I N P U R S U I T O F T H E W A T E R M A F I A

JUL/AUG 2015 $8.99 U.S./CAN

 contents 07|08.2015

054
Midnight
Marauders
Delhi’s water economy is broken,
leaving residents at the mercy
of a water mafia. But as the cap-
ital scrambles for solutions,
could this network of illicit sup-
pliers serve as the very model
needed to slake the city’s ever-
deepening thirst?
by AMAN SETHI

066
Survival by Design
On a planet already stressed for
food and water, are there enough
resources to support a population
that will approach 10 billion by
2050? Despite what doomsayers
argue, all might not be lost.
essays by OLIVIER DE
SCHUTTER and
CHARLES FISHMAN

076
Corked
As former Soviet republics
develop closer ties with the
West, Russia is pulling out all
the stops to keep them in the
fold. Amid this battle, Moldova’s
wine industry has become the
unlikeliest front.
by MARK BAKER

084
The New
Abolitionists
Operation Underground Railroad,
a small Mormon-led group, is
going undercover to rescue kids
from sex trafficking. But is its
brand of salvation working?
by THOMAS STACKPOLE

ON THE COVER
PHOTOILLUSTRATION BY Sanjit Das AND Gluekit

Photograph by ADAM VOORHES

 russia-direct.org

EXPAND YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON RUSSIAN STUDIES

How to get from How deep is the

Soviet studies to Russian studies
Russian studies? bench?

Where did all the How to improve

Russia experts go? the field of Russian
studies?

The Russia debate, Why Russia could

from ivory tower to become a place for
the White House. American students
to study?

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HIGHEST RANKED SCHOOLS IN THE US

FROM THE NEW RUSSIA DIRECT REPORT

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION FOR ONLY $39.99*

Subscribe now and get a 30% discount >> russia-direct.org/get-discount

*Annual subscription includes 12 reports, covering a wide range of foreign policy topics;
unlimited access to 25+ publications in the archive section; delivery of 4 special print
reports within the US.
 contents 07|08.2015

Observation Deck

096
MAPPA MUNDI
Requiem for
a Macrosaurus
by DAVID ROTHKOPF

098
Sightlines

012 APERTURE
NATIONAL SECURITY
Missed Calls
by JAMES BAMFORD

104
Child’s Pay
photographs by TOBY BINDER

020
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
ECONOMICS
The Secret of Singapore
by DEBORA L. SPAR

106
The Village Health Worker
interview by ELIZABETH
PALCHIK ALLEN

022 ENERGY
Same Game, New Board
by KEITH JOHNSON

108
THE EXCHANGE
Lynsey Addario and
Shirin Ebadi Talk Iran

024 BOOKS & CULTURE

Fare Trade
by CHERYL LULIEN TAN

110
VISUAL STATEMENT
Real Suffrage
by WINNIE DAVIES

026 DECODER
THE FIXER
Out and About in Lahore
interview by MIRA SETHI

The Art Market

by ED JOHNSON

028 INNOVATIONS
Precise Pain-Reduction,
Virtual Battlefields,
and More 008 Contributors
by NEEL V. PATEL 112 The Futurist
 ENNEAD ARCHITECTS
International. Interdisciplinary. Indiana.
Indiana University, one of America’s great global public
institutions, is investing in international affairs and area
studies. Indiana’s new School of Global & International
Studies is hiring 25 new tenure track faculty to add to the
University’s renowned strength in area studies. The School’s
new $53 million building opens this fall, bringing together
300 faculty, instruction in 70 languages, and award-winning
institutes that cover the world.

sgis.indiana.edu
 David Rothkopf
CEO AND EDITOR, THE FP GROUP

Mindy Kay Bricker Benjamin Pauker Yochi Dreazen

EXECUTIVE EDITOR, PRINT EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ONLINE MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS

Seyward Darby Rebecca Frankel Lara Jakes

DEPUTY EDITOR, PRINT DEPUTY EDITOR, ONLINE DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS

Josef Reyes
CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Amanda Silverman Amy Finnerty

STORY EDITOR, PRINT ARTICLES EDITOR, PRINT

SENIOR EDITORS, TEA LEAF NATION SENIOR STAFF WRITERS

Rachel Lu, David Wertime Colum Lynch, Seán D. Naylor
MIDDLE EAST EDITOR SENIOR REPORTERS
David Kenner John Hudson, Keith Johnson
ASIA EDITOR STAFF WRITERS
Isaac Stone Fish David Francis, Paul McLeary
ASSOCIATE EDITOR COPY CHIEF
Max Strasser Preeti Aroon
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITORS DEPUTY COPY EDITOR
Jake Scobey-Thal, Shannon Schweitzer
Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer COPY EDITOR
ART DIRECTOR Elaine C. Ayo
Ed Johnson WEB DEVELOPER
ASSISTANT EDITORS Erik Reyna
Elias Groll, Ilya Lozovsky, ASSISTANT DIGITAL PRODUCER
Siddhartha Mahanta, Reid Standish
Thomas Stackpole FELLOW, TEA LEAF NATION
FELLOWS Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Justine Drennan,
Siobhán O’Grady
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Benjamin Soloway CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Daniel Altman, John Arquilla, William Inboden, Charles Kenny,
Peter Bergen, David Bosco, Christina Larson, Aaron David
Ian Bremmer, Rosa Brooks, Miller, Thomas E. Ricks, J. Peter
Christian Caryl, Mohamed A. Scoblic, James Traub, Stephen M.
El-Erian, Peter D. Feaver, Walt, Micah Zenko
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CIRCULATION,
PUBLISHER DIGITAL STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS David E. Hoffman,
Amer Yaqub Christopher Cotnoir CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR, PRINT

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS James Wellford

DEVELOPMENT AND
Ian Keller BRAND MANAGEMENT

VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL Tara Vohra

Emily Simon
WEB DIRECTOR 2009 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD
DIRECTORS, INTERNATIONAL
Tim Showers GENERAL EXCELLENCE
Duc Luu, Aaron Schumacher
WEB DEVELOPERS
DIRECTOR, ADVERTISING
Brian Ackerman Josh Mobley, Priya Nannapaneni,
Foreign Policy SUBSCRIPTIONS  SUBSCRIBER SERVICES
Saxon Stiller
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT INTERN 11 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 600 Foreign Policy, P.O. Box 283, Congers, NY 10920-
DIRECTOR, CONTENT SALES
Henry Burbank Keith Arends Washington, D.C. 20036 0283; ForeignPolicy.com/subscription-services;
PUBLISHING OFFICE e-mail: fp@cambeywest.com; (800) 535-6343 in
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, MARKETING
VICE PRESIDENT, COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND AD TRAFFICKING (202) 728-7300 U.S.; (845) 267-3050 outside U.S.; Publications
Carol Ross Joynt Matthew J. Curry SUBSCRIPTIONS mail agreement no. 40778561. Rates (in U.S.
(800) 535-6343 funds): $59.99 for one year. NEWSSTAND AND
PRESS DIRECTOR
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BOOKSTORE DISTRIBUTION Curtis Circulation
Maria Ory CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER ADVERTISING Company, 730 River Road, New Milford, NJ 07646-
VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Allen Chin (202) 728-7310 3048; (201) 634-7400. BACK ISSUES $10.95
Grace Rooney ASSISTANT TO THE CEO per copy. International airmail add $3.00 per copy;
DIRECTOR, EVENTS Ann Kingston online: ForeignPolicy.com/buy-back-issues; e-mail:
Stephanie Cherkezian fp@ForeignPolicy.com. SYNDICATION REQUESTS
JUNIOR ACCOUNTANT © 2015 by The FP Group, a division of Graham
Contact Matthew Curry (202) 728-7351;
Henry Riggs Holdings Company, which bears no responsibility
for the editorial content; the views expressed in matthew.curry@ForeignPolicy.com. OTHER
the articles are those of the authors. No part of this
PERMISSION REQUESTS Copyright Clearance
publication may be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. Center, Inc. (978) 750-8400; www.copyright.com.

6 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 READY TO CHANGE THE WORLD?
TREASURY WHITE COMMERCE OAS FEDERAL NATIONAL ACADEMY
DEPARTMENT HOUSE DEPARTMENT RESERVE OF SCIENCES

WORLD IMF THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY STATE

BANK DEPARTMENT

START HERE.
GW ELLIOTT SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs is located

just steps from some of the most important policy-
making institutions in the world. Our proximity to U.S.
and international organizations puts our scholars in a
powerful position to analyze policy problems as they
unfold, and it draws world leaders to our campus to
address some of the most important issues of our time.

Every school of international affairs bridges the theory

and practice of foreign policy. At GW’s Elliott School
of International Affairs, we don’t need bridges;
we have sidewalks.

elliott.gwu.edu
contributors

Cheryl
Lu-Lien Tan Olivier De
is a New York-based Schutter
writer. Born and is a legal scholar
raised in Singapore, focusing on
she is the author of economic and social
A Tiger in the Kitchen: rights. He recently
A Memoir of Food stepped down after
and Family and is the a six-year term as
editor of the fiction the United Nations’
anthology Singapore special rapporteur
Noir. Her first novel, on the right to food.
Sarong Party Girls, is Prior to that, from
AMAN SETHI forthcoming. She 2004 to 2008,
“‘Forget it,’ Sanjit Das, the photographer, was previously a staff he served as a
writer at the Wall secretary-general
said as we drove down yet another alley Street Journal, InStyle of the International
in southeast Delhi. ‘Why don’t we just get magazine, and the Federation for
some kebabs?’ It had been a long day in Baltimore Sun. Human Rights.
search of the spots where the water mafia fill
their tankers, and Sanjit and I were getting
nowhere. Everyone we spoke to assured
us that we just had to drive along the Yamuna
River to find long queues of tankers waiting
to pick up their illicit cargo, but no one could
point us to the right place. Defeated, we
pulled over to a cramped restaurant Thomas
and, over a plate of kebabs and daal, planned Stackpole Mira Sethi
is an assistant editor is a Pakistan-based
our next steps. We got back into the car and at FOREIGN POLICY, writer and was
were headed home along the highway when where he oversees formerly an assistant
suddenly we spotted a water tanker, painted the Peace Channel, books editor at the
a partnership with Wall Street Journal.
a rusty orange, careening down the road, the U.S. Institute Her work has
making a beeline for the river. We slipped of Peace. Formerly, appeared in the New
behind the truck and followed it as it crossed he worked for Mother York Times and the
Jones, where he New Republic, among
the Yamuna and veered off the road wrote about energy other publications.
down an unlit, broken dirt path. We paused and climate change, Her first book, a
for a second, worried by what lay ahead, and for the New collection of short
Republic, where he fiction set in Pakistan
but figured, ‘This is our city. How wrong can covered politics and and the United States,
things go?’ We continued behind the reproductive rights. is forthcoming.
truck, until a turn in the darkness revealed
a busy operation of idling tankers.” P. 54

