Is there Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?
By Andrew Rice
November 16, 2009
Dr. Robert Zeigler,
an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a
series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food
supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports,
they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples,
fluctuate violently on the world market over the previous three years,
at one point doubling in just a few months. The Saudis, rich in oil
money but poor in arable land, were groping for a strategy to ensure
that they could continue to meet the appetites of a growing population,
and they wanted Zeigler’s expertise.
There are basically
two ways to increase the supply of food: find new fields to plant or
invent ways to multiply what existing ones yield. Zeigler runs the
International Rice Research Institute, which is devoted to the latter
course, employing science to expand the size of harvests. During the
so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, the institute’s laboratory
developed “miracle rice,” a high-yielding strain that has been credited
with saving millions of people from famine. Zeigler went to Saudi
Arabia hoping that the wealthy kingdom might offer money for the basic
research that leads to such technological breakthroughs. Instead, to
his surprise, he discovered that the Saudis wanted to attack the
problem from the opposite direction. They were looking for land.In a
series of meetings, Saudi government officials, bankers and
agribusiness executives told an institute delegation led by Zeigler
that they intended to spend billions of dollars to establish
plantations to produce rice and other staple crops in African nations
like Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Ethiopia. “They laid out this incredible
plan,” Zeigler recalled. He was flabbergasted, not only by the scale of
the projects but also by the audacity of their setting. Africa, the
world’s most famished continent, can’t currently feed itself, let alone
foreign markets.
The American
scientist was catching a glimpse of an emerging test of the world’s
food resources, one that has begun to take shape over the last year,
largely outside the bounds of international scrutiny. A variety of
factors — some transitory, like the spike in food prices, and others
intractable, like global population growth and water scarcity — have
created a market for farmland, as rich but resource-deprived nations in
the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere seek to outsource their food
production to places where fields are cheap and abundant. Because much
of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent,
according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile
ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by
development, in Africa. According to a recent study by the World Bank
and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the
earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre
Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across
Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola.
Foreign investors —
some of them representing governments, some of them private interests —
are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies,
create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not
only feeds overseas markets but also feeds more Africans. (More than a
third of the continent’s population is malnourished.) They’ve found
that impoverished governments are often only too welcoming, offering
land at giveaway prices. A few transactions have received significant
publicity, like Kenya’s deal to lease nearly 100,000 acres to the
Qatari government in return for financing a new port, or South Korea’s
agreement to develop almost 400 square miles in Tanzania. But many
other land deals, of near-unprecedented size, have been sealed with
little fanfare.
Investors who are
taking part in the land rush say they are confronting a primal fear, a
situation in which food is unavailable at any price. Over the 30 years
between the mid-1970s and the middle of this decade, grain supplies
soared and prices fell by about half, a steady trend that led many
experts to believe that there was no limit to humanity’s capacity to
feed itself. But in 2006, the situation reversed, in concert with a
wider commodities boom. Food prices increased slightly that year, rose
by a quarter in 2007 and skyrocketed in 2008. Surplus-producing
countries like Argentina and Vietnam, worried about feeding their own
populations, placed restrictions on exports. American consumers, if
they noticed the food crisis at all, saw it in modestly inflated
supermarket bills, especially for meat and dairy products. But to many
countries — not just in the Middle East but also import-dependent
nations like South Korea and Japan — the specter of hyperinflation and
hoarding presented an existential threat.
“When some
governments stop exporting rice or wheat, it becomes a real, serious
problem for people that don’t have full self-sufficiency,” said Al
Arabi Mohammed Hamdi, an economic adviser to the Arab Authority for
Agricultural Investment and Development. Sitting in his office in
Dubai, overlooking the cargo-laden wooden boats moored along the city’s
creek, Hamdi told me his view, that the only way to assure food
security is to control the means of production.
