The Deluge, page 71
In Niger, we heard of a crop blight, the Chikungunya virus laying waste to that society’s yields even as arable land vanishes. The synergistic effects of soil degradation, desertification, and salinization have been precursors in the collapse of every civilization from ancient Greece to Mesoamerican empires.
The fishermen we met in Honduras saw their nets empty, so they pick up weapons and join whatever vicious militant group or narco-trafficker that will have them. Yet behind that empty net is the acidification of the oceans, overfishing, and anoxic dead zones created by fertilizer runoff. Marine ecosystems are near collapse, global fish stocks imperiled, and they will take with them one of the world’s key sources of protein and the livelihood of roughly 200 million people.
Yet in the middle of all this, Earth’s most fearsome species, the commodity trader and his algorithms of ultra-fast trading, sees only profit. Scarcity is lucrative and prices surge as Wall Street hoards grain futures. This, I fear, includes Peter’s firm, which has been particularly aggressive in the commodity broad baskets space. Therefore, I cannot escape my own complicity: Tara Fund utilizes systems models I worked on while consulting with the New England Complex Systems Institute in the early 2020s. Peter remains quiescent about the real-world effects of agro-trading and speculation, but nevertheless the major food multinationals, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge, are experiencing their most profitable years on record.
The effects ripple outward. Vietnam bans rice exports, so Thailand and Cambodia follow suit, and Myanmar begins to starve. Russia marches troops into Ukraine to “restart agriculture” in the region’s famed black earth, the same rationale proffered by every leader from Peter the Great to Adolf Hitler, and this time the West holds its tongue in the hopes it will ease the strain on surplus grain. The continued flow of refugees has led to the ascension of a powerful coalition of white nationalist governments within the EU. Following his scheduled release from prison, the political rise of Anders Breivik, the notorious mass murderer, has reverberated loudly across Europe, where Far Right movements are making a serious play for majoritarian control with the so-called Six Arms alliance. The sense of isolation and uprootedness that immigrants, refugees, and native-born alike experience as they watch their worlds warp is exacerbated by deprivation. The hungry and starving will not die quietly.
While predicting civil and geopolitical unrest is difficult in the specific, in the aggregate it is relatively easy: simply look at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index. When it breaches 120, there will likely be war, riots, and revolutions to varying degrees around the world. When it reached 131.9 in 2011, the Arab Spring broke out. The index began a precipitous climb two years ago. Kate Morris thinks herself a revolutionary but the fuel for her revolt, which led to the death of a man I loved, was very much tied to the price of food. As of this writing the FPI has reached 167.3, an all-time high.
Understanding hunger intellectually is quite different from seeing its dazed victims, disproportionately children, wasting away to their deaths. On the outskirts of the Philippine city of Antipolo, while we toured the burned ruins of a farm, I saw a group of children, among them one I recognized. We’d stopped at the behest of our government escort, who wanted to show us what was happening to the country’s agriculture. What were once wheat and barley fields had been fried to a crisp by fire and drought, the soil ripped away by bracing winds. I could feel the grit scouring my skin. The farm was littered with the bodies of emaciated livestock, scorched to unrecognizable husks by a summer fire. They were being lifted by bulldozers and buried unceremoniously in a pit. Dr. Tufariello was beside me, listening to our escort and spitting out the dust. The sand had collected in the braids of her hair and its extensions. I longed to touch her hand and ask her if what I was seeing was in fact real.
As the rusted blades shoveled the charred cows into a pit, the children buzzed around the animals along with the flies. They were trying to pick meat off one of the cow’s bodies that was awaiting burial. One of them, who I was seeing from a distance of perhaps twenty feet, looked so much like Forrest, I almost expected him to come running to me. He was older, as Forrest might look in a year or two, but he had the same wide nose and head of soft curls. His eyes were slightly more almond-shaped, but the black eyebrows were arched in the same inquisitive way as when Forrest’s face was resting. Both of their faces came with the same permanent question. Of course, this child was malnourished and much thinner, but the resemblance was simply beyond my capacity to understand, beyond the easy answer that our lineage is exponential and our common ancestors much closer in history than we can comfortably believe. The ancestors of Forrest’s biological mother, Seth, and this boy, they’d certainly all crossed at some point in a past that feels distant to us, but was in fact genetically, biologically, and geologically practically yesterday.
A worker came over to chase the children away, and the young boy who looked so much like my son scampered up the hill, his form dissolving behind a beige veil. Jane stepped into my vision, her face signaling worry.
“Are you okay, Ash?”
I did not answer. Instead, I returned to the convoy.
* * *
This experience will haunt me for a long time. I’ll dream of the abandoned skyscrapers of Honduras, vertical slums catching twilight through their hollowed-out frames, and the women who were baking cookies from salt, butter, and dirt to feed their children. I’ll remember donning galoshes to squelch through the few muddy ponds remaining of Lake Chad on the Nigerian border—once one of the mightiest bodies of fresh water in Africa, now only a salt-blasted desert lake bed that maintains the name. I’ll find time to write of our security convoy traveling through a heat-seared IDP camp north of Kidal in east Mali, the makeshift city awash in plastic tarps attempting to catch condensation while people clotted around the only well, this immense brick-lined straw in the earth, and used ropes to lower buckets to the bottom to fill their cisterns.