8 JULY | AUGUST 2015

SPONSORED CONTENT
Keeping Score: Who Won and Who Lost in The ‘Arab Spring’ Aftermath
An interview with Antoine Sreih, a Middle East business advisor and co-author of
Reinventing the Middle East
Q: Who should read Reinventing the
Middle East?
A: The book is focused on the MENA
region’s socio-economic changes and their
wider implications for the region’s political
economy. Consequently, it is an excellent
update for those with general interest in
WKH0(1$UHJLRQDQGVSHFL¿FDOO\IRU
those interested in its geopolitics, business,
economy and trade.
Q: What gap in the literature on the
UHJLRQGRHVWKHERRN¿OO"
A: Unlike most publications focused on
political (and military) affairs and day-to-day
developments that take place in the region,
this book analyzes the region in a macro
context. First, it reviews the core social and
economic structures of the Arab Middle East
and North Africa and illustrates how those
VWUXFWXUHVLQÀXHQFHGVWDWHOHGVWUDWHJLHVLQ
the region over the past several decades.
Second, it explains how the interaction
between these political strategies and the
region’s socioeconomic fabric contributed
to the uprisings. Third, the book examines
how the region’s economic institutions may
¿WLQWRWKHIXWXUHGLUHFWLRQRIWKHUHJLRQ
one hundred years after the Sykes-Picot
agreement, a secret treaty between France
and the UK that divided the MENA region
and shaped it into what we know today.
“The ordinary people of the MENA region, especially the poor, are the
biggest losers . . . Unfortunately, it seems like the biggest winners at the
moment are ISIS and Al Qaida terrorist groups.”
Q: In what ways have the region’s
¿QDQFLDOLQVWLWXWLRQVGLVSOD\HGUHVLOLHQFH
in the face of the Arab Spring? In what
ways have they been weakened?
A: 'XULQJWKHJOREDO¿QDQFLDOFULVLVRI
WKH0(1$UHJLRQ¶V¿QDQFLDO
institutions were relatively strong because
they were managing their assets and
liabilities in a much more conservative
manner than their Western counterparts
were. In addition, the weaker link between
the region’s capital markets and the global
¿QDQFLDOV\VWHPUHGXFHGWKHLPSDFW
of the toxic assets that brought down
numerous institutions in the West. Many
of them have shown similar resilience
after the Arab Spring so far. However,
with recent escalations in countries like
Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, one can
only predict disastrous economic and
¿QDQFLDOFRQVHTXHQFHV7KHULVLQJFRVWRI
doing business and low oil prices will even
endanger the positions of wealthy countries
RIWKH*XOI)RUH[DPSOHWKLVGLI¿FXOW
situation forces Saudi Arabia to withdraw
billions of dollars from their strategic reserve
to maintain their national budget.
Q: What opportunities did the Arab
Spring open for the region’s economic
growth, national development, and social
cohesion that were not possible before the
revolutionary period?
A: Unfortunately, things are not looking
JRRG¿YH\HDUVDJRZHZHUHIXOORI
optimism and hope that democracy would
¿QDOO\UHDFKWKH0(1$UHJLRQ)LYH\HDUV
on, we stopped talking about the region’s
democratic future and we can now only
hope that the region can stop the advance
of terrorists and their bloodshed and restore
the security and safety of the region before
it is too late. Very few opportunities still
exist in the region and it is critical for the
organizations operating in the MENA region
to assess, prioritize and mitigate operational
risk in the region.
Q: In what ways did the Arab Spring
fundamentally change the economics of
the Middle East?
A: The Arab Spring did little to change the
economics of the MENA region. It was
rather an outcome of the region’s internal
challenges and external pressures that have
been built up for generations. In fact, the
Arab Spring was partly triggered by a series
of social experiments that some of the
MENA regimes tried to reduce the fragilities
in their economy. Many MENA countries
promoted higher education, but this did not
bring the expected results as the region’s
governments failed to create economies
that could fully absorb the well-educated
youth and their aspirations for freedom,
democracy, and social equality.
Q: What are the biggest setbacks that the
region now faces because of the instability
associated with the Arab Spring?
A: The biggest setback the region now
faces is the escalation of the local and proxy
¿JKWLQJLQ6\ULD/LE\D,UDTDQGQRZ
<HPHQLQWRDGLUHFWFRQÀLFWEHWZHHQWKH
major regional powers of Saudi Arabia, Iran,
and Turkey.
Q: In every crisis, there are winners and
losers. Who do you see as the major
ZLQQHUVDQGORVHUVLQWKH0LGGOH(DVW¿YH
years after the start of the Arab Spring?
A: The ordinary people of the MENA
Buy Reinventing the Middle East on
Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
About The Authors
Antoine Sreih is a board-level
advisor to MENA banks and
assists banks to establish
RIƓFHVDQGEUDQFKHVLQYDULRXV
locations in the EU. With more
than 30 years’ international
banking experience, Antoine
was the CEO of Europe Arab
Bank (part of Arab Bank Group)
from 2008 to 2011, and
Chairman of Wahda Bank (the fourth largest bank
in Libya) until 2011. This is Antoine’s third book
co-authored with Joseph DiVanna. Previous titles
include A New Financial Dawn: The Rise of Islamic
Finance (2009) and Weathering the Financial Storm in
the MENA Region (2012).
Antoine Sreih can be reached at asreih@live.co.uk
Joseph DiVanna can be reached at joe.divanna@
marisstrategies.com
region, especially the poor, are the biggest
losers. More than 10,000 people were driven
from their homes every day last year by
war and violence in the MENA region. As
a consequence of ISIS’s terror campaign,
WZRPLOOLRQ,UDTLVÀHGWKHLUKRPHVLQ
0HDQZKLOHPLOOLRQ6\ULDQVDERXW
percent of the population, are now refugees.
Unfortunately, it seems that the biggest
winners at the moment are ISIS and Al
Qaida terrorist groups.
Q: Is the Middle East actually reinventing
itself, or have the tensions that simmered
underneath the surface of the region’s
long-reigning authoritarian regimes
simply been revealed?
A: It is both. What started with what
appeared to be the aspiration of becoming
democratic societies has been quickly
kidnapped by terrorist organizations, who
KDYHEHQH¿WHGIURPWKHHWKQLFDQGVHFWDULDQ
FRQÀLFWLQWKHUHJLRQ
APERTURE THE THINGS THE EXCHANGE VISUAL STATEMENT DECODER INNOVATIONS
Young workers THEY CARRIED Photojournalist The Umbrella Thanks to the Hydrogen-powered
find both In Uganda, a health Lynsey Addario and Movement lives 1-percenters who cars, virtual reality
opportunity and worker needs an Nobel laureate on, though Hong want Warhols, the that wins real-world
exploitation in old bike—and new Shirin Ebadi on Kong’s pleas for global art market is battles, and news-
Bolivia’s recent pants—to deliver exposing injustices democracy never more lucrative than paper-inspired
labor law. | P. 12 drugs. | P. 20 in Iran. | P. 22 reach Beijing. | P. 24 ever before. | P. 26 solar cells. | P. 28

“The Umbrella Movement was born. And it isn’t dead.” | P. 24

Illustration by NICK CHAFFE FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 11

12 JULY | AUGUST 2015
aperture SIGHTLINES
photographs by TOBY BINDER

Child’s Pay
Each morning before school,
Oliver, 12, spends about five
hours shouting minibus routes
to passengers at an informal bus
stop in El Alto, Bolivia. Among
the youngest announcers at the
station, he is paid around 70
bolivianos per day (roughly $10).
Oliver’s work is sanctioned by
a July 2014 law that made
Bolivia the first country to legal-
ize labor for children as young
as 10—dependent on school
attendance and their parents’
permission. Human rights
groups have condemned the law,
but the government has argued
that it offers necessary protec-
tions to an already widespread
practice: Nearly 500,000—or one
in four—children ages 5 to 13
work in the country, according
to a 2008 study.
In December 2014, German
photographer Toby Binder spent
two weeks documenting these
young laborers, who are identi-
fied only by their first names.
“I want to show the complexity
of this topic—and that you
cannot simply argue there is
a right and a wrong.”
aperture

Marina, 6, dances for money

in La Paz. The girl and her mother
travel some 130 miles from their
home in Oruro province every
month, for about a week at a time,
to earn money in the capital.

Working with her family, Maria,
9, hawks sweets to passing driv-
ers during rush hour in downtown
La Paz. Her mother sells can-
dies; her brother José, 7, cleans
windows; and her sister Ana, 11,
serves as the cashier.
SIGHTLINES
Nearly every day after school,
Sara, 9, sells sweet limes for
5 bolivianos (around $0.75) per
bag to pedestrians and drivers
in Sopocachi, one of the more
upscale neighborhoods in La Paz.
In the evening, when she’s done,
she takes three bus lines—
a journey that takes about 90
minutes—to return home to the
neighboring city of El Alto.
aperture
Jorge, 12, lives with his brother
and mother near silver and tin
mines in the city of Potosí, around
330 miles from La Paz. The fam-
ily is paid about $50 a month
to guard one of the mine
entrances on the weekends and
at nights. During the day, Jorge
sorts and crushes rocks.
16 JULY | AUGUST 2015
Like Jorge, Tania, 12, also picks
through rocks. She and her fam-
ily work as guards at one of the
40 entrances to the Potosí mines.
In addition to her duties at the
mines, she is responsible for
family chores, such as
washing clothes.
SIGHTLINES

Gonzalo, 15, has been working

inside the mines for a year. Here,
he waits as a wagon transports
stones out of a tunnel.
 aperture

Working to support his family

since he was 10, Vladi, now 22,
is one of the older lustrabotas,
or shoeshiners, in La Paz. When
he was 14, his parents aban-
doned the family, leaving Vladi to
care for his four younger siblings.

Lustrabotas often work in units,

like the boys pictured here.
Although informal—there is no
wage sharing among the shiners—
the groups serve as a support
system for the young laborers.

18 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 SIGHTLINES

Brayan, 16, cleans car windows in

La Paz. On a good day he earns
about 90 bolivianos (around $13).
 1

The Village 2
Health Worker
Desire Njalwe
3

4 5 6

1 2 3 4 5 6
Medicine box VHT-issued Timer Generic Alcatel mobile Ugandan shillings
Supplies from the T-shirt When I am treating antimalarials phone As coordinator,
Ministry of Health It’s of poor a coughing prob- Some patients I have to carry two the district gives
are stamped “GOU quality and is not lem, I can count don’t take the dose fully charged bat- me 10,000 shillings
[Government of durable, so I don’t the frequency correctly, even teries at all times per month [approx-
Uganda] - NOT FOR like wearing it. of breathing after we explain because people imately $3.30].
SALE.” In the past, But the shirt and judge if I it. Once the child call me every day Regular VHTs earn
some health work- matters a lot in should refer the starts to get bet- for medical infor- nothing and yet
ers would steal the community patient to the hos- ter, the parents stop mation, especially they help people at
government sup- because when I put pital. The timer giving the drugs, young men in their all hours. They’re
plies and sell them. it on, it advertises doesn’t have a even if the pre- 20s. They argue also not given
Now, people know what I am doing. clock on it; it just scription requires about the quality of basic resources
that they are sto- I don’t need to makes ticking more treatment. different condom they need, like
len goods and will carry an ID when noises at one- Then the child gets brands and how to flashlights and
report it to police. I have it on. second intervals. sick again. use them. umbrellas.