Hamdi’s agency,
which coordinates investments on behalf of 20 member states, has
recently announced several projects, including a tentative $250 million
joint venture with two private companies, which is slated to receive
heavy subsidies from a Saudi program called the King Abdullah
Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad. He said the main
fields of investment for the project would most likely be Sudan and
Ethiopia, countries with favorable climates that are situated just
across the Red Sea. Hamdi waved a sheaf of memos that had just arrived
on his desk, which he said were from another partner, Sheik Mansour Bin
Zayed Al Nahyan, a billionaire member of the royal family of the
emirate of Abu Dhabi, who has shown interest in acquiring land in Sudan
and Eritrea. “There is no problem about money,” Hamdi said. “It’s about
where and how.”
A long the dirt
road that runs to Lake Ziway, a teardrop in the furrow of Ethiopia’s
Great Rift Valley, farmers drove their donkey carts past a little
orange-domed Orthodox church, and the tombs of their ancestors,
decorated with vivid murals of horses and cattle. Between clusters of
huts that looked as if they were constructed of matchsticks, there were
wide-open wheat fields, where skinny young men were tilling the soil
with wooden plows and teams of oxen. And then, nearing the lake, a
fence appeared, closing off the countryside behind taut strings of
barbed wire.
All through the
Rift Valley region, my travel companion, an Ethiopian economist, had
taken to pointing out all the new fence posts, standing naked and
knobby like freshly cut saplings — mundane signifiers, he said, of the
recent rush for Ethiopian land. In the old days, he told me, farmers
rarely bothered with such formal lines of demarcation, but now the
country’s earth is in demand. This fence, though, was different from
the others — it stretched on for a mile or more. Behind it, we could
glimpse a vast expanse of dark volcanic soil, recently turned over by
tractors. “So,” said my guide, “this belongs to the sheik.”
He meant Sheik
Mohammed Al Amoudi, a Saudi Arabia-based oil-and-construction
billionaire who was born in Ethiopia and maintains a close relationship
with the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s autocratic regime.
(Fear of both men led my guide to say he didn’t want to be identified
by name.) Over time, Al Amoudi, one of the world’s 50 richest people,
according to Forbes, has used his fortune and political ties to amass
control over large portions of Ethiopia’s private sector, including
mines, hotels and plantations on which he grows tea, coffee, rubber and
japtropha, a plant that has enormous promise as a biofuel. Since the
global price spike, he has been getting into the newly lucrative world
food trade.
Ethiopia might seem
an unlikely hotbed of agricultural investment. To most of the world,
the country is defined by images of famine: about a million people died
there during the drought of the mid-1980s, and today about four times
that many depend on emergency food aid. But according to the World
Bank, as much as three-quarters of Ethiopia’s arable land is not under
cultivation, and agronomists say that with substantial capital
expenditure, much of it could become bountiful. Since the world food
crisis, Zenawi, a former Marxist rebel who has turned into a champion
of private capital, has publicly said he is “very eager” to attract
foreign farm investors by offering them what the government describes
as “virgin land.” An Ethiopian agriculture ministry official recently
told Reuters that he has identified more than seven million acres. The
government plans to lease half of it before the next harvest, at the
dirt-cheap annual rate of around 50 cents per acre. “We are associated
with hunger, although we have enormous investment opportunities,”
explained Abi Woldemeskel, director general of the Ethiopian Investment
Agency. “So that negative perception has to be changed through
promotion.”
The government’s
pliant attitude, along with Ethiopia’s convenient location, has made it
an ideal target for Middle Eastern investors like Mohammed Al Amoudi.
Not long ago, a newly formed Al Amoudi company, Saudi Star Agricultural
Development, announced its plans to obtain the rights to more than a
million acres — a land mass the size of Delaware — in the apparent hope
of capitalizing on the Saudi government’s initiative to subsidize
overseas staple-crop production. At a pilot site in the west of the
country, he’s already cultivating rice. Earlier this year, amid great
fanfare marking the start of the program, Al Amoudi personally
presented the first shipment from the farm to King Abdullah in Riyadh.
Meanwhile, in the Rift Valley region, another subsidiary is starting to
grow fruits and vegetables for export to the Persian Gulf.
