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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World.  Two senior members of an Islamist insurgent group in Somalia today vowed revenge against the United States.  They used the U.S. will, and we quote, “taste the bitterness of our response.”  They were reacting to yesterday’s raid that reportedly killed one of Africa’s most wanted fugitives.  He is 30-year-old Ali Saleh Nabhan.  The attack took place mid concerns that Al Qaeda is gaining a foothold in Somalia.  The World’s Jason Margolis has details.

JASON MARGOLIS: The U.S. Military has targeted enemies in Somalia in recent years, but until now it has sent long-range missiles and predator drones to do the dirty work.  This time, commandos flew in on four helicopters and attacked a convoy from the air.  They then reportedly landed and took away the bodies.  Tom Donnelly is with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.  He says deploying elite troops, rather than remote control weapons, was the way to go.

TOM DONNELLY: The critical job of distinguishing the right target at the right time and the right place is still most effectively done with actual human beings.  When you had a guy you wanted to be sure to get him.  You also have to try to, as the news reports indicated, they recovered the body as well because you want to make sure that you got him.

MARGOLIS: The commandoes may have also come back with intelligence such as computers, cell phones, or documents.  Karen Von Hippel is with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.  She says military commanders sent in troops to carry out this mission for a good reason.

KARIN VON HIPPEL: Now they did this I think to reduce civilian casualties which is a good move because I think that a number of the predator strikes were not hitting their targets and were killing civilians.  And just like in Pakistan, I don’t think that this does anything to support a policy of reducing terrorism in these countries.  If anything, it just angers the public population and often gives, you know, they end up with more tacit support to the terrorists.

MARGOLIS: But, of course, there are down sides to commando strikes, namely they put U.S. troops at greater risk.  Also, Von Hippel asks whether it’s the right thing to do.

VON HIPPEL: What I find interesting about what’s happening in Somalia and including what’s happening in Pakistan with the predator strikes is that there’s very little debate in the United States about the fact that we are involved in summary executions of people without trial.

MARGOLIS: By International Law, a military strike like the one yesterday is defensible under the rules of war, but this leads to the question:  Who is the United States at war with?  The trucks in Somalia were carrying fighters with a Jhadist group called the Shabab.

VON HIPPEL: It’s a very violent group of youth militias who have some affiliation to al-Qaida.  I think they were really delighted to be listed on the designated terrorists lists by the United Nations and the United States because it really elevated them to playing with the big boys.

MARGOLIS: The Shabab poses a threat because its presence in Somalia offers a potential staging ground for attacks into nearby Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya.  That’s why Andre le Sage at the national Defense University in Washington says the reported killing of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was significant.

LE SAGE: He was one of the members of the Al Qaeda East Africa cell.  He was a leader of their attacks in 2002, targeting the Paradise Hotel near Mobassa, Kenya, also targeting an Israel jetliner.  So he had showed the intention and capability of attacking western targets in East Africa.

MARGOLIS: Le Sage says the killing of Nabhan weakens the Al Qaeda network.

LE SAGE: He’s probably one of the individuals in that network that maintained overall operation command of Al Qaeda activities in East Africa, possibly even connections out to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in the Pakistan/Afghanistan area.  So if he was removed from Al Qaeda East Africa, it would certainly degrade the capabilities of that network and their ability to conduct future attacks.

MARGOLIS: But that victory may be temporary says Tom Donnelly at AEI.  He says the hierarch of a terrorist network like Al Qaeda is not as clear cut as that of a conventional enemy state.

DONNELLY: Arguably, even killing Osama Bin Laden at this stage would not have the same sort of decisive act or effect that say killing Stalin or Adolph Hitler would have had.  These organizations are more amoeba-like and while it’s of real value to try to attack their leaders to try to kill them, the effect tends to be more temporary and transitory.