Again, I ask, who ultimately was this fact-finding mission for? Certainly not the children watching us longingly in every city or village hoping we’d hand over a pack of snack mix from the airplane. Not their parents, some of whom approached us to beg that we take their sons or daughters with us. Not their governments, to which we promised to implore our recalcitrant nation to send more food aid. At times it felt like we were only in these failing, hungry, violent states to convince ourselves that the American empire has any footing left in the world, that it could be compassionate or heroic when called upon to do something other than deliver weapons to whatever political faction it deemed least likely to cause it problems.
On the flight back home from the Philippines, with most of my fellow fact finders asleep, I read from a report on India. The fascist Hindu government is executing a grueling endgame as it attempts to corner and starve its Muslim population. I was lost in thought on this harrowing subject when a rough and gnarled index finger intruded, tapping the paper twice:
“Some light reading while you can’t sleep?”
Admiral Michael Dahms slid into the open seat beside me. I regarded him for a moment.
“The Hindu government is using our visit as propaganda to declare what a humane job it’s doing.”
Dahms nodded solemnly. He had the physique of a bodybuilder, a smooth bald head with the overlarge ears of an elderly man, and a distractingly large mole on his nose that must catch his vision incessantly. He looked hard and brittle and spoke with a hoarse voice ravaged by polyps:
“These situations with allies are incredibly complex.”
“Obviously what has proved most edifying, Admiral, are not the states we visited but those we were not allowed into.” Here I spoke of multiple governments, including US allies, referred to in the report, that are using the disruption in the global food supply to administrate starvation. “Or perhaps President Love is in agreement with these methods.”
Dahms shifted uncomfortably and looked at the screen on the seatback, which showed our plane hovering in the middle of the Pacific. He then proceeded to offer me a pointless condolence:
“I would say I’m sorry for your loss. And I am. But I’m sure that means exactly bupkis to you.”
I regarded him with great animosity.
“May I ask why you haven’t resigned like so many other officials in the executive branch?”
“Impractical.” He spat the word more than said it, and I thought he might leave it at that. After a moment, though, like most people in a defensive moral posture, his justification stumbled on. “I’m a hyperrealist. Forty years in the service will make you that way. Resignations get to an itch for self-regard. What Vice President McGuirk did was deeply stupid. There may yet come a time when events necessitate that a steady hand be at least near the rudder.” His eyes moved around the plane. The cabin was dark, humming, but otherwise silent. Not one other passenger seemed awake. His voice was wounded: “This is not in President Love’s defense. Not at all. But what he’s looking at every day in the daily intelligence brief, it’s truly terrifying. What happened in Washington, it’s nothing compared to what’s going on out there on the rest of the planet. You’ve seen the reports on the India-Bangladesh border. Pakistan. The Uyghur autonomous zone.”
“Saudi Arabia’s policy of mass starvation of its own citizens to root out insurgents. Israel’s closing off food access for Gaza and the West Bank. IDF robo-snipers and auto-kill zones.”
“We’d be calling these war crimes if the politics would allow us. Or genocides.”
Now that word buzzed in the air. I was very surprised he’d been the one to say it.
I said: “The term ‘war crime’ could as easily be applied to what happened in Washington.”
Dahms rubbed his upper lip, and with some agitation nodded. “Of course. And there is no one more appalled by what happened than me. But when folks are trying to manage chaos with no good options, they are forced to make extreme decisions quickly. We have a band of lawlessness and slaughter now encompassing the earth. The president has been downright restrained compared to some of his counterparts. There is intense political pressure to go much further than he has. My job is to be the voice that keeps his worst impulses in check. He needs advisors other than Yes Men—or Yes Women. Christ, Caperno wanted to hit the Mall with a drone strike.” I could not tell if he was joking. “We need people who can ride herd on his worst notions.”
He was looking at me almost eagerly.
“I’m not sure what you want from me, Admiral. Absolution is not something I’m capable of giving you. We do what we think is right, each of us, with the information we have available.”
I turned my head to the window to indicate I wanted him to go back to his seat. And without another word, he did. Drifting over the vast expanse of the Pacific through the earth’s most perfect and silent slice of night, I thought of the arrogance the living carry. We ensconce ourselves in an epistemological certainty born from the mere fact that we’ve known history marginally longer than the dead. We elbow each other knowingly at their failures and ignorance. We almost never ask what it is that we don’t yet know.
* * *
While you took to the media to describe what our delegation had seen on its journey around a starving, panicked world, I collected Forrest from my sister and returned to D.C. to write my report. Yet as I got to work, Seth still lingered in every corner of the house, and I found myself unable to focus until I excised him. I began by removing the pictures, then donating his clothes. His toothbrush and other toiletries went in the trash. His devices, I backed up, wiped, and recycled.