Al Amoudi’s plans
raise a recurring question surrounding investment in food production:
who will reap the benefits? As we drove down to the waterside, through
fields dotted with massive sycamores, a farm supervisor told me that
the 2,000-acre enterprise currently produces food for the local market,
but there were plans to irrigate with water from the lake, and to shift
the focus to exports. In the distance, dozens of laborers were bent to
the ground, planting corn and onions.
Later, when I asked
a couple of workers how much they were paid, they said nine birr each
day, or around 75 cents. It wasn’t much, but Al Amoudi’s defenders say
that’s the going rate for farm labor in Ethiopia. They argue that his
investments are creating jobs, improving the productivity of dormant
land and bringing economic development to rural communities. “We have
achieved what the government hasn’t done for how many years,” says
Arega Worku, an Ethiopian who is an agriculture adviser to Al Amoudi.
(Al Amoudi declined to be interviewed.) Ethiopian journalists and
opposition figures, however, have questioned the economic benefits of
the deals, as well as Al Amoudi’s cozy relationship with the ruling
party.
By far the most
powerful opposition, however, surrounds the issue of land rights — a
problem of historic proportions in Ethiopia. Just down the road from
the farm on Lake Ziway, I caught sight of a gray-bearded man wearing a
weathered pinstripe blazer, who was crouched over a ditch, washing his
shoes. I stopped to ask him about the fence, and before long, a large
group of villagers gathered around to tell me a resentful story.
Decades ago, they said, during the rule of a Communist dictatorship in
Ethiopia, the land was confiscated from them. After that dictatorship
was overthrown, Al Amoudi took over the farm in a government
privatization deal, over the futile objections of the displaced locals.
The billionaire might consider the land his, but the villagers had long
memories, and they angrily maintained that they were its rightful
owners.
Throughout Africa,
the politics of land is linked to the grim reality of hunger. Famines,
typically produced by some combination of weather, pestilence and bad
governance, break out with merciless randomness, unleashing calamity
and reshaping history. Every country has its unique dynamics. Unlike
most African nations, Ethiopia was never colonized in the 19th century
but instead was ruled by emperors, who granted feudal plantations to
members of their royal courts. The last emperor, Haile Selassie, was
brought down by a famine that fueled a popular uprising. His
dispossessed subjects chanted the slogan “land to the tiller.” The
succeeding Communist dictatorship, which took ownership of all land for
itself and pursued a disastrous collectivization policy, was toppled in
the aftermath of the droughts of the 1980s. Under the present regime,
private ownership of land is still banned, and every farmer in
Ethiopia, foreign and domestic, works his fields under a licensing
arrangement with the government. This land-tenure policy has made it
possible for a one-party state to hand over huge tracts to investors at
nominal rents, in secrecy, without the bother of a condemnation process.
Ethiopia’s
government denies that anyone is being displaced, saying that the land
is unused — an assertion many experts doubt. “One thing that is very
clear, that seems to have escaped the attention of most investors, is
that this is not simply empty land,” says Michael Taylor, a policy
specialist at the International Land Coalition. If land in Africa
hasn’t been planted, he says, it’s probably for a reason. Maybe it’s
used to graze livestock, or deliberately left fallow to prevent
nutrient depletion and erosion.
There is an ongoing
debate among experts about the extent of the global land-acquisition
trend. By its nature the evidence is piecemeal and anecdotal, and many
highly publicized investments have yet to actually materialize on the
ground. The most serious attempt to quantify the land rush, spearheaded
by the International Institute for Environment and Development,
suggests that as of earlier this year, the Ethiopian government had
approved deals totaling around 1.5 million acres, while the country’s
investment agency reports that it has approved 815 foreign-financed
agricultural projects since 2007, nearly doubling the number registered
in the entire previous decade. But that’s far from a complete picture.
While the details of a few arrangements have leaked out, like one Saudi
consortium’s plans to spend $100 million to grow wheat, barley and
rice, many others remain undisclosed, and Addis Ababa has been awash in
rumors of Arab moneymen who supposedly rent planes, pick out fertile
tracts and cut deals.