MARGOLIS: Critics of U.S. policy in Somalia say the U.S. should offer more support for Somali civil organizations and local police.  On the other hand, Somalia used to be dubbed the “graveyard of foreign aid.”  Africa experts say what’s needed is a complete overhaul of U.S. policy in the Horn of Africa.  For starters, that means making the region a higher priority.  For The World, I’m Jason Margolis.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: We go next to another East African trouble spot.  Darfur, a region in Sudan.  Darfur became the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in 2003.  That’s when rebels there took up arms against the Sudanese government.  An estimated 2.7 million people were driven from their homes and many still live in camps.  U.S. Special Envoy Scott Gration visited some of them over the weekend. He was not always welcomed. Human rights lawyer Rebecca Hamilton accompanied Gration.  She’s in The Hague at the moment.  So General Gration was appointed by President Obama, who was seen as kind of a champion of Darfur during last year’s election campaign, even using the word genocide to describe what happened there.  So what kind of reception did General Gration get, Rebecca?

REBECCA HAMILTON: Among the displaced population in the camps there was, I think, it’s said it’s a very strong reaction against Gration coming to visit.  There was one gentleman in the room who had this U.N. paper luggage tag effectively taped to the one eye.  And at first you looked at him, and you were thinking, “This is someone we need to get medical care urgently because this is what he’s using for an eye patch.”  But in actual fact it was a protest.  When he stood up, he said, “I’m wearing this on my one eye because I cannot look to you, Scott Gration, with both eyes after what you said.  And this is due to a set of misunderstandings and miscommunications over the testimony that Gration gave recently before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

WERMAN: What was the misunderstanding?

HAMILTON: Yeah, well, it’s over some statements that he made.  So he basically spent 85% of the first day there saying three points to all these groups that he spoke with.  He said, “I never said Sudan should be removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.  I never said that sanctions should be removed from Khartoum, and I never said that the displaced had to leave their camps now.”  And the displaced listened to this.  They were sort of ranging from polite to moderately receptive in these groups, but a lot of the times afterwards, I had women come up to me and say, “You know, we heard him apologize but we don’t accept it because we simply don’t believe him.”  They at this point perceived him as being … not acting in the interests of the displaced.

WERMAN: Now we should clarify that.  You were not there as a member of the special envoy delegation, correct?

HAMILTON: No, and yeah, that’s an important clarifier. I’m writing a book on Darfur policy and the impact of advocacy, and I was really just getting to be a fly on the wall to see the special envoy in action on the ground.

WERMAN: This was his first trip to Darfur, correct?

HAMILTON: No, it’s actually, I think four …

WERMAN: I mean, under the Obama Administration.

HAMILTON: … it’s his fourth trip into Darfur.  He’s been extremely active as a special envoy and that’s something that is … I mean, this man is 200% committed to the job, and I would say that having had off-the-record conversations with him, he has a much more nuance of understanding of the government in Khartoum than I perhaps had given him credit for, and that he perhaps gets credit for in the media.  So there’s a lot of positive things that you can say, but the fundamental take-away that I got from this trip this weekend was about this really disconnect between him and the displaced population at the moment.

WERMAN: And so with this rather sort of bumpy trip to Darfur, I mean, how does that actually taint the White House policy regarding Darfur at this point?  How do the Darfuris feel about, you know, Obama’s policy?

HAMILTON: Well, I think it’s a huge challenge because there was, as you mentioned, so much hope with the Obama Administration coming in.  People said very specifically we had a lot of hopes that the change in administration would deliver results for us on the ground in Darfur, and we’re feeling that our hopes are being dashed.

WERMAN: Human rights lawyer, Rebecca Hamilton, is writing a book about the Darfur Advocacy Movement, and she’s just back from a trip to Darfur with U.S. Envoy Scott Gration.  Thank you very much for your time indeed.

HAMILTON: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: It was one year ago today that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.  That collapse triggered a cascade that led to a global financial crisis.  Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the global economy is on the road to recovery, though many may not be feeling that just yet.  Still, a number of former Lehman employees have found work again in other banks and investment houses. For one of them, the end of Lehman’s inspired a creative about face as The World’s Laura Lynch reports.

LAURA LYNCH: This is the day Caroline White is unveiling her new career.