20 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 the things they carried
7 8
7 8
Rehydration salts
For diarrhea, I usu-
ally give a patient
two packets per
day. The next day,
the patient can
come back and get
more. I don’t give
too many drugs at
once because poor
families might sell
them for money or
give the child more
than the recom-
mended daily dose.
Photographs by JIRO OSE
SIGHTLINES
interview by ELIZABETH PALCHIK ALLEN
DESIRE NJALWE SPENDS most Fridays and
Saturdays pedaling over the bumpy ter-
rain of Masaka, a rural district in central
Uganda, on a government-issued bicycle.
As a coordinator of village health teams
(VHTs)—groups of unpaid medics who,
among other things, provide free drugs
to sick children—Njalwe distributes
fresh supplies to the 20 volunteers whom
9 he oversees.
Despite progress over the past few
decades, far too many Ugandan children
won’t reach their fifth birthday. According
to the latest World Bank data, the United
States has seven deaths in this cohort
per 1,000 births; Uganda has 66. Njalwe
himself has buried three of his own eight
children. Part of the problem is that,
by some estimates, Uganda has just
one doctor per 15,000 people; the World
Health Organization recommends 10
times that many.
In response, the Ugandan Ministry
of Health launched the VHT program in
the early 2000s. Often farmers or petty
traders by vocation, volunteers take a two-
week basic health-care course in which
they learn how to diagnose and treat diar-
rhea, bacterial pneumonia, and malaria—
three of the top killers of Uganda’s young
children. The medics are also trained
to provide advice to new mothers about
caring for their babies and to entire com-
munities on how to improve sanitation
and hygiene.
Njalwe, a retired social worker, joined
the program in 2010. Now 74, he says the
work is a way to serve his community and
10 God: “As a religious believer, not every
activity should be paid for.” (He receives
a meager stipend as a coordinator, comple-
9 10
menting earnings from his farm.) Among
Amoxicillin Medical reference Bicycle
This is for bacte- cards I got this about other tasks, Njalwe records how a disease
rial pneumonia, I show parents the a year ago through is spreading locally, and, though not tech-
another big prob- illustrations on the VHT program, nically part of his job description, he also
lem here. Some these cards when but the quality is
adults call me I’m trying to diag- poor. When I still sometimes provides free ambulatory ser-
wanting medicine; nose a child or had the original vices to hospitals and clinics. “There are
unfortunately, I conduct a health tires, I had an acci- some patients who cannot move rapidly,”
do not have their lesson. The cards dent; they burst
medicine. They’ve describe com- and I fell. My trou- he explains, “so I just load them on my
asked, “Why are mon childhood ill- ser was torn, and bicycle, mother and child both.”
only children cared nesses. They also I had many bruises. FOREIGN POLICY recently sat down
for?” I explained to prove that I am Thankfully I was
them that children working with the not carrying a with Njalwe to learn what he takes travel-
have no money. Ministry of Health. patient. ing through the countryside.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 21
 the exchange

Is anyone free
to report on Iran?

Since the fall of 2013, the international media have offered a

weekly, and sometimes hourly, tick-tock of the successes and
setbacks leading up to a nuclear deal with Iran. Largely missed
by this exhaustive news cycle, however, have been the human
rights abuses that persist in the Islamic Republic. Last year alone
saw, by some accounts, more than 700 executions, upwards of
100 Bahais—Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority—in
detainment, and the imprisonment of Washington Post reporter
Jason Rezaian. ¶ The challenges of covering these types of abuses
and the vulnerability of a free press are things with which
American photojournalist and MacArthur “genius” grant
awardee LYNSEY ADDARIO is all too familiar: She has been kidnapped
twice herself—first in Iraq in 2004 and then again in Libya in
2011—for documenting those caught in the cross-hairs of conflict.
Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate SHIRIN EBADI’s work
defending the Bahai community and publicizing Iran’s dismal
rights record made her a target of the regime, which shut down
her Tehran-based human rights center in 2008 and detained
her sister the next year. Ebadi was ultimately forced into exile
in 2009. ¶ Today, drawing from their personal experiences, both LYNSEY ADDARIO

women are chroniclers of injustice. Addario, a frequent New

York Times contributor, penned It’s What I Do, a memoir in
which she shares the often harrowing stories behind her
photographs of rape victims in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, everyday life under the Taliban, and injured U.S. soldiers
leaving Fallujah. Ebadi’s Treachery: My Story of Exile From Iran
is due out in early 2016. The two recently caught up to discuss
detriment because Iran is an incredible
country. The people are very educated and
have a lot to say. If more journalists were
allowed into Iran, there would actually be

ADDARIO: PAUL ZIMMERMAN/GETTY IMAGES; EBADI: TIZIANA FABI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

the importance of an open press, how to fight censorship, and
what Iran is really like.
SHIRIN EBADI: Lynsey, you managed to travel to Iran as
a female photojournalist. How difficult was it for you
to actually obtain a visa? LYNSEY ADDARIO: I haven’t been
able to get into the country in nine years. But when I
did get a visa, a lot of what I was doing was in private
homes and sort of in secret. SE: In your opinion, if a
country is making it so difficult for journalists to obtain
a visa, what does that actually mean? LA: I become very
skeptical as a journalist. If journalists are not allowed
inside and there’s no freedom of speech, clearly people,
their opinions, their views, and the way they live are
oppressed in some way. In Iran’s case, that’s to great
great sympathy for the people. SE: What is
good about Iran is related to the people of
the country and the civilization of Iran.
What the government does not want the
world to know is its own performance. So
you must differentiate between what the
government does and [the] people and the
civilization. LA: Exactly. Exactly. Before I
went to Iran, I had this idea of what it would
be like—this dark, oppressive place—and
it was the opposite. I ended up meeting
incredibly intelligent people, going out
for wonderful dinners in private homes,
and seeing how cultured and how open
the Iranian people were. And I think that’s

22 JULY | AUGUST 2015


precisely the reason why I can’t get a visa to
go back, because I did many stories on how
Iran was actually the opposite of what we
had seen in the Western media. And I don’t
think the government actually liked that.
LA: It’s so important that journalists are able
to get into difficult-to-get-into places like
Iran. At the end of the day, the job is to show
a real picture of what these countries are
like. SE: Iran is one of the worst countries
for journalists. We have a large number
of journalists in prison at the moment. Is
Jason Rezaian one of your friends? LA: No,
he’s a friend of a friend. But he’s Washing-
ton Post! His detainment should be more
public news. It’s outrageous that a Wash-
ington Post journalist is in prison. SE: Unfor-
tunately, this is a very tragic reality in Iran.
Just recently, in May, there were reports
on Iranian news that Mohammad-Reza
Moradi, the editor in chief of a publica-
tion called Bayan Eghtesad, was arrested
because he compiled a report on the cor-
ruption in a city council. LA: In your opin-
ion, what’s the best way to deal with this?
SE: I think that foreign journalists must go
to the aid of their Iranian counterparts,
and they must publish what the Iranian
journalists cannot. The European Union
and the United States have both com-
piled a list of Iranian officials who have
violated human rights. They’ve banned
these officials from entering their coun-
tries and confiscated any of their assets
in the West. That’s very good, but this list
is still too short.
LA: In a lot of the conflict zones where I’ve
worked, there is very little to no freedom of
the press for journalists, particularly local
journalists. But I feel very strongly about
the role of journalism. We have to inter-
view the local people. We have to get their
stories told. When we get those stories out
to policymakers, to people in positions of
power, they have to act on it. That’s why I
feel like it is important to cover places like
Iran. Or like, I felt it was very important to
be in Libya when I was there in 2011. And I
ended up in prison. I ended up kidnapped
for a week, but I think it was important to
bear witness to what was happening in the
uprising. SE: This is exactly the case. Every-
one pays a price for what they believe in—
and the same applies to journalists.
SE: In all these personal experiences with
detainment, with regards to my family mem-
bers and so on, I have made sure that they
have been well publicized. I’ve written about
this in my books and have asked: How do
SHIRIN EBADI
SIGHTLINES
you think a government that’s behaved in
such a way with a human rights activist, with
a lawyer who has won a Nobel Peace Prize,
behaves toward unknown students or young
journalists in the country? LA: I agree. I think
that we have to use these more-high-profile
kidnappings to bring attention to people
who are detained. SE: This has been my
objective in publishing my diaries. One
of my very close colleagues, with whom
I have worked with for many years, is the
well-known feminist Narges Moham-
madi. She has been sentenced to six years
of imprisonment by a very unjust court
for her human rights activities. Her hus-
band, Taghi Rahmani, is a political activ-
ist and a journalist, and he also spent 16
years behind bars in the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran. At the moment, he’s a refugee
living in Paris. He cannot return to Iran
because if he takes the risk and does that,
he could end up being behind bars for the
rest of his life. Q
This conversation has been condensed
for publication.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 23
 visual statement
by WINNIE DAVIES

“When the British

handed over Hong
Kong to China in 1997,
the ‘special adminis-
trative region,’ it was
determined, would
follow a policy of ‘one
country, two systems.’
Hong Kong was
promised democracy;
yet the process has
stalled. For more than
two months last year,
thousands of
protesters, me
included, united for
more robust voting
rights. And though the
student-led
demonstrations were
peaceful, the police
responded with
pepper spray and tear
gas. For protection,
the students used
umbrellas; thus, the
Umbrella Movement
was born. And it isn’t
dead: More protests
occurred in June,
when lawmakers were
considering the
government’s political
reform package.
The yellow I use in
the ribbons, umbrel-
las, and banners (‘I
want real universal
suffrage’) symbolizes
our peaceful fight.
The red, white, and
blue cloth in the
foreground is a cheap
material commonly
used in Hong Kong
and represents
the soil on which the
city stands. Our
demand never reaches
Beijing, which is
set high and far in
the background.”
THE ARTIST
SIGHTLINES
 decoder
by ED JOHNSON

49.8
million

50M
sales
IN 2007

The Art Market

AT CHRISTIE’S NEW YORK in May, for the first
time in history an auction house sold
$1 billion worth of art in a week—includ- T E
AR ALU

ES
L
A T V
ing a seminal Picasso painting that drew
OB E

AL
GL ARK

TS
a raft of telephone bids until the hammer

40M
M

AR
fell at $179.4 million.

