The New Breadline by Jean-Martin Bauer examines global hunger through a humanitarian lens, drawing on the author’s experience working with the UN World Food Programme. Written in accessible language and making its argument through case studies and personal experience, this book calls for urgent action to end hunger through sustainable, localised solutions, writes Rageshree Bhattacharyya.
The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the 21st Century. Jean-Martin Bauer. Profile Books. 2024.
In 2015, the world’s governments publicly declared their commitment towards ending global hunger by 2030 at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit. Goal Two of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals too aims to bring about zero hunger by achieving food security, improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture by the year 2030. However, despite such a strong global humanitarian pledge towards creating a more equitable world, and with only a few years remaining to achieve the target, this goal seems further away than ever before. As the world grapples with the rapidly worsening effects of climate change, genocides and pandemics, the marginalised and the most vulnerable population groups across the world are experiencing an unprecedented level of food insecurity, malnutrition and hunger. It is in the context of this catastrophic global moment that Jean-Martin Bauer draws our attention to world hunger through the lens of humanitarian aid.
Bauer, Director of the United Nations World Food Programme in Haiti, has had a two-decade long professional trajectory of working with and on humanitarian food assistance in various impoverished and volatile regions of the world. In this book, he weaves a compassionate and deeply enlightening narrative framing of hunger as a political issue while showcasing the ways in which we can “rethink our food policy, with its emphasis on sustainability and agency” (226). Divided into eleven chapters, The New Breadline takes its readers from Haiti and the Sahel to the Central American Republics and the Middle East to provide a concise historical overview on global food systems “and to show how, by making better political choices and creating more equitable and humane systems of aid, we can reduce or even eliminate hunger” (11).
The uniqueness of Bauer’s attempt lies in how it analyses hunger and its weaponisation in contemporary societies from an insider’s reading of humanitarian aid.
By centring his account on the primary argument that malnutrition, starvation and hunger are man-made systemic crises which have always been the result of poor and corrupt administrations, Bauer joins a line of scholars including Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who have demonstrated that “hunger is related, ultimately to economic disparity and political disempowerment” (10). In doing so, this book highlights the interconnected nature of our current food systems, thereby showcasing that “food crises are not self-contained events that hurt people in a world away…The global food crises threatens millions who suffer from hunger, just as it undermines social progress and national security in better-off parts of the world” (9). While this course of intellectual enquiry is well-established, the uniqueness of Bauer’s attempt lies in how it analyses hunger and its weaponisation in contemporary societies from an insider’s reading of humanitarian aid. Through presenting case studies, historical contextualisation of those case studies and personal experiences as a seasoned food aid worker, the author makes a crucial and thought-provoking intervention.
[Bauer] encourages aid workers to find alternative ways to assist communities through strengthening home-based food processing and preparation, supporting local farmers’ markets and farming cooperatives, and injecting cash into and creating jobs in local communities.
The first chapter carefully explains the long-standing food crises in Haiti, followed by a chapter highlighting the role of caste and gender in exacerbating inequality, and by extension, food insecurity and hunger in The Sahel. The third and fourth chapters discuss land-grabbing and starvation, respectively, while chapters five and six take us though case studies in the Middle East and Africa. Departing from a region-specific journey through the geopolitics of food in the21st century, the second part of the book (chapters seven to eleven) explores issues including the breakdown of supply chains brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic which exacerbated food inequality (chapter seven), the food rights of indigenous people (chapter eight), the promises of humanitarian food technologies (chapter nine) and racial inequality within humanitarian organisations (chapter ten). In the last chapter, Bauer proposes sustainable grassroots solutions that use a decentralised and localised approach to improve people’s access to food, placing emphasis on “giving individuals agency over their food choices” (223). Though he believes airdrops and trucks will remain the only option for distributing food aid in many conflict-affected areas, he also encourages aid workers to find alternative ways to assist communities through strengthening home-based food processing and preparation, supporting local farmers’ markets and farming cooperatives, and injecting cash into and creating jobs in local communities. “It’s not enough to grow mountains of food and make it affordable to the masses – we need to make sure that the food is healthy, that it’s produced and distributed in a way that is not harming the environment, and that is culturally appropriate to those who would consume it”, he further urges (224).
While The New Breadline is a rich and thought-provoking monograph, its analysis might appear somewhat surface-level to informed readers and scholars expecting a more nuanced theoretical reading of hunger and humanitarian food aid. For instance, chapter 10, which sets out to illustrate the “specific experience of Black communities because they face glaring inequalities form the very institutions that are meant to help them feed themselves” (196), does not adequately critique as well as reflect upon the specific functioning of organisations such as the United Nations or the World Food Programme, of which the author has an insider’s knowledge. By choosing not to get into the depths of the ways in which race operates in such global humanitarian organisations, the book leaves a considerable gap in its treatment of the subject. A similar trend is demonstrated in the chapter on indigenous people’s right to food, wherein Bauer provides anecdotal descriptions of the plight of the Baka community in Congo rather than putting forward a structured argument on the subject. To that end, studies authored by social science scholars including Devi Sridhar and Michael J. Watts can enable readers to gain a more theoretical understanding of hunger and famine.
This book makes for a great introductory text that will enable people from diverse walks of life to make sense of how global food aid has interacted with and responded to chronic hunger.
Though it might fall short of certain academic expectations, the book’s strength and appeal lies in its ability to present its case in a well-written, highly readable and accessible fashion. By avoiding technical jargon and grounding its arguments in case studies, this book makes for a great introductory text that will enable people from diverse walks of life to make sense of how global food aid has interacted with and responded to chronic hunger. As a result, this book holds immense value to an interested general audience as well as the undergraduate and early level post-graduate students of food policy, development studies, sociology of food and other allied disciplines.
As the world falls into ever more precarious conditions of hunger, malnutrition and starvation with every passing day, this book is a timely intervention that attends to these systemic crises with conviction and empathy. In so doing, it calls out the apathy and misadministration of our contemporary world leaders who are failing those in the grips of lethal food insecurity.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image credit: Ericky Boniphace on Shutterstock.
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