CAROLINE WHITE: Now the decision is do you want a white or black one?

LYNCH: Decisions, decisions.  This is a small one whether to use the white or black business cards that have just been delivered announcing that Caroline White, formerly Lehman’s banker on the London derivatives desk is now Caroline White fashion designer.

WHITE: A lot of people are like, “What are you doing?  Banking to fashion?  Howe does that work?  I’m like, yeah.  They’re not highly correlated, I know but it’s been a passion of mine for so long.

LYNCH: At a gallery in London’s trendy Shoreditch neighborhood workers are preparing for White’s big bash where she’ll officially reveal her first piece, a very special laptop bag.

WHITE: On the inside, you’ve got the linings and these are like a patchwork basically of the emergency evacuation kits that we had under our desks at Lehman.  So it’s kind of a little piece of Lehman that survived.

LYNCH: She’s referring to the emergency kits issued to all Lehman employees.  White took hers with her a year ago.  So did a lot of the other employees.  Embossed with the Lehman Brothers logo, the kit held goggles, a face mask, and a flashlight to be used in case of a fire or even a terrorist attack. But it couldn’t protect White or Lehman’s from financial disaster.  It’s still easy for White to recall the emotions of that time.

WHITE: Oh, anger, I think.  That was a huge one.  Disappointment and kind of betrayal as well because I think it was seriously mismanaged by some of the senior management out of New York, and I think Europe really suffered as a result of some of the decisions made there.

LYNCH: White says the anger propelled her to get out of banking and inspired her to design this one-of-a-kind bag.  Making it, she says, was cathartic and she doesn’t have plans to sell it.  Instead, she’s using it as a marketing device for her new line of what she calls affordable luxury bags.  White is launching this new venture because of her interest in fashion, but also she admits because she needs to earn a living.

WHITE: There’s quite a large sort of generalization out there that anyone who works in a hedge fund or an investment bank is earning squillions, and it’s quite not the case.  I was earning a very well paid salary, but I also wasn’t the kind of person that would go out spraying bottles of champagne in night clubs and ridiculous bar tabs.  It’s not my style.

LYNCH: As the caterers wheel in wine glasses and serving trays for tonight’s event, White is right there supervising every little thing.  Most of her former colleagues have remained in banking working for smaller outfits, and she says in some ways she’s grateful for what happened a year ago today.

WHITE: I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. I’ve already felt sorry for myself for a few months and I’ve felt that’s enough time to sort of pull myself up and get on with it.

LYNCH: Tonight’s opening, White hopes, will allow her to banish the ghost of Lehman Brothers or at least keep it zipped up firmly insider her new designer bag.  For The World I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  This was the scene in Frankfurt, German today.  Investors hit by last year’s collapse of Lehman Brothers protested their loss of savings.  They marched outside the company’s former offices.  One man shouted, “Criminals. Bank robbers.”  Lehman Brothers fold one year ago today.  The crisis that engulfed the firm has caused to question, well, the whole kit and caboodle: capitalism.

MICHAEL MOORE: We’re seeing the end of capitalism.  The end of capitalism as we know it, and I say good riddance.

WERMAN: That was filmmaker Michael Moore speaking last year with CNN’s Larry King.  Moore’s upcoming movie has an ironic title, “Capitalism:  A Love Story.”  But it’s just the latest blast against capitalism.  Decades ago German playwright Bertolt Brecht had his say in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Brecht wrote about New York.  It’s as if he was writing last year.  The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Weeks after the crash Brecht put pen to paper and came with this:  A poem called The Late Lamented Fame of the Giant City of New York.  At the start, New Yorkers are on top of the world.

ROBERT COHEN: What people they were, their boxers the strongest, their inventors the most practical, their trains the fastest, and also the most crowded, and it all looked like lasting a thousand years.  For the people of the City of New York, put it about themselves that their city was built on the rock and hence indestructible.

GALLAFENT: Sounds familiar and it becomes more so as the poem goes on.  Wall Street crashes.  New York City goes into free fall.