AL
The art market’s resurgence was confirmed

OB
GL
this year by the European Fine Art Founda-

OF 1,530
tion’s annual Art Market Report: Last year’s
$68.1 billion (51 billion euros, converted ME
LU
VO

based on the average 2014 exchange rate)

in global sales, the highest ever recorded, sig- LOTS WERE SOLD FOR OVER
$1.33 MILLION EACH IN 2014.
naled a full recovery from the 2009 recession.
Together, they represented 48 percent of
30M

Notably, even more growth was seen at the the value of all fine art deals, but only
highest reaches of the market than during 0.5 percent of transactions. Money has
the 2007 crest, when sales were driven up, in become concentrated at the top of the market,
which is clear when comparing the volume
part, by speculation and an ascendant Chi- of sales (see dotted red line) to their value. 2014
nese market. Indeed, in 2014 a minuscule had more than 10 million fewer sales than at
0.5 percent of transactions encompassed the previous height of the market, in 2007. Like
other macroeconomic trends, this was largely
nearly half the value of overall art sales—a driven by increasing income inequality. It’s no
polarization that parallels increasing dispar- surprise that 2014 also tops in a different
ity in many of the world’s major economies. statistical category: Globally, there were more
20M

billionaires, at 2,325, than ever before.

On the supply side, only 54 artists, from
Édouard Manet to contemporary provo- U.S.
cateurs such as Jeff Koons, produced lots
that sold for more than $13 million. In short,
a few alpha buyers, the world’s poshest
hoarders, are battling it out over a shrink-
ing resource: masterpieces.
Art buying is driven by both profit and U.K.
10M

emotion. Art is portable and pretty, and RLD

F WO
today a startling number of the world’s trea- TO
sures are concentrated in the hands of a few RES
wealthy collectors.
The density is geographical too. A New
York monopoly persisted until 2010, when
China began to dominate. Last year, how- CHINA
ever, China slipped to 22 percent of market
share, tied with London, while New York
2006 2007 2008 2009
took the lead again. Today, as dealers eye
billionaires across the globe, the cities with
priceless collections and deep wells of insti-
tutional expertise remain the power centers. 10.5% ART AS INVESTMENT?
DOLLAR AMOUNTS CONVERTED

Larry Fink, who heads the world’s biggest investment management

FROM EUROS USING ANNUAL
AVERAGE EXCHANGE RATE.

And, whatever the nationality of its uniden- RETURN FOR

POSTWAR  fund, made waves in April when he said that contemporary art, along
CONTEMPORARY
tified buyer, the sale of that record-breaking ART, 200313 with apartments in Manhattan, is one of “the two greatest stores of
Picasso added a 12 percent broker’s fee to wealth internationally.” According to Deloitte’s 2014 Art & Finance

New York’s art economy—a windfall of 7.4%

RETURN FOR
Report, postwar and contemporary art provided a compound annual
return of 10.5 percent between 2003 and 2013, compared with
more than $19 million. AMY FINNERTY SP 500, 200313 7.4 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

26 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 SIGHTLINES

$60B
$68.1
billion
THE ART MARKET
REACHED ITS
LARGEST RECORDED
SIZE IN 2014.

$50B
38.8

$40B
million
sales
IN 2014

$18.5 WARHOL RULES

billion 2014 was a good year for Andy Warhol. His
work alone accounted for 8.5 percent of

$30B
IN 2011, CHINA
SURPASSED THE postwar and contemporary art sales—itself
U.S. FOR THE
FIRST AND ONLY the largest sector of the overall art market. His
TIME FOR ART Triple Elvis [Ferus Type] sold for $81.9 million,
SALES. ECONOMIC
UNCERTAINTY IN and Four Marlons sold for $69.6 million.
CHINA HAS SINCE
CHILLED ITS
ART MARKET.

$20B
$10B

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

IN WITH THE NEW

FINE ART FOUNDATION’S 2015

OTHER
In 2014, the postwar and
DATA VIA THE EUROPEAN

OLD MASTERS MARKET VOLUME

contemporary art sector
ART MARKET REPORT.

IMPRESSIONIST AND MARKET VALUE

accounted for 48 percent
POSTIMPRESSIONIST
of the entire market’s
MODERN
value. It was also the most
POSTWAR  lucrative sector on a
CONTEMPORARY
per-sale basis.
10% 20% 30% 40%

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 27
 Pain Is Temporary,
But Electricity
Is Forever
IT’S CURRENTLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR MANY PAIN
medications to target only problem-
atic body parts: Rather, drugs spread
throughout the body, sometimes harm-
ing healthy tissues and organs. In a
study published in Science Advances
this spring, researchers from Sweden
showed off a proof of concept for an
implantable bioelectric medical device
that could deliver localized medication
for years, limiting the patient’s drug
exposure and achieving true, precise
pain reduction. What’s more, this devel-
opment has the potential to eventually
Elastic Energy
treat neurological disorders like epi- Back in the 20th century, when newspapers
lepsy, which affects 65 million people flourished, they were printed quickly and
worldwide, by delivering relevant drugs cheaply on long sheets of paper that unrolled
directly to the body’s nervous system down a large factory belt, a process called
and hastening their effects. roll-to-roll (R2R). Today, digital media means
A tubular device—surgically there is less use of R2R, but it’s actually find-
implanted under the skin, parallel to ing a second life in the production of solar
and alongside the spine—dispenses cells. Scientists working on TREASORES, a
pain-blocking medication, which doc- $15 million EU-funded project to create
tors can refill through a syringe as cheap carbon-based electronics, announced
needed. The key is in having complete this spring that they had successfully devel-
control over how much dosage is dis- oped a prototype of a flexible solar cell mod-
persed, which is why the device is oper- ule made from R2R processing. The cell, they
ated electrically via an outside power reported, can bend to a 25-millimeter radius
source. Once the doctor flips on the without breaking, and it boasts a lifetime
power, low, measured voltage pumps the of about 4,000 hours. But unlike conven-
drugs into the spinal cord. The research- tional cells, which are heavier and cannot be
ers successfully tested the device on readily used in bendable or flexible devices,
rodents with nerve injuries and were the prototype doesn’t require scarce (and
able to block pain signals stemming expensive) materials, using silver instead
specifically from those wounds from of indium. Ultimately, TREASORES plans
reaching the brain. to produce rolls about 330 feet long.

28 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 innovations
A man refuels
Toyota’s fuel-cell
vehicle, Mirai,
at a hydrogen
station in Tokyo.
5
CAR: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; BRIEFCASE: COURTESY OF BAE SYSTEMS
That’s the diameter, in nano-
meters, of a particle that can
help detect carbon monoxide
levels in the air. In a study
published in April, research-
ers in Austria and Japan
showed how tiny gas-sensing
wires, made from cheap
materials like copper oxide,
could replace larger, more
expensive, and less efficient
pollution trackers.
by NEEL V. PATEL
The Little
Engine That Can
TOYOTA, HONDA, GENERAL
Motors, and at least
a dozen other automak-
ers are jostling to domi-
nate the nascent market for
zero-emission, hydrogen-
powered vehicles. But the
newest commercial hydro-
gen car, the Toyota Mirai,
still comes in at a whopping
$57,500—blame the steep
expense of onboard hydro-
gen storage—so it’s no sur-
prise that only a few are on
the market today. Hydro-
gen fuel cells typically gen-
erate electricity by fusing
stored hydrogen gas with
oxygen. And though special
tanks can store the gas at
high pressures, they take up
huge space under the hood
and waste precious energy
because so much is needed
to lug them around.
But nanoengineer Joseph
Wang of the University of
California, San Diego, might
have discovered a cheaper,
more compact alternative
that turns this method on
its head. In a recent paper in
the German journal Ange-
wandte Chemie, Wang and
his team outline a system
that stores hydrogen as a
space-saving liquid instead
of as a bloated gas.
When they were develop-
ing this model, their biggest
challenge was creating a
metal catalyst that would pro-
duce enough hydrogen gas
to power a car, while avoid-
ing chemical
byproduct accumulation—
two factors that are crucial in
keeping the cost of fuel-cell
parts down. They created
special 20-micron-wide par-
ticles, about as wide as a fine
strand of hair, called “Janus
particles,” named after the
two-faced Roman god. One
side is made of a catalyti-
cally active platinum powder,
and the other side is coated
in inert titanium. The par-
ticles are dumped into the
liquid-filled tanks, where the
platinum chemically reacts
with hydrogen-infused salts
and produces hydrogen gas.
That gas production makes
the particles act like tiny
motors: They’re propelled
forward, which stirs the fuel,
prevents byproduct buildup,
and ensures the process hap-
pens continuously.
The researchers’ method
produced more than nine
times as much hydrogen gas
as liquid reactions without
Janus particles. They even
powered a small model car,
about the size of a large beach
ball. The technology could
mean a substantial reduc-
tion in costs, but the team
still needs to test it on con-
sumer-sized vehicles to see
whether these micromotors
can really save the bright
idea of hydrogen-powered
cars. If the technology works,
expect to see cars whirring
down the highway spew-
ing water vapor instead of
smoky exhaust.
SIGHTLINES
Briefcase
Battles
Although the public will soon be
getting its first dose of augmented
reality through much-hyped
devices like Oculus Rift and Micro-
soft’s HoloLens, militaries around
the world have long been a leap
ahead. Soldiers and fighter pilots
have been training with augment-
ed-reality displays, which overlay
virtual data on a real-world view,
for more than 50 years. But now
U.K.-based defense company BAE
Systems hopes to take this tech-
nology and, in its own words, “rev-
olutionize” training and real-life
battlefield operations, as well as
emergency-response systems.
With the help of researchers
from the University of Birming-
ham, BAE is developing a brief-
case-sized portable command
center that includes a virtual-
reality headset paired with inter-
active gloves. Announced in
May, the prototype allows a com-
mander, interacting from any-
where in the world, to access
a virtual touch screen with video
feeds and real-time information
collected by on-site cameras and
other instruments. Users can even
employ artificially intelligent ava-
tars—think a less annoying version
of Microsoft Office’s Clippy—that
can collect and analyze all kinds of
incoming data in order to provide
a more comprehensive assess-
ment of what factors are affecting
what is happening on the ground.
The commanders’ orders on navi-
gating the battlefield or managing
disaster-relief operations can be
relayed directly to troops via the
command center.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 29
 It's All Global Now

Searching for a
graduate school with
an international focus?
Make it an
APSIA school!

The world’s leading graduate programs in international affairs come together

in the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA).

APSIA members combine multidisciplinary, policy-oriented studies with

professional development. They have demonstrated excellence in preparing
students for success in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

Visit APSIA.org today to

• Discover what you can do with an APSIA degree
• Learn about hiring APSIA students and alumni
• Register for admissions events around the world and online
• Find Fellowship and Scholarship information

WWW.APSIA.ORG
From 20th century walls
to 21st century bridges.
From geopolitics to global business.
From security to humanitarian aid.
From investment to sustainable development.
From walled gardens to open source.