I also took this time to begin an experiment. Most of the malnourished people we came across had access to only six hundred calories a day, sometimes less. I allotted twelve hundred calories each day for Forrest and myself and started work on the white paper. Each morning began the same. I’d prepare a bit of soy milk and applesauce for Forrest and granola and milk for myself, and we would not eat again until that night. Of course, the very first day, he began crying around one o’clock and did not stop until I gave him a half cup of macaroni with chopped broccoli at 5 p.m. I ate only a small can of soup. We proceeded like this.
During the day, while I researched and wrote, I sometimes turned on the news to drown out his sobbing. Seth had often worked with MSNBC on in the background, and perhaps Haniya had goaded my imagination, but when I turned it on, Forrest would look around, as if expecting his father to come around the corner. He bawled to news of Senator Mackowski introducing a bill to phase out all food aid. “So we can encourage able-bodied adults all over the world to, simply put, grow more food and stop having so many children they cannot feed.”
The idea that the world’s governments should “let nature take its course” has become the catchphrase of the Right. Maximum cruelty is often how people attempt to exorcise their fear. We are currently experiencing hunger, heat, and refugee flows that are simply outside humanity’s experience—all in a globalized media environment where terror and panic boost advertising dollars and algorithms turn disinformation into currency. Yes, climate disruption has ransacked agricultural production, but actual starvation is being driven by zero-sum Malthusian politics. A great hoarding has erupted, driving great violence. Landless and unprotected, the famine refugee is uniquely susceptible to, for lack of a better word, extermination. The use of computation—Big Data, to borrow a pithy phrase—makes these cullings much easier propositions. Depictions of genocide in popular culture have tended toward the cartoonishly evil, likely in order to abrogate the viewer from thinking of him- or herself as a participant. This is a great disservice, for at its core the practice of genocide is about eliminating competition for one’s children. The globally wealthy believe that to continue their historic consumptive binge, they must deny others. This philosophy trickles down. It is becoming accepted wisdom that we will not all survive the crisis, and therefore the savvy will now entertain previously unthinkable agendas. Forgive me, Congresswoman, for I know you are a mother of four, but child-rearing, far from accessing a heretofore unrealized spiritual plane, devolves the parent into a selfish, habitual purveyor of violence against those children not his or her own. It is such a small step from believing one’s child is special to demanding the eradication of competitor children who would demand their fair share of noodles and broccoli. The unique sensation of loving a child is merely the selfish gene activating, guiding the parent toward discrimination, exploitation and, if necessary, mass murder. Genocides are committed by parents.
During that initial period of limited calories, Forrest and I were both exhausted all the time. He expressed this by screaming constantly day and night. He barely slept and when he woke, he would be hungrier and more furious than ever. His small eyes vanished into the pudge of his cheeks. His diaper needed changing less even though I continued to give him clean water regularly, a luxury many of the children who I saw in, say, Mali or Mumbai did not have. Nevertheless, he was dehydrated and constipated. His feces arrived in hard, small marbles, and he at least could express that his stomach hurt because when he looked at me he rubbed it like he was trying to scoop pain out of himself. I was also in a great deal of discomfort, especially after I allotted an additional one hundred calories to Forrest from my own daily allowance. I could at least suffer silently. The headaches and dizziness began immediately. I found myself lethargic, unable to work on the report for more than an hour before I had to lie down. If he needed affection, I would take Forrest and lay him on my chest while we watched the news. I wanted it to be clear to him that he was not being punished, that his remaining father would still show him all the necessary attention and affection, but we were simply in the same predicament as so many: hampered by a new and frightening scarcity of calories.
After nine days, he stopped crying. He was, it seemed, too tired. He looked at me instead with a mournful indifference. When I placed mashed bananas before him, he would still paw it hungrily into his mouth, but he seemed to already know this was all that would be forthcoming, and it only made him sad. His hair thinned, and I found the kinky strands in his bath and scattered in the crib. His skin, usually quite puffy and soft, now had a parched, dried consistency. He never smiled and his usual cooing and babbling ceased as well. Other than the occasional grunt or “Dada” he rarely made a sound.
Americans are unused to spending more than 15 percent of their income on food. Unpredictable social consequences will follow. Already, panic buying due to perceived shortages has led to riots in supermarkets, and the hacking and carjacking of trucks delivering food products is now rampant across American highways. Stories of the wealthy stockpiling food in specialized bunkers are not helping matters. According to Peter, many affluent individuals are buying “food redoubts”: huge storage facilities filled with nonperishable goods that can be loaded into armored trucks and delivered to them in case of emergency. Domestically, SNAP has been effectively gutted by congressional Republicans, and the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States now faces the threat of severe hunger, a famine being unfurled from within a wealthy polity by the politicians and provocateurs intent on sorting the worthy from the unworthy.
By the third week of our caloric limitation I’d finally finished my work on the draft white paper, a task that would normally have taken me eight to ten days. Every waking hour my stomach and head ached. Giving Forrest his bath one night, I asked him if he was hungry. He simply shook his head and continued to move a plastic boat in circles around the water. He’d eaten only a handful of Cheerios and a few strawberries that day. I considered giving him a portion of the beans I was to eat that night, but some ancient greed inside me kicked in, and I realized I did not care how hungry he was, I needed to eat those kidney beans. No longer was I just hungry—I was the state of hunger, and I could scarcely imagine being any other way ever again.