COHEN: What a bankruptcy.  How great a fame has departed.  What a discovery that their system of communal life has placed the same miserable flaw as that or more modest people.

GALLAFENT: 2009 is plenty different from 1929, but not entirely different according to Robert Cohen, a professor at New York University.

COHEN: I think the comparison is unavoidable.

GALLAFENT: Brecht had never visited his New York when he wrote his poem, but that didn’t stop him from having an opinion about the place. The poem was shaped by Brecht’s admiration for Karl Max.

COHEN: It is a vision of capitalism that kind of in the waves the way Marx describes it, which has its high moments and then constantly self-destructs, rebuilds itself, and this kind of cyclical vision kind of reveals its logic.  If we read the poem today and we see the obvious parallels.

MARC SILBERMAN: For people like Brecht, the collapse in 1929 was a confirmation of suspicions of market capitalism had a destructive power.

GALLAFENT: This is Marc Silberman who studies the work of Bertolt Brecht at the University of Wisconsin.  For Silberman Brecht’s doubts about capitalism emerged from a specific time and place, Germany in the 1920s.  After the trauma and defeat of the first World War, Germany embarked on a bold experiment in constitutional democracy, the Weimar Republic.  But while Germany’s politics were changing, other aspects of life were stagnant.

SILBERMAN: Brecht was living a Weimar, Germany that was completely burdened by tradition.  Dress codes, cultural values, ideals and so on.

GALLAFENT: So young artists like Bertolt Brecht and her composer collaborator Kurt Weill looked elsewhere for inspiration.  They looked west.

SILBERMAN: For many of the intellectuals, middle-class people who felt constrained, America was a breath of fresh air.  The United States seemed like the place where everything was possible.

GALLAFENT: Before Brecht came to criticize America, he loved America and the fruits of American capitalism.

COHEN: Anything from Fordist industrial production to dancing girls dancing in steps, which is kind of version of an industrialized form of dance.  Music, gestures, and attitudes that Germans imagined Americans have like being cool, being dramatic.

GALLAFENT: Brecht devoured American culture, American thought.

SILBERMAN: He read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Frank Norris, The Pit.

GALLAFENT: And he put America, his imagined America center stage in his writing. Mix a cocktail of Brecht, Weimar, Maxism and America and you get things like this.

MARILYN MANSON: [Singing Alabama Song]

GALLAFENT: This is Marilyn Manson’s cover of Alabama Song written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.   The original features in an opera called The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  It’s a parable of capitalism.  Mahagonny is an imaginary city in Alabama.  Coincidentally, the state that Lehman Brothers got its start back in the 19th Century.  It’s a city of pleasure.  At the start, that’s shown to be a good thing.  You can buy anything, everything you want, but as the opera develops, prosperity gives way to savage greed.

SILBERMAN: What we find is a kind of market capitalism where everything is defined by money.  Everything can be bought including human relations.  Market capitalism is shown to destroy all social connections.

GALLAFENT: In Mahagonny, capitalism is cut throat.  The city is like a net cast out to snare edible birds.  But by the end of the opera, the city itself is destroyed.  It’s a harsh depiction of capitalism.  But Brecht didn’t see that as the end of thing, says scholar Marc Silberman.

SILBERMAN: This is an intimate part of Brecht’s thinking.  I believe that moments of crisis, moments of destruction are also possibilities for developing something new.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We have a once in a generation chance to act boldly and turn adversity into opportunity and to use this crisis as a chance to transform our economy for the 21st Century.

GALLAFENT: Now, don’t believe everything you hear.  President Obama is not a Marxist.  He believes in the apparatus of capitalism and the power of the markets.   The President spoke on Wall Street yesterday.  He had strong words for a rebounding financial industry.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The old ways that led to this crisis cannot stand, and to the extent that some have so readily returned to them, underscores the need for change and change now.  History cannot be allowed to repeat itself.