The world you inherit will require you to be agile across borders
of many kinds—between countries, between academic fields,
between knowledge and practice, between top-down policies
and bottom-up ventures.
The Fletcher School’s multidisciplinary approach to complex
problem solving transcends the classroom and prepares graduates
for leadership positions that span traditional boundaries.

Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) Visit fletcher.tufts.edu or

Master of International Business (MIB) email fletcheradmissions@tufts.edu
Global Master of Arts Program (GMAP)
Master of Laws in International Law (LLM)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Master of Arts (MA)
Executive Education

From Thesis Project to Business Plan:

Amanda Judge, MALD’09
Founder, Faire Collection
How Amanda Judge Turned $10,000 into
a $1 Million Thriving Social Enterprise
While earning her Fletcher degree, Amanda
Judge (MALD ’09) conceived and launched
Faire Collection, a New York-based fair trade
jewelry company that provides pathways
out of poverty for rural artisans in Ecuador
and Vietnam. Judge is the winner of the 2015
Fletcher Women’s Leadership Award. Read her
story at Fletcher.Tufts.edu/FWLA2015 . Read Amanda’s story
7
9
I came to Korbel because it’s a
place where new ideas and
different ideas are brought
about – it’s not just about a
set curriculum.”

- Kyleanne Hunter
M.A. Candidate
Sié Fellow

Kyleanne Hunter is a former officer in the United States Marine Corps, serving as an AH-1W Super Cobra attack
pilot. Now she’s a Sié Fellow at the Josef Korbel School’s Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security &
Diplomacy. As such she’s working alongside world renowned faculty doing relevant research on today’s most
pressing global issues.

To learn more about our master of arts programs and our two-year full tuition scholarship, the Sié Fellowship, call
303.871.2544 or email korbeladm@du.edu.

www.du.edu/korbel/info
 of Global Studies

The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies is Boston University’s newest school. Our students
take courses with world-class faculty, and have access to University-wide resources and all our
affiliated regional and thematic studies centers.

Rigorous graduate programs—including joint and dual master’s degrees—offer small classes,
language proficiency, and support for research travel.

Gain real-world expertise before you graduate. Experience the Pardee difference.

Advancing Human Progress

bu.edu/pardeeschool @BUPardeeSchool
University of Ottawa

A school where
public policy and
international affairs
come together
Created in 2007, the Graduate School of Public
and International Affairs (GSPIA) is a focal point
for debate on public policy and international
affairs. Excellence is our purpose and public affairs
is our passion.

GSPIA — unique and exceptional

t %FEJDBUFE
XPSMEDMBTT
TDIPMBST
FOHBHFE
JO
DVUUJOHFEHF
SFTFBSDI
BOE
UPQRVBMJUZ
UFBDIJOH

t "
QMBDF
XIFSF
UIFPSZ
BOE
QSBDUJDF
DPNF
UPHFUIFS
UISPVHI
UIF
DPOUSJCVUJPO
PG
POTJUF
QSBDUJUJPOFST
XJUI
exceptional experience

t 5IF
MBSHFTU
CJMJOHVBM
TDIPPM
PG
QVCMJD
BOE
JOUFSOBUJPOBM
BGGBJST
JO
$BOBEB

t -PDBUFE
JO
UIF
IFBSU
PG
the national capital, the
centre of our country’s
HPWFSONFOU
BOE
UIF
IVC
PG
JUT
EJQMPNBUJD
BGGBJST

"
HMPCBM
WJTJPO
www.socialsciences.uOttawa.ca/api
613-562-5800, ext. 2834
15
bridging theory and practice
The School of Public Policy at Central European University is a new kind of global
institution dealing with some of the most compelling public policy issues we face today
LQFOXGLQJJRYHUQDQFHVXVWDLQDEOHGHYHORSPHQWVHFXULW\DQGPHGLD:HR΍HUSXEOLF
policy graduate degrees that combine knowledge and experience of policy design and
practice. We are an English-language institution accredited in the United States and
Hungary.

Join our international community of students, scholars, and professionals from over 50
countries in Budapest, Hungary. For more details on our programs, visit our website at
www.spp.ceu.edu or contact us at sppadmissions@ceu.edu
 PREPARE
TO BE AN
AGENT
OF
CHANGE

Pursue a
Graduate Program
in
International Affairs
at
Seton Hall
University
Master’s Degree
with 13 Specializations
Certificate in Post-Conflict
State Reconstruction
Certificate in
United Nations Studies
United Nations
Summer Study Program

Join us
for a webinar and
learn more.
www.shu.edu/diplomacyFP

17
“International
politics is changing
at an increasingly
rapid pace.
Many long-held
assumptions have
to be challenged, new threats
have to be tackled, and old and
new partnerships have to be
strengthened. Today more than
ever, prosperity and peace in one
region are dependent on stability
and security in another.
We need young professionals
who understand the nature of
these challenges and who are
equipped to deal with them
successfully.”

Wolfgang Ischinger
Senior Fellow, Hertie School of Governance
Chairman, Munich Security Conference

Study International
Affairs and Public
Policy in Berlin
Join students and professionals from over
40 nations at the Hertie School of Governance,
Germany’s leading public policy school.
We offer graduate programmes that prepare our
graduates for leadership positions in government,
business and civil society:

• Master of International Affairs

• Master of Public Policy
• Executive Master of Public Administration
• Doctoral Programmes
• Executive Seminars and Certificates

Scholarships available.
For more information visit our website or contact
us at grad-admissions@hertie-school.org

Understand today.
Shape tomorrow.
www.hertie-school.berlin
19
GLOBAL
CITIZEN

TO UNDERSTAND GLOBAL ISSUES, YOU MUST M.S. in Global Affairs

BECOME PART OF THEM. CONCENTRATIONS:
Environment/Energy Policy
The growing influences of new world powers, emerging states and
Human Rights and International Law
non-state actors, socioeconomic transformation, and cross-border
International Development and
crises have reshaped the field of global affairs. Those pursuing
Humanitarian Assistance
careers in this area must not only study the issues, they must be
International Relations
deeply involved in them. The M.S. in Global Affairs, offered by
Peacebuilding
the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs,
Private Sector
positions you in the heart of the international community of
Transnational Security
NYC, providing you with the contextual perspectives you need
to become an effective problem solver and innovator. Global Graduate Certificates in:
field intensives, exposure to renowned expert practitioners, and Global Energy
challenging projects form the basis of an education that allows you Peacebuilding
to live what you learn—anticipating the next global challenge. Transnational Security

VISIT: sps.nyu.edu/cga/programs1a CALL: 212-998-7100

REQUEST INFO./APPLY TODAY: sps.nyu.edu/gradinfo12a

FIND YOUR
FUTURE SELF

New York University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity institution. ©2015 NYU School of Professional Studies.
GREAT CHALLENGES
OF OUR TIME DEMAND A

GLOBAL
PERSPECTIVE

MALINI RANGANATHAN
Assistant Professor, School of International Service

GARRETT GRADDY-LOVELACE
Assistant Professor, School of International Service

HOW DO WE LINK ENVIRONMENTAL

SUSTAINABILITY WITH SOCIAL JUSTICE?
Just ask Garrett Graddy-Lovelace and Malini Ranganathan, both
geographers, political ecologists, and professors at the School of
International Service. While Ranganathan studies urban water access
and flood risk in India and the US, Graddy-Lovelace researches
grassroots agrarian politics in the Andes, Appalachia, and beyond.

Learn how you can join these professors and their colleagues in
meaningful conversations at www.american.edu/sis.

21
 the food and water issue

IN MAY, the United Nations announced that while globally there are 200 million fewer hungry people than there were
25 years ago, twice as many African countries are now suffering food crises. Moreover, Pacific islanders’ access to
sanitation facilities is declining, and just over half of that population has potable water. The question of power and
agency—who gets to control the resources on which human survival depends—is central to FP’s food and water issue.
Former U.N. special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter challenges the agency’s claim on hunger, stating that numbers,
if anything, have remained steady and explains why local responses, not solely international actions, will defeat
hunger. Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst, asserts that slaking a parched planet requires collective prag-
matism, even cooperation among adversaries. Travel writer Mark Baker explores Russia’s grip on impoverished
Moldova’s wine industry. And reporter Aman Sethi’s investigation of Delhi’s water mafia shows that when govern-
ments fail as stewards of nature’s bounty, corruption fills the void. Climate change demands that humankind be
nourished more sustainably; figuring out whose responsibility this is won’t be easy. But it is crucial. —THE EDITORS

Illustration by MATT CHASE

D E L H I ’ S WAT E R E C O N O M Y I S B R O K E N , L E AV I N G
R E S I D E N T S AT T H E M E R C Y O F A WAT E R M A F I A .
B U T A S T H E C A P I TA L S C R A M B L E S F O R S O LU T I O N S ,
W H I L E G O V E R N M E N T P O L I C I E S C O N T I N U E TO
FA I L , C O U L D T H I S N E T W O R K O F I L L I C I T S U P P L I E R S
S E R V E A S T H E V E R Y M O D E L N E E D E D TO S L A K E
T H E C I T Y ’ SA N D E V E N T H E N AT I O N ’ S
EVERDEEPENING THIRST?
M I D N I G H T
M A R A U D E R S

