Book Review: ‘The New Breadline,’ by Jean-Martin Bauer

THE NEW BREADLINE: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century, by Jean-Martin Bauer

In 2004, Jean-Martin Bauer was doing humanitarian work in southern Mauritania when he met a woman named Binta living with her children in a patched-up tent by a dry riverbed. A member of the oppressed Haratin caste, Binta often struggled to feed her kids, and had developed a trick to cover for that: “At night,” she told Bauer, “I gather the pots and pans, and build a fire. I pour out water into the large pot. I act just as though I am making dinner. And if my kids become suspicious and start asking me when dinner is ready, I snap at them and tell them: ‘Quiet! Can’t you see I’m cooking?’” When they’d finally fall asleep, she’d stop the charade.

This is one of many memorable moments in “The New Breadline,” Bauer’s illuminating account of his 20 years working with the World Food Program, for which he has led country offices in Haiti and the Republic of Congo in addition to serving in the western Sahel and central Africa, and responding to crises in Afghanistan and Syria. The book is a close-up look at efforts to vanquish hunger amid both major, front-page disasters, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Syrian civil war, and the countless lower-profile calamities that are documented on the inside pages, if at all.

The theme linking the landscapes of want depicted by Bauer is straightforward: Hunger is almost always the product of political decisions, whether the immediate cause is violent conflict, misguided trade and aid policies, or discrimination against minorities and lower castes. The downside of this reality is that humans are constantly engaged in “forces that lay the groundwork for hunger.” The upside is that hunger should, in theory, be largely avoidable. “By making better political choices and creating more equitable and humane systems of aid, we can reduce or even eliminate hunger,” Bauer writes.

Unfortunately, world hunger has lately gotten worse, not better. In 2023, an estimated 250 million people suffered from acute (life-threatening) hunger, double the figure from just three years earlier, and that’s in addition to the 700 million who suffered from chronic hunger — meaning they had barely enough food to survive.