GALLAFENT: Bertolt Brecht’s Germany became Hitler’s Germany.  The writer fled to a new home, California.  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH-Boston.  A part of the world once synonymous with drought and starvation is facing another food crisis.  Twenty-five years ago images of malnourished children in Ethiopia focused the world’s attention and sympathies on East Africa.  Today, a lack of rain as well as political violence again threatened the region with starvation.  In a moment, we’ll examine the causes of and responses to a recent African food crisis and we’ll consider the legacy of green revolution pioneer Norman Borlaug.  But first, listen to this aid worker.  He’s just visited Northern Kenya where he and his colleagues saw some wrenching sights.

NICHOLAS WASUNNA: We saw an elderly lady just faint. She just passed out.  Her thin body, frail hands.  I remember going to where she was just to hold her hand, and I looked in her eyes which were half shut. And I remember thinking to myself; does it really have to come this? What can we all do to ensure that in our day and age we do not see these kinds of things?

WERMAN: That’s Nicholas Wasunna in Nairobi, Kenya.  He’s a humanitarian advisor for the aid group, World Vision.  He and his colleagues witnessed the effects of the drought as soon as they began their mission.

WASUNNA: Already we could see the carcasses of cows, donkeys, goats and I was shocked when I saw the carcasses of camels as well, but this does show you the severity of this drought.  These communities they really rely on their livestock.  We saw a lot of communities there that they … When I looked in their eyes, there was an emptiness.  There was a despair.  These kids were hungry.  The women were hungry.  Of note were the elderly people.  They were all so … Their body was thin.  You could easily see their ribs.  Yeah, this was a real concern.

WERMAN: Are there people literally on the verge of starvation?  Has anybody died yet?

WASUNNA: No one has come to us specifically and reported a death due to a lack food.  We also have spoken with the government, and they don’t seem to have any figures on death.  But when we’re talking about figures, we’re talking about 3.9 million pastoralists or agro pastoralists are in need of food.  But this crisis also goes wider than just the arid regions.  It also goes into urban centers.  In Kenya, for example, there are 2.5 million people in urban centers that need food assistance, and we also have some people which are still displaced by the post-election violence, and these are about 100,000 people who still need food assistance.

WERMAN: So what brought this about, Nicholas?  I mean, how much is it due to political unrest, the ethnic conflict that you mentioned and the post-election violence and how much is it due to just bad rain for the last two years.

WASUNNA: I think everyone can cite climate change as one of the factors, but actually, if we start working backwards, we can see in places like Northern Kenya, the infrastructure is just so poor.  These are areas that have never been prioritized in terms of infrastructural development.  Getting there by road could take two or three days.  A pastoralist community in Northern Kenya who are looking for a market for the livestock it would take a businessman three days in a [SOUNDS LIKE] lorry to get to Northern Kenya.  By the time he gets there, the quality of the livestock, the body condition is poor so the price will be poor.  A meager sum that can hardly buy cereal for the food.

WERMAN: There is some suspicion that rains will arrive in October, but do you think that would bring any relief?  I mean, a big rain at the end of the growing season seems a little too much too late.

WASUNNA: Some areas are flood prone and we are already preparing to respond to communities where there might be flooding episodes, but normally in places like Takana [PH] in the north, we see that the rain really helps the grass to grow so the animals can start to graze again, but the future trends are there will be more droughts, there will be more episodes of flooding.  We’re expecting and El Nino to be coming from October.  Then we’ll go back to a series of droughts again.  So this will become what we’re calling the new norm.

WERMAN: Nicholas Wasunna is a humanitarian advisor for the aid group, World Vision.  He joined us from Nairobi, Kenya.  Greatly appreciate your thoughts.

WASUNNA: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Droughts and flooding are not the only causes of food crises. Politics and economics often play major roles.  A case in point is the West African nation of Niger.  In 2005, untold numbers of children died of malnutrition there even though the country did not suffer an especially bad harvest.  Reporter Daivd Hehct has investigated the causes of Niger’s food trouble.  He finds that the roots of the crisis extended a long way from where people went hungry.

DAVID HECHT: In 2005, foreign journalists descended on Niger.  They broadcast to the world images that have become all too familiar from Africa; children with hollow cheeks, bloated bellies and arms like sticks.