Of course, there
have been scrambles for African land before. In the view of critics,
the colonial legacy is what makes the large land deals so outrageous,
and they warn of potentially calamitous consequences. “Wars have been
fought over this,” says Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with Grain, an
advocacy group that opposes large-scale agribusiness and has played a
key role in bringing attention to what it calls the “global land grab.”
It wasn’t until
Grain compiled a long list of such deals into a polemical report titled
“Seized!” last October that experts really began to talk about a
serious trend. Although deals were being brokered in disparate locales
like Australia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Vietnam, the most controversial
field of investment was clearly Africa. “When you started to get some
hints about what was happening in these deals,” Kuyek says, “it was
shocking.” Within a month, Grain’s warnings seemed to be vindicated
when The Financial Times broke news that the South Korean conglomerate
Daewoo Logistics had signed an agreement to take over about half of
Madagascar’s arable land, paying nothing, with the intention of growing
corn and palm oil for export. Popular protests broke out, helping to
mobilize opposition to Madagascar’s already unpopular president, who
was overthrown in a coup in March.
The episode
illustrated the emotional volatility of the land issue and raised
questions about the degree to which corrupt leaders might be profiting
off the deals. Since then, there has been an international outcry.
Legislators from the Philippines have called for an investigation into
their government’s agreements with various investing nations, while
Thailand’s leader has vowed to chase off any foreign land buyers.
But there’s more
than one side to the argument. Development economists and African
governments say that if a country like Ethiopia is ever going to feed
itself, let alone wean itself from foreign aid, which totaled $2.4
billion in 2007, it will have to find some way of increasing the
productivity of its agriculture. “We’ve been complaining for decades
about the lack of investment in African agriculture,” says David
Hallam, a trade expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization. Last
fall, Paul Collier of Oxford University, an influential voice on issues
of world poverty, published a provocative article in Foreign Affairs in
which he argued that a “middle- and upper-class love affair with
peasant agriculture” has clouded the African development debate with
“romanticism.” Approvingly citing the example of Brazil — where masses
of indigenous landholders were displaced in favor of large-scale farms
— Collier concluded that “to ignore commercial agriculture as a force
for rural development and enhanced food supply is surely ideological.”
In Ethiopia,
Mohammed Al Amoudi and other foreign agricultural investors are putting
Collier’s theory into practice. Near the southern town of Awassa, in a
shadow of a soaring Rift Valley escarpment, sits a field of waving corn
and a complex of domed greenhouses, looking pristine and alien against
the natural backdrop. On an overcast July morning, dozens of laborers
were at work preparing the ground for one of Al Amoudi’s latest
enterprises: a commercial vegetable farm.
“For a grower, this
is heaven on earth,” says Jan Prins, managing director of the
subsidiary company that is running the venture for Al Amoudi.
Originally from the Netherlands, Prins says he assumed that Ethiopia
was arid but was surprised to learn when he came to the country that
much of it was fertile, with diverse microclimates. The Awassa farm is
one of four that Prins is getting up and running. Using computerized
irrigation systems, the farms will grow tomatoes, peppers, broccoli,
melons and other fresh produce, the vast majority of it to be shipped
to Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Over time, he says, he hopes to expand into
growing other crops, like wheat and barley, the latter of which can be
used to feed camels.
The nations of the
Persian Gulf are likely to see their populations increase by half by
2030, and already import 60 percent of their food. Self-sufficiency
isn’t a viable option, as the Saudis have learned through bitter
experience. In the 1970s, worries about the stability of the global
food supply inspired the Saudi government to grow wheat through
intensive irrigation. Between 1980 and 1999, according to a study by
Elie Elhadj, a banker and historian, the Saudis pumped 300 billion
cubic meters of water into their desert. By the early 1990s, the
kingdom had managed to become the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter.
But then its leaders started paying attention to the warnings of
environmentalists, who pointed out that irrigation was draining a
nonreplenishable supply of underground freshwater. Saudi Arabia now
plans to phase out wheat production by 2016, which is one reason it’s
looking to other countries to fill its food needs.