BY AMAN SETHI
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SANJIT DAS

Down by the sandy banks of

the Yamuna River, the men
must work quickly. At a little
past 12 a.m. one humid night
in May, they pull back the
black plastic tarp covering
three boreholes sunk deep in
the ground along the water-
way that traces Delhi’s east-
ern edge. From a shack a few
feet away, they then drag
thick hoses toward a queue of
20-odd tanker trucks idling
quietly with their headlights
turned off. The men work in
a team: While one man fits
a hose’s mouth over a bore-
hole, another clambers atop
a truck at the front of the line
and shoves the tube’s oppo-
site end into the empty steel
cistern attached to the vehi-
cle’s creaky frame.
 “On kar!” someone shouts in Hinglish into the darkness; almost instantly,
his orders to “switch it on” are obeyed. Diesel generators, housed in nearby
sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts,
drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the
earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks.
Within 15 minutes, the 2,642-gallon (10,000-liter) containers on the first
three rigs are full. The pumps are switched off briefly as drivers move their now-
heavy trucks forward and another trio takes their place. The routine is repeated
again and again through the night until every tanker is brimming with water.
The full trucks don’t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, driv-
ers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby highway. There, they
turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty. They go
to factories and hospitals, malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across
this city of 25 million.
Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug with-
out permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold
without testing or treatment. “Water work is night work,” says a middle-
aged neighbor who rents a house near the covert pumping station and
requested anonymity. “Bosses arrange buyers, labor fills tankers, the
police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says
nothing to nobody.” Tonight, that muscle—burly, bearded, and in tight-
AT AN ILLEGAL WATERFILLING POINT IN DELHI.
fitting T-shirts—has little to do: Sitting near
the trucks, the men are absorbed in a game
of cards. At dawn, the crew switches off the
generators, stows the hoses in the shack
from which they came, and places the tarp
back over the boreholes. Few traces of the
night’s frenetic activity remain.
Teams like this one are ubiquitous in
Delhi, where the official water supply falls
short of the city’s needs by at least 207 mil-
lion gallons each day, according to a 2013
audit by the office of the Indian comptrol-
ler and auditor general. A quarter of Delhi’s
households live without a piped-water con-
nection; most of the rest receive water for
only a few hours each day. So residents have
come to rely on private truck owners—the
most visible strands of a dispersed web of
city councilors, farmers, real estate agents,
and fixers who source millions of gallons of
water each day from illicit boreholes, as well
as the city’s leaky pipe network, and sell the
liquid for profit.
The entrenched system has a local mon-
iker: the water-tanker mafia. Although the
exact number of boreholes created by this
network is unknown, in 2001 the figure in
Delhi stood at roughly 200,000, according
to a government report, while the 2013 audit
found that the city loses 60 percent of its
water supply to leakages, theft, and a fail-
ure to collect revenue. The mafia defends
its work as a community service, but there
is a much darker picture of Delhi’s subver-
sive water industry: one of a thriving black
market populated by small-time freelance
agents who are exploiting a fast-depleting
common resource and in turn threatening
India’s long-term water security.
Groundwater accounts for 85 percent of
India’s drinking-water supply, according
to a 2010 World Bank report. The country
continues to urbanize, however, and a little
more than half its territory is now severely
water-stressed; more than 100 million Indi-
ans live in places with critically polluted
water sources, according to India Water Tool
2.0, a local mapping platform. The tanker
mafia is only worsening this problem. In
2014, the government reported that nearly
three-fourths of Delhi’s underground aqui-
fers were “over-exploited.” This means that
boreholes must go deeper and deeper to
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 57
TWO TANKERS DRIVE PAST EACH OTHER NEAR AN ILLEGAL WATERFILLING POINT IN DELHI.
find water, making it increasingly likely
that hoses are sucking up liquid laced with
dangerous contaminants. In 2012, the coun-
try’s Water Resources Ministry found excess
fluoride, iron, and even arsenic in ground-
water pockets.
Yet the mafia continues to thrive as the
local demand balloons. When boreholes
dry up and more drilling leads to nothing,
pumping crews just look farther afield,
toward or even past Delhi’s borders. This
has created a vast extraction zone, where
the thirsty metropolis gives way to a parched
hinterland. And recognizing a business
model that works, the mafia is putting down
roots or spawning copycats in other cities
and towns.
The government has made some efforts
to stop illegal water pumping and sales, but
to no avail. Despite what its name suggests,
the mafia is not a unified, organized syn-
dicate and thus cannot be eliminated by
catching and punishing a few big players.
Rather, it is loose, nimble, and adaptable; it
routinely outsmarts the authorities whom it
isn’t already bribing to allow it to do its work.
The real answer to the tanker mafia is
better infrastructure: a correction to sev-
eral decades’ worth of inequitable develop-
ment in which public utilities were built for
the benefit of the elite, leaving millions of
poor to fend for themselves. But the city’s
long-neglected and corrupted water sys-
tem, managed by an agency known as the
Delhi Jal Board (DJB), is near the point of
collapse. Projections for needed improve-
ments indicate a dauntingly long and
expensive process.
It may be too late to cut the mafia off at
the knees, much less provide millions of res-
idents with the water they need to survive.
Delhi thus offers a painful warning to other
countries where water mafias have sprouted
up: Bangladesh, Honduras, and Ecuador, to
name just a few. “More than anyone else, the
DJB and the Delhi government [have been]
responsible for the rise of the water mafia,”
says Dinesh Mohaniya, a member of the
Delhi Legislative Assembly who represents
Sangam Vihar, one of Delhi’s poorest neigh-
borhoods, that is a hub for water tankers. “If
they had supplied piped water to everyone,
why would anyone pay the mafia?”

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 59
I T I S 1 1 3 D E G R E E S Fahrenheit in the
shade on a recent afternoon in Sangam
Vihar. Raj Tilak Sanghwan, one of the com-
munity’s most established tanker bosses,
rests on a cot, his beefy forearms crossed
over his bulging stomach. He wears a gray
polo shirt, blue sweatpants, and white Adi-
das sneakers that make him look like an
aging nightclub bouncer.
A pump buzzes nearby as it transfers
water from a nearly 5,300-gallon tanker
to a fleet of smaller containers hitched to
farm tractors. A few feet away sits Sangh-
wan’s assistant, a slim man in his late 20s
who answers his mobile phone every few
minutes. In this heat, desperate residents
of the sprawling neighborhood are rush-
ing to place their orders. Along with the
words “Sanghwan, Janta Sevak” (“Sangh-
wan, Servant of the People”) emblazoned
in white, all the containers bear the assis-
tant’s phone number.
“It’s always busy on a Sunday,” the young
man says between rounds of placating cus-
tomers. “Most people are home and want
to fill up for the rest of the week.”
The economics of the illegal water busi-
ness are straightforward: Tanker bosses
buy water from the men who steal it—
for instance, the crew on the banks of the
Yamuna—for $3 per some 2,600 gallons,
according to four borehole operators inter-
viewed for this article. The tanker owners
then sell the water directly to locals at an
elevated price; on this particular day in San-
gam Vihar, a gallon costs about 0.75 rupees
(about 1 U.S. cent). Sanghwan, whose tank-
ers have a combined capacity of about 8,400
gallons, will earn around $90 to empty a full
load. That’s $2,700 per month, assuming
one complete sale per day—minus the cost
of fuel, bribes, drivers’ salaries, and tanker
maintenance. (The monthly minimum wage
in Delhi for a skilled worker is roughly $165.)
Sanghwan has mandated that the min-
imum order allowed is 1,050 gallons, the
capacity of all his smaller tractor-drawn
tankers. Many of Sanghwan’s clients are too
poor to shell out so much money in one go,
so they sometimes pool funds and divide the
purchased water among themselves. “Call
it a water mafia; call it a business,” Sangh-
wan says. “I call it a lifeline.”
“ C A L L I T A W AT E R M A F I A ;
C A L L I T A B U S I N E S S ,”
S A N G H W A N S AY S .
“ I C A L L I T A L I F E L I N E .”
The need for a lifeline dates back to the 1960s, when urban planners grossly
underestimated growth in Delhi’s first master plan. Within 20 years, the city’s
population had exploded from 2.6 million to 6.2 million, but there was only
housing (of varying quality) for 90 percent of that number. Some half a million
people wound up in unauthorized colonies—essentially squatter settlements.
One of them was Sangam Vihar, where enterprising farmers, including Sangh-
wan’s parents, divided their personal fields into residential plots and sold them
to migrants eager for toeholds in the city. Over time, tension arose between the
colonies’ residents and the city’s elite and middle class. Fear grew, in particu-
lar, as the illegal settlements became more populous, topping 2 million in the
early 1990s. Wealthier Delhi residents became concerned that colonies would
suck away resources, including water, in a city already strapped for them, as
municipal politicians looked to the booming population centers for votes.
In 1993, Common Cause, an Indian legal advocacy group, filed a petition in
the Delhi High Court demanding that the government be restrained from pro-
viding public amenities to colonies. The petition criticized “politicians who
have been interested in promoting, encouraging and stimulating the devel-
opment of such unauthorized colonies” and argued that people living in the
settlements were “encouraged to act illegally and to gain from such illegal
acts; their moral fabric gets undermined.”
While the case wound its way through India’s overburdened judiciary over
the next eight years, flustered colony residents began to take water manage-
ment into their own hands. They installed hand-operated pumps to draw
groundwater for drinking, cooking, and bathing, but this only worked for a
little while. Overpumping eventually caused water levels to dip and quality
to deteriorate. In turn, residents began pressuring the Delhi government for
assistance. The pending court case meant that authorities could not install a
permanent water grid, but they launched a program in 1998 that can best be
described as institutionalized ad hoc-ism: The DJB drilled a series of boreholes
around the city that released water for eight hours at a time, and it hired a fleet
of private tankers to deliver drinking water at specified times.
Colony residents were expected to wait in lines to retrieve water and then
lug it home themselves. But the boreholes were prone to malfunctioning,
and queues sometimes persisted for hours. In Sangam Vihar, some residents
devised an ingenious workaround, laying a private pipeline system that con-
nected the nearest borehole to any home willing to pay a monthly fee. Oth-
ers created their own holes to connect to the pipe system. (Sanghwan did this
in 2005, pumping water to his neighbors’ houses for a price until his well ran
dry eight years later.)
Meanwhile, the DJB’s tanker plan quickly fell apart. Drivers began selling
their water, intended to be free, to middle-class Delhi residents who could
afford to pay. Other eager individuals saw an opportunity and began invest-
ing in their own rigs that could link up with both legal and illegal boreholes.
And so the tanker mafia was born. It quickly grew and morphed, in step
with a widening gap in water distribution. The 2013 government audit found DELHI’S RESIDENTS HAVE long hoped
that colonies received, on average, 1 gallon of water per person per day, while that a transformative political force could
in central Delhi—home to politicians, judges, and other elites—the number act for the good of the many by fixing
was 116 gallons. Sanghwan, like other soon-to-be tanker bosses, bought two the city’s inequitable water distribution.
trucks to ferry water from illegal boreholes along the Yamuna to an under- A possibility arose in late 2013 when the
ground cistern he had put in his land, and smaller vehicles to make deliveries Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a new political
to thirsty residents across Sangam Vihar. front of former civil society activists, won
The mafia has gained other, wealthier customers too. Over the past decade, municipal elections on a platform of pro-
Delhi has become home to a vast number of water-intensive establishments: tecting the average person’s interests. But
malls, office towers, and hotels that need floors mopped, lawns watered, and then it announced it intended to dismantle
toilets flushed. The government cleared projects based on the assumption that the water mafia—and things turned sour.
necessary infrastructure would be put in place, but that has rarely happened. In January 2014, Mohaniya, the party’s
Instead, sleek buildings have been erected atop old, dripping pipes that can’t elected legislator from Sangam Vihar,
possibly supply them with water. “No one, not even the DJB, knows the water orchestrated a police raid on the commu-
network,” said a private consultant to the government water agency, who nity’s water tankers and borehole opera-
spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There is no master plan, no blueprint.” tors. “A crowd gathered outside my office
New facilities have thus gone searching for help. And water bosses, ever and demanded that the party either sup-
eager for new clients and adept at capitalizing on government failures, have ply water ourselves or let the tankers oper-
always been just a phone call away. ate,” Mohaniya recounts, describing how
an irate resident threw a brick through a
glass window, while others tried to burst
into his office.
SANGAM VIHAR NEIGHBORHOOD.
Mohaniya then took a different tack,
introducing, as he recalls, the concept of
water-user associations: groups of people,
recommended by their communities, who
would oversee private operators of spe-
cific government wells. The associations,
Mohaniya announced, would supply water
to homes for a flat monthly fee—$0.75 for
rental tenants and $1.50 for homeowners,
who presumably could bear higher costs.
The goal was to apply some semblance
of regulation to the illicit water industry,
while also drastically reducing the going
price per gallon.
More than 100 such associations exist in
Sangam Vihar today (one for each DJB bore-
hole), according to Mohaniya, but they have
no legal basis. They are strictly voluntary,
operating without government oversight
and with no clear procedures for electing
members or collecting money. At this point,
almost anyone can form one. According
to S.C.L. Gupta, a former legislator from
the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, the
groups have basically maintained the sta-
tus quo: “Many of the water-user associa-
tions are headed by the same people who
were running the wells in the first place,”
Gupta says. What was a private mafia, he
says, became one that was legitimized by
the government. “The same people contin-