MALE REPORTER: Niger’s problem now the experts say is that the country is poor …

FEMALE REPORTER: France’s foreign minister said in Niger, “People need aid, not declarations of summits.”

MALE REPORTER: Niger in this terrible time is always another child fighting to stay alive.

HECHT: There remains a debate about just how severe Niger’s food crisis was.  Some called it a famine.  Others, particularly Niger’s government, said the crisis was vastly overblown. The cause of the food shortage has also been a point of contention.  Some blamed locusts and poor rains, but it turns out at least some of the reasons can be traced beyond Niger’s borders, to that country’s neighbor, Nigeria.  The two countries meet at bustling border tows like Jibiya, where traders exchange corn, millet and beans as well as livestock.  Niger and Nigeria may have similar names but they are very different countries.  Niger to the north is vastly populated and mostly desert.  Nigeria to the south is far more crowded and most of its land is arable.

ALHADJI TENIR MUSAMOTA: [Speaking foreign language]

HECHT: Trader Alhadji Tenir Musamota says foods usually flows north across the borders from fertile Nigeria to arid Niger.  But when Nigeria suffers a bad harvest, he says food can flow the other way around.

MUSAMOTA: [Translation] They say about four years back something like this happened.  Because the rainfall was not much here in Nigeria but over there they had good rainfall and they had a good harvest.  So they crossed over and buy millet and corn to bring down here.

HECHT: In other words, Musamota and other traders say in 2005 it was Nigeria not Niger that had the bad harvest.  So Nigeria bought food from Niger and because Nigeria is much wealthier than its neighbor, Nigeria is one of the world’s top oil exporters it pushed up prices so much so that many people in Niger couldn’t afford the food produced in their own country.  Food experts now generally acknowledge that this one of the underlying causes of Niger’s food crisis.  But those experts didn’t see it at the time.  Marcus Prior is a spokesman for the World Food Program.  He was in Niger in 2005.

MARCUS PRIOR: The sudden spike in food prices did take a lot of people by surprise.  One of the reasons for which was that at the time there was not a particularly good understanding of the way Niger’s and the sub region’s markets actually worked.

HECHT: Because aid agencies didn’t understand what was causing the fluctuation in food prices and food supplies, some may have inadvertently worsened the problem.  Mohammed Sabo Nanono is a prominent farmer in the northern Nigerian City of Kano.  He says at the time of Niger’s food crisis, some of aid officials contacted him.  They wanted to buy food from him and send it to Niger.

MOHAMMED SABO NANONO: They brought cash.  I organized the transportation, the grains, everything.  And off they went, and they crossed the border.

HECHT: But Nanono says there were two problems with this plan.  First, aid officials were unprepared for the corruption that would siphon off food meant for the hungry.

NANONO: They were able only to witness the distribution of ten percent.  So 90 percent was with the Niger officials.

HECHT: Second, Nanono says sending his food to Niger did nothing to address the underlying cause of its food shortage that is Nigeria’s willingness to pay high prices for Niger’s food.  This point was driven home when he received a surreal phone call.  He says it was from government officials in Niger who offered to resell him the very food he had sold to the aid organization.

NANONO: They wanted to bring back this thing and sell it in Kano.

HECHT: The same food?

NANONO: The same food.

HECHT: So the same food that you sold?

NANONO: Exactly.

HECHT: Because it’s just going the pockets of government officials?

NANONO: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and I told them I’m not interested.

HECHT: In buying your own food?

NANONO: In buying my own food.  You see that is the problem.  The underlying issue is corruption.

HECHT: Corruption and the law of supply and demand, because when food is scarce, the prices go up and the food goes to those who can afford it. In fact, in 2005, when babies were starving in Niger, chickens in Nigeria were well fed.  It was widely reported that Nigerian poultry farmers were even buying up the food aid sent to Niger because they could pay higher prices for it.  Food flows to where the money is.   With these kinds of problems plaguing responses to many food emergencies, some aid agencies are trying a radically new approach.  Rather than giving food to the hungry, they’re giving people cash.  Jonathan Brass is with the aid organization Oxfam.