“The rules of the
game have changed,” says Saad Al Swatt, the chief executive of the
Tabuk Agricultural Development Company, one of the kingdom’s largest
farming concerns. Al Swatt’s company was one of those that met with
Robert Zeigler about farming rice; he says that with government
encouragement, he is looking at expanding into countries like Sudan,
Ethiopia and Vietnam. “They have the land, they have the water, but
unfortunately, they don’t have the system or sometimes the finance to
have these large-scale agricultural projects.” Al Swatt says. “We
wanted to export our experience and really develop those areas, to help
people.”
About 10 percent of
the more than 80 million people who live in Ethiopia suffer from
chronic food shortages. This year, because of poor rains, the U.N.
World Food Program warns that much of East Africa faces the threat of a
famine, potentially the worst in almost two decades. Traditionally, the
model for feeding the hungry in Africa has involved shipping in
surpluses from the rest of the world in times of emergency, but
governments that are trying to attract investment say that the new
farms could provide a lasting, noncharitable solution. (“It’s better
than begging,” one Ethiopian official recently told the African
publication Business Daily.) Whatever the long-term justification,
however, it looks bad politically for countries like Kenya and Ethiopia
to be letting foreign investors use their land at a time when their
people face the specter of mass starvation. And many experts wonder
whether such governments will go through with the deals. Ethiopia,
after all, was one of the countries that banned grain exports during
the recent spike in world food prices. “The idea that one country would
go to another country,” says Robert Zeigler, “and lease some land, and
expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if
there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”
The
hyperinflationary spiral that caused the world food crisis had multiple
causes. The harvests in 2006 and 2007 were the worst of the decade,
hedge funds and other players in the commodities markets appear to have
driven up prices and government subsidies for biofuels encouraged
farmers to grow crops that ended up as ethanol. But the environment and
demography are more lasting issues, and experts predict that prices,
which have declined since their peak, are likely to stabilize
significantly above precrisis levels. This represents a danger to the
developing world, where the poor spend between 50 and 80 percent of
their income on food, but it may also present an opportunity. If one
good thing has emerged from the crisis, it’s a growing awareness of
Africa’s unrealized agricultural potential. Because where there are
appetites, there are profits to be made.
In late June,
several hundred farmers and investment bankers came together in
Manhattan to survey the landscape at a conference on global agriculture
investment. The food crisis has served as a catalyst for the sleepy
agricultural sector, spurring financial firms like Goldman Sachs and
BlackRock to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas
agricultural projects, so the mood was heady for business, though
depressing for humanity. There much talk of Thomas Malthus, the
19th-century prophet of overpopulation and famine.
“Beware of 2020 and
beyond, because we think there could be genuine food shortages by that
period,” Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management,
told the audience during a talk on Africa’s agricultural potential. She
showed a series of slides citing chilling statistics: grain stocks are
at their lowest levels in 60 years; there were food riots in 15
countries in 2008; global warming is turning arable land into desert;
freshwater is dwindling and China is draining its reserves; and the
really big problem that contributes to all the others — the world’s
population is growing by 80 million hungry people a year. The United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in order to
feed the world’s projected population in 2050 — some nine billion
people — agricultural production needs to increase by an annual average
of 1 percent. That means adding around 23 million tons of cereals to
the world’s food supply next year, a little less than the total
production of Australia in 2008.
“Africa is the
final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one
continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African
Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred
million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may
be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems
that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor
come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.
The payoffs could
be immense. In a country like Ethiopia, farmers put in backbreaking
effort, but they yield about a third as much wheat per acre as do
Europe, China or Chile. Even modest interventions could start to close
this gap. One small example: the black soil I saw throughout the Great
Rift region. Known as vertisol, it’s a product of volcanic activity and
possesses the nutrients to produce enormous harvests. Because of its
high clay content, however, it becomes sticky and waterlogged during
the rainy season, which makes it very difficult to plow by traditional
methods. With the addition of advanced implements, improved seeds and
fertilizer, you can double the amount of wheat it yields. Ethiopia,
like all of Africa, is full of such opportunities, which is one reason
the World Bank says that investing in agriculture is one of the most
effective ways to speed economic development on the continent.