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 61
ued their same business,” he says, “except
that the government now paid the electric-
ity bill for each pump.”
Sanghwan, in particular, didn’t waste
any time jumping on the association band-
The AAP is still going after the mafia. The DJB, for instance, has begun put-
ting GPS sensors onto its tankers in an effort to stop bosses from diverting its
water. Yet these efforts haven’t even put a dent in the illegal market, which is
only expanding its reach.
wagon: He became the head of one in 2014.
(His assistant notes that it wasn’t hard for
his boss to take the helm. “Sanghwan has
always supplied water to the area,” the
young man explains, “so it was natural.”)
Sanghwan says his group, which professes
to oversee one DJB borehole, its pump, and
its privately laid connections to nearby
homes, collects about $800 a month, on
top of the money earned by his tanker outfit.
This money is ostensibly used for mainte-
nance and a $78 monthly salary for a sin-
gle employee hired to oversee the pumping
and pipes—calling into question whether
the operation can really be called an asso-
ciation at all. However, Sanghwan’s group
gives no receipts to customers nor keeps any
books of accounts, so it’s hard to say where
the funds really go.
Even with his continued success, Sangh-
wan admits that it’s getting harder to be in
Delhi’s water business. The DJB borehole he
operates is supposed to supply 500 homes,
but with groundwater levels dipping deep
below the earth’s surface, he says, “even the
most powerful pump can’t supply more than
one or two houses at a time.” On average,
each home receives water for a few hours
every fortnight.
Customers are feeling the strain. “You can
fill as much water as you can each time the
water comes from the DJB borewell,” says
Sangam Vihar resident Sunita, a domestic
worker who goes by only one name. “So
everyone tries to buy as much storage as
possible, because you never know when
your turn will come again.” For her fam-
ily of six, Sunita has 660 gallons’ worth of
storage capacity that lasts her about a week
to 10 days at a time. If her turn to have run-
ning water does not come before her tanks
run dry, she is forced to buy from a private
tanker at a higher cost. Sunita estimates that
she spends almost one-fifth of her salary on
water. Her husband, whose income was cru-
cial to balancing the monthly budget, has
been sick for well over a year with chronic
diarrhea, a water-borne disease.
62 JULY | AUGUST 2015
SANGAM VIHAR’S 30YEAR transformation from an agrarian community
on Delhi’s periphery into a densely populated urban slum has become some-
thing of a model for rural locales increasingly shaped by their proximity to
Delhi. Farmers in the neighboring state of Haryana, for example, have begun
carving up their fields into housing colonies packed with multistory homes
made of exposed brick and with unruly sprawls of shops and cafes. And just
like their cousins in the city, these communities are boring down in search of
water as a source of both sustenance and income. According to a 2011 report by
the Central Ground Water Board, a Delhi-based government regulatory body,
there are more than 13 million boreholes across the country.
One evening in May, a young man named Krishna and some friends in
Tilpat, a small village about 14.5 miles from the heart of Delhi, sit around a
table piled with beer bottles, spent cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and bottles
of molasses whiskey. “There are no jobs in Tilpat,” Krishna explains, even for
someone like him, with an undergraduate degree in history from the Univer-
sity of Delhi’s distance-learning program. “So young men in these parts either
sell land, as property agents, or they sell water.”
Krishna says he has drilled into his family’s fields and can now pump
some 2,600 gallons and sell it to tankers for about $3, the same going rate as
in Delhi. (Sanghwan’s team of trucks from Sangam Vihar has begun going
as far as Tilpat to purchase water.) The tankers then sell to garment-export
businesses, based in Delhi and Haryana, that need lots of liquid to process
clothes before shipping them to the United States and Europe. Of late, how-
ever, Krishna notes that business is suffering, as farmers closer to the national
highway connecting Delhi and Haryana have begun to dig their own bore-
holes and peddle water.
Other enterprising men in places like Tilpat are well on their way to becoming
new tanker bosses. After retiring in 2012 from a low position at a Delhi-based
multinational bank, Devraj Choudhury, along with his brothers, dug a 250-foot-
deep borehole beside the Delhi-Haryana highway, invested in a heavy-duty
pump, and got to work: “Everyone was doing it, so we thought, ‘Why not?’”
Choudhury says. At first, they only sold water from their borehole to pass-
ing tankers; now the brothers own eight trucks of their own, bought partly
with Choudhury’s retirement bonus and partly with money earned from the
borehole. They supply water to nearby textile factories for as much as $24 for
roughly 2,600 gallons. “The rates are higher in the winter,” Choudhury says,
when the facilities are upping production for the spring and summer fashion
collections in the West.
As Choudhury sits next to his borehole, trucks turn off the highway, use the
well to fill up, and then drive away. “I don’t know where they go,” he says. “We
just sell the water and mind our own business.”
POLITICIANS AND PLANNERS IN Delhi, like their peers in many other parts
of India, are eager to solve the city’s water-supply problems with megaprojects.
When they see a shortage, they begin discussing dams, miles-long pipelines,
and massive pumping stations, often built with the help of private corpo-
rations. Already, some of the DJB’s water supply comes from as far away as
the Himalayas; the Tehri Dam, about 200 miles northeast of Delhi in Uttara-
 from beneath Delhi and other cities and
could be distributed over small, well-kept
grids or, if necessary, by regulated tank-
ers. “Policymakers need to accept that
groundwater is being used and the issue
is the unsustainability of its use,” says
Sunita Narain, director-general of the Cen-
tre for Science and Environment, a public-
interest research organization.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Rajendra
Singh, a conservationist and winner of the
2015 Stockholm Water Prize, often called
the Nobel of the water world. “Urban India’s
water problems cannot be solved if govern-
ments focus on transporting water from the
countryside to the city,” he says. To Singh
and Narain, an enlightened mafia model,
so to speak, doesn’t just require better gov-
ernance; it must involve finding a way to
replenish the water being pumped from
the earth.
Singh already has experience doing
exactly this. Over 30 years, he has helped
revive underground aquifers by building
rainwater-harvesting structures in the arid
state of Rajasthan. The program, by most
accounts, has been a spectacular success:
The water table has risen sharply, local riv-
LOCALS GATHER TO COLLECT WATER FROM A DELHI JAL BOARD ers and streams have revived, and villagers
WATER TANKER IN A SLUM IN DELHI. report having enough water for their daily
needs. But urban centers, including Delhi, he
says, haven’t tried anything similar. “I am yet
khand state, came online in 2006 for close to $1 billion. More recently, Delhi to see one town or city in India that harvests
authorities have offered to pay 90 percent of the costs of a new dam in the its rainwater and replenishes its aquifers,”
country’s mountainous northeast that supposedly would supply the city with Singh says, adding that his attempts to share
275 million gallons of water per day. his experiences with state officials have been
The rush to sanction such projects is due in no small part to the potential rebuffed. “Governments are not interested
scope of corruption: The more expensive and complex a scheme, the more because they think they will build another
opportunities there are to skim money. Unsurprisingly, graft is already well pipeline and find more water.”
documented in India’s water sector. In 2012, for instance, a government whistle- Political will, in other words, is criti-
blower revealed irregularities to the tune of $5.5 billion in a decade’s worth of cal to achieving the public water system
irrigation projects in Maharashtra, the western state that is home to bustling Delhi needs, but it is also nearly impossi-
Mumbai (and that metropolis’s own water mafia). ble to harness. The AAP’s Mohaniya has
Corruption is a big reason that major projects routinely flop, or at least fall proposed connecting Sangam Vihar to Del-
well short of expectations, and these failures, in turn, are only giving water hi’s existing grid, and his party recently
bosses more power. But counterintuitively, some water activists say, the mafia pledged to provide nearly 5,300 gallons of
may offer lessons for a way out of India’s multifaceted water crisis, including free water a month to Delhi homes with
an end to the black market. formal, metered connections—a promise
Most notable among these lessons is the idea of keeping solutions local. that excludes about one-fourth of the city,
Water doesn’t need to be found in far-flung places; megaprojects have human which, according to the 2013 government
costs—some 9,500 families were displaced by the Tehri Dam, according to audit, remains without meters. But these
government estimates—and they don’t inspire a much-needed focus on water are merely plans, and they don’t address
conservation. With smart planning and investment, water could be drawn the question of where all the water will

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 63
ultimately come from or how those sources
would be refreshed.
Singh guesses that public resolve may
finally arise “when urban communities
experience water scarcity the way the vil-
lagers in the deserts of Rajasthan do.” For
Delhi, that time could be nigh. Until then,
the water mafia will continue to rule.

SOME EVENINGS, when the summer heat

is more unbearable than usual, Sanghwan
diverts a few thousand gallons of his bounty
into a watering hole in the Delhi Ridge, a
sparse forest patch behind Sangam Vihar.
“It’s for the animals,” he says, referring to the
small population of nilgai antelopes that are
still occasionally spotted in the area. “They
need to drink too.”
In conversations, Sanghwan is annoyed
by concerns about the sustainability of his
small empire, about the short-term nature of
his profits compared with his work’s poten-
tially devastating long-term implications.
Such questions, he says, demonize the poor
and water providers like him, while letting
the rich and the government off the hook.
He claims he would welcome efforts to lay
a proper pipe network in his neighborhood,
but given the government’s track record, he
isn’t holding his breath.
Sitting in his courtyard and listening to
the rumble of passing trucks, the sound of
water gushing into tankers, and the voices
of drivers as they yell to one another, he
makes a point of mentioning a broken bath-
tub he fills each evening for the stray cattle
that wander the streets of Sangam Vihar.
He also shows off his muddy courtyard,
which, he says, he intentionally didn’t pave
over so that rainwater can trickle into the
earth. It seems to be Sanghwan’s way of say-
ing that he, more than any policymaker,
knows water’s true value and is seeking to
protect it.
“Ultimately, what is money?” he eventu-
ally asks, standing up to indicate that the
interview is over. “It is the dirt of our hands
that is washed clean in death.” Q

AMAN SETHI (@Amannama) is a Delhi-

based journalist and the author of A
Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death
in Delhi.
THE RIVER YAMUNA, ONE OF THE MOST POLLUTED RIVERS IN THE WORLD, IS THE PRIMARY SOURCE OF DELHI’S WATER.
On a planet
already stressed
for food and
water, are there
enough resources
to support a
population that
will approach
10 billion by
2050? Despite
what doomsayers
argue, all might
not be lost.