JONATHAN BRASS: What we end up doing by providing cash is creating that demand for food, so local traders will ensure that there’s food in those areas to be able to take advantage of the cash in that area.

HECHT: He says that with cash, or in some cases food vouchers, poor people can buy food from the markets that already exist.  So aid organizations don’t have to create parallel food distribution systems.  Plus the added cash can encourage local farmers to increase production.  Proponents of this strategy argue it should be used to head off the current crisis brewing in East Africa.  Because not far from where people are going hungry, there are regions where food is plentiful.  It’s just no getting to those who need it.  For The World, I’m David Hecht, Jibiya, Nigeria.

WERMAN: David Hecht’s reporting was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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MARCO WERMAN: One reason food is plentiful in much of the world is the so-called Green Revolution of the second half of the 20th Century.  High yield crop varieties and other innovations helped to more than double world food production from 1960 to 1990. Experts say the advances saved perhaps a billion lives.  One of the key figure behind the Green Revolution died over the weekend at the age of 95.  Norman Borlaug was plant pathologist who helped develop the new varieties of wheat the helped spark the explosion in crop yield.  That work earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.  To help us understand the legacy of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, we turn to Lester Brown.  Brown is the head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington and he’s followed development in global agriculture and food supply perhaps as closely as anyone over the last four years.  Mr. Brown, take us back, if you would, first to Norman Borlaug’s work of the middle of the last century and the challenge he had at that time of feeding the world?

LESTER BROWN: Well, food supplies were tightening in the early ’60s and even before that as we anticipate the huge growth in the human population during the last half of the 20th Century.  And what Norm Borlaug did was to take the dwarf wheat that had been developed in Japan to Mexico and began breeding them with local varieties, but he was in a hurry to do this so he had two different plant breeding sites.  In the summer time, he’d grow a crop in Northern Mexico and ten take those seeds down to Southern Mexico and grow them in the winter so he could get two crops a year and speed up the new variety development process.  And what that did and even he was not sort of aware of it, was it produced high yielding varieties of wheat that were widely adaptable in growing conditions.  So when it came time to look for varieties of wheat that would work well in Pakistan and India, he had the answer.

WERMAN: The Nobel Peace Price Committee said when they presented Borlaug with the Peace Price more than any other single person of this age he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.  Is that an overstatement?

BROWN: No because it was those high yielding wheat that made such an enormous contribution to food production in many countries throughout the developing world.

WERMAN: The Green Revolution, of course, leads to some pretty serious unintended and unforeseen consequences.  Tell us what we know now that we didn’t know then that cast the Green Revolution, and Borlaug’s work in the different light.

BROWN: Well, there’s been a tendency particularly in the environmental community to criticize the Green Revolution because it lead to more intensive agriculture, the use of heavy applications of fertilizer, for example, and this would seem as not a good thing in the eyes of many. But in the eyes of the people in India, who hadn’t very little new land that could be brought under the plow, it was the only way to go.  The alternative would have been to totally deforest the rest of India in an effort to try to produce more food, but it wouldn’t have worked because most of the remaining forest land was marginal land in any event.  And it’s easy to look at some of the problems associated with the Green Revolution, but in order to evaluate that you need to spin out the alternative scenario which would have been India without a Green Revolution, for example, and that would have been an epic tragedy.

WERMAN: Do you still feel that the world is better off with the developments of the Green Revolution than without?

BROWN: Well, I don’t think there’s any question that that was desirable.  My big disappointment in the case of India and many other developing countries was that they did not, as I had hoped, give the same attention to getting the breaks on population growth.  As a result, today we have an India not with half a billion people but more than a billion people, and some 46% of all children are chronically hungry and malnourished.  So the problem has not been solved.  We sustained a much, much larger population but we have not eradicated hunger.

WERMAN: Lester Brown, thank you very much.

BROWN: My pleasure, Marco.

WERMAN: Lester Brown is the author of the forthcoming book, Plan B4.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.