Yet agriculture has
historically been a tiny item in foreign-aid budgets. For years,
governments, private foundations and donor institutions like the World
Bank have been urging African governments to fill the spending gap with
private investment. Now, at the very moment a world food crisis has
come along, creating the perhaps fleeting possibility of an influx of
capital into African agriculture, some of the same organizations are
sending conflicting messages. The Food and Agriculture Organization,
for instance, co-sponsored a report calling for a major expansion of
commercial agriculture in Africa, but the organization’s
director-general has simultaneously been warning of the “neocolonial”
dangers of land deals. “We’re making them feel that it’s sinful,” says
Mafa Chipeta, a Malawian who oversees Ethiopia and the rest of eastern
Africa for the organization. “Why are we not saying, here is an
opportunity?”
One focus of
agricultural investment in Ethiopia is the region of Gambella, near the
border with Sudan. The World Bank says it has more than four million
acres of irrigable land. “It’s emerald green, the whole place is
fertile and they have only 200,000 people down there,” says Sai
Ramakrishna Karuturi, head of an Indian commercial farming company.
Earlier this year, Karuturi signed an agreement with the government to
lease close to 800,000 acres on which he will grow rice, wheat and
sugar cane, among other crops. Karuturi told me he doesn’t have to
export the food to make money; there’s plenty of profit potential in
the East African market. He has flown in John Deere tractors,
agricultural experts from Texas A&M and commercial farmers from
Mississippi to help him get things going. He says he’s raising $100
million in capital from private equity firms for the first phase of the
project, which he estimates will ultimately cost well over a billion
dollars. “Recently, I saw a lot of articles . . . where they referred
to me as a food pirate,” Karuturi says. “This whole thing is so
elitist, it’s ridiculous. They want Africa to remain poor.”
But the argument
against enormous land concessions needn’t be based solely on appeals to
human rights, environmental warnings or romanticism. It’s possible to
be a believer in development without endorsing Paul Collier’s view that
the small landholders stand in its way. In fact, there’s a whole school
of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not
necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore
might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re
unprofitable. A recent World Bank study found that large-scale export
agriculture in Africa has succeeded only with plantation crops like
sugar and tea or in ventures that were propped up by extreme government
subsidies, during colonialism or during the apartheid era in South
Africa.
This record of
failure is one reason that the government of Qatar, in addressing its
food-security concerns, has chosen to concentrate on investing in
existing agribusinesses rather than just acquiring land. That’s just
one of many ways to invest in farming without removing the African
farmers. On a bright Rift Valley afternoon, I went to see another
option, a cooperative scheme under which a group of around 300
Ethiopians, working plots of 4 to 10 acres, were getting into export
agriculture. During the European winter, they grew green beans for the
Dutch market. The rest of the year, they cultivated corn and other
crops for local consumption. The land had been irrigated with the help
of a nonprofit organization and an Ethiopian commercial farmer named
Tsegaye Abebe, who brought all the produce to market.
As a breeze riffled
through a tall field of corn, a group of farmers, wearing sandals made
from old tires, told me the arrangement, while not perfect, was
beneficial in the most crucial respect: they weren’t toiling for
someone else. Not far away, a Pakistani investor had taken over a
government cattle ranch, once an area free for grazing, and had put
fences and trenches in place to keep out the local livestock. The
Ethiopians who worked there were miserable.
The farmers had
heard rumors that foreign investors were eyeing still more Ethiopian
land. Imam Gemedo Tilago, a 78-year-old cloaked in a white cotton
shawl, shook his finger, vowing that Allah would not allow the
community to remain passive. But that was a problem for the future, and
the farmers had more grounded concerns. I noticed, driving down the
rural paths that led to this farm, that the earth looked parched in
places, and the cattle were showing their ribs through their dull brown
hides. The worried farmers told me that this year, the seasonal rains
were late in coming to the Rift Valley. If they didn’t arrive soon,
there’d be hunger.
Andrew Rice is
a contributing writer and the author of “The Teeth May Smile But the
Heart Does Not Forget,” about a Ugandan murder trial.
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