Survival
By
Design
Illustrations by KATE FRANCIS  GEL JAMLANG
 Don’t
Let Food
Be the
Problem
PRODUCING TOO MUCH FOOD IS WHAT
STARVES THE WORLD.

By OLIVIER DE SCHUTTER

Fifty years ago, many people believed

the world was on the edge of disaster. In
the mid-1960s, the annual rate of pop-
ulation growth peaked at an estimated
2.1 percent. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich pre-
dicted in his best-selling book, The Pop-
ulation Bomb, that entire regions would
soon be facing starvation as agricultural
output failed to catch up with demo-
graphic growth; after all, in much of the
developing world, yields per surface—
that is, the amount of food produced on
a given piece of land—had been stag-
nating for decades. Before long, the
neo-Malthusians’ doomsday predictions
seemed to be turning into reality. In 1972,
bad harvests in the Soviet Union, com-
bined with the first global oil shock the
following year, led the real prices of food
to skyrocket suddenly.
 The answer, governments decided, was to
produce more food—much more food. The
specific responses varied, but the general
approach was similar everywhere: Techno-
logical advances and public policies, includ-
ing subsidies to farmers, would raise outputs
and drive prices down. This vision shaped
the Common Agricultural Policy of the
fledgling European Economic Community,
while in the United States, it inspired Pres-
ident Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary
to launch a massive program encouraging
grain production. Farmers were told not to
worry about the risk of gluts in the markets;
if prices were insufficient to cover costs, the
government would make up the difference.
In South Asia, where the perils associated
with overpopulation were considered to be
highest, the Green Revolution attempted
to boost agricultural output through new
high-yielding crop varieties, particularly
wheat and rice; the extension of irrigated
land; and a massive increase in the use of
chemical fertilizers and mechanization.
This framing of hunger and malnutrition
primarily as quantitative problems—the
results of a remediable mismatch between
supply and demand—didn’t just shape pol-
icy choices in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It inaugurated a trend that has lasted for
several decades almost without interrup-
tion, driven by governments and big agri-
business. Judged by their own standards,
the revolutions in food systems have been
tremendous victories. As population growth
rates have declined, agricultural output has
grown steadily—about 2.1 percent annually
over the past 50 years—and without a sig-
nificant expansion of cultivated areas. In
1961, food grown on 1.37 billion hectares of
land fed 3.5 billion people; by 2011, when the
world’s population had doubled to 7 billion,
only 12 percent more land was being used.
Was looming disaster thus averted?
Not exactly.
The absolute number of hungry people
has hardly been reduced since the early
1970s, consistently oscillating around
850 million—that is, when including such
things as short-term undernourishment,
inequalities in food distribution within
the household, among other things, that
the United Nations overlooks in its annual
State of Food Insecurity reports. While the
proportion of undernourished people has
declined—today, it’s about 12 percent of the
world’s population—hunger is far from erad-
icated. In fact, when assessed from the view-
point of their contributions to health, poverty
alleviation, and environmental protection,
the food systems inherited from the 20th
century have not been a spectacular suc-
cess. Rather, they have failed spectacularly.
IT MIGHT APPEAR THAT the world is hopelessly
stuck with a dysfunctional behemoth of a
global food economy. From storage facili-
ties to processing plants and transportation
routes, infrastructures have been built in sup-
port of large-scale production. As a result,
today’s food systems are in the hands of large
agrifood interests—the commodities brokers,
the food processors, the increasingly con-
centrated retailers—whose dominance only
breeds dominance. Because they have the
logistics, control the networks, and capture
the subsidies, they can easily crush compet-
itors. These large actors, in turn, have reason
to oppose a transformation in the food sys-
tems, and their economic heft allows them
to veto change. In the meantime, they con-
tinue to flood the markets with processed
foods, manufactured from the mountains
of soy and corn that governmental subsi-
dies encourage.
These interconnected systems of over-
production won’t feed the world. In fact,
it is both what ails humankind and what
starves it. Although its Goliath-like scale
might make it appear invincible, its very
ungainliness and failure to meet human
needs could yet be its undoing. Indeed, big
food has already been met with resistance
795M
people in the world do not have enough food to
lead a healthy active life. That’s about one in nine
people on earth. (World Food Programme)
in the form of an idea steadily gaining trac-
tion at the grassroots level: food sovereignty.
The concept emerged 20 years ago from
the mobilization of small-scale farmers, or
campesinos, in Costa Rica, and from the
protest marches of small-farm holders in
the Indian state of Karnataka. The message
was simple: Agricultural policies should not
be held hostage to the exigencies of inter-
national trade. This idea was central to the
establishment in 1993 of La Via Campesina,
which is now arguably the world’s largest
transnational social movement, spanning
164 local and national organizations in more
than 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe,
and the Americas; it represents an estimated
200 million farmers. Initially rural, the move-
ment focused on the needs of small-scale
farmers who took pride in their identity as
“peasants”—very much a reaction to big-
food geopolitics. By 1994, when the Uruguay
Round of multilateral trade negotiations con-
cluded, and at the request of major develop-
ing countries, agriculture had become a key
bargaining chip in the establishment of the
World Trade Organization. Food was set to
become the next frontier of the great mill of
commodification, and farmers the world over
were asked to compete, even if this meant
that the least competitive would disappear.
The early food-sovereignty activists of La
Via Campesina were quite prescient when it
came to understanding how international
trade could—and would— shape food sys-
tems: standardizing farmers as well as the
commodities they produce, encouraging the
unsustainable growth of long-distance trade
controlled by the agrifood behemoths, and
neglecting local and regional markets. Resil-
ience requires diversity, these activists cam-
paigned, including a diversity of markets.
The 2008 food-price crisis showed how right
they were. The dramatic spike in commodity
prices hit the countries that depended the
most on food imports particularly hard, and
it did not benefit farmers, who were squeezed
between rising costs for inputs upstream and
large buyers downstream whose command-
ing position allowed them to capture most
of the value of the food chain.
Food sovereignty has now left its rural
origins and become a movement in which
both consumers and producers seek to
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 69
reclaim or reinvent food systems from the Agriculture’s Food and Water Web
bottom up. Indeed, in all regions, groups Over the past two decades, food-sovereignty movements
of ordinary citizens are developing ways to have tirelessly pushed governments and corporations to
put the power of production and distribution back into the
gain autonomy and bypass the dominant
hands of local farming communities. The fact remains,
industrial food systems. though, that the world’s food systems are still dominated
On the consumers’ side, today food- by international trade. Two years after the 2008 crisis,
policy councils in North America invoke food prices rose again almost as dramatically as they
had fallen; that year, in 2010, the United States exported
sovereignty; examples from Toronto to Oak-
nearly $30 billion worth of corn, soybeans, and wheat—
land are increasingly influencing experi- major staples on which the world’s poor largely depend—
ments elsewhere. Sovereignty has given rise just in the trade routes shown here. Global trade networks
to farmers markets in Mumbai and Beijing, have become busier as developing countries struggle to
among other cities, and to school gardens keep booming populations nourished. The United States,
for instance, exported nearly $1 billion in soybeans to
and urban agriculture as citizens seek to China in 2000; by 2010, that figure had increased to
reconnect to local farmers and, more broadly, $12 billion. Meanwhile, as countries export crops, they
to the food systems on which they depend. also, in a sense, export water: Globally, the agricultural
On the production side, as a way out of sector accounts for roughly 70 percent of all freshwater
withdrawals, according to the United Nations.
the fossil fuel-based model, farmers increas-
ingly are embracing agroecology. In this
approach, biological control—the use of
the right combination of crops on any sin-
gle field—replaces the use of pesticides.
Leguminous plants serve to nourish soils,
reducing the need to use nitrogen-based
fertilizers. Trees, which in the past had
been banished from fields in the name
of maximizing yields, are being planted
again alongside crops; their roots allow soil
to capture moisture better, and their shade
reduces evaporation, making it possible to
save water for irrigation. Integrated crop-
ping and rotation allow the replenishment
of soils that monocropping had been qui-
etly destroying over decades.
Agroecology aims to reduce the use of
external fossil fuel-based inputs, to recycle
waste, and to combine elements of nature to
maximize synergies. It treats the complexity
of nature not as a liability, but as an asset. The
farmer learns by trial and error, even when the
ultimate “scientific” explanation may remain
elusive; long at the receiving end of technolog-
ical developments, he or she will now deter-
mine what works best in a local context.

LET’S NOT LIE TO OURSELVES. Well-documented

threats—peak oil, genetic erosion from
monocropping schemes, soil degradation, PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL FRESHWATER
climate change—will mean a future with FOR AGRICULTURE 2013
more volatility and the need to quickly CORN SOYBEANS WHEAT PALM OIL
EXPORTS PER YEAR 2010
invent more solutions to food problems. TRADE DATA: RESOURCES FUTURES / CHATHAM
HOUSE; CORN TRADE DATA, ARGENTINA: INSTI
Still, there is room for optimism: Devastat- TUTO NACIONAL DE ESTADÍSTICA Y CENSOS,
ARGENTINA; US CORN TRADE DATA: UN COM
ing threats, in fact, could lead us to gradu- 15 PERSONS/SQ. MILE POPULATION DENSITY 250+ TRADE; POPULATION DENSITY MAP VIA SOCIO
ECONOMIC DATA AND APPLICATIONS CENTER
ally favor resilience over efficiency.

70 JULY | AUGUST 2015

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 71
 If nimble, location-specific innovation is
the best way to build that resilience, the para-
dox of an increasingly interdependent world
requires creating alliances at the national
Don’t
Let Water
and international levels to support local mar-
kets and systems—even partnerships long
unthinkable. Environmental groups can
team with parents organizations, as both
worry about the impacts of industrialized
food production on the planet and on their
children. Politicians of all stripes concerned
Be the
about public deficits might join forces with
health-care practitioners to address the
mounting costs of treating diet-related ill-
Problem
nesses. Development NGOs may discover IF IRAN AND THE UNITED STATES CAN COOPERATE
that their concerns about the impact of sub-
ON WATER ISSUES, ANYONE CAN.
sidies, which result in dumping on local
markets in the global south, are echoed by
taxpayers associations, which complain By CHARLES FISHMAN
about the huge sums of public money
that go to farmers to grow commodities—
not food, but raw materials that serve as
inputs to the food-processing industry.
The more I have worked with govern-
ments operating from the top down, the
more I have come to believe in the strength On May 27, 2009, the U.S. Consulate in
of social movements to make change happen
from the bottom up. Solutions that can be
Istanbul sent a cable to then-Secretary
designed using local resources (in addition of State Hillary Clinton’s office. The
to, not instead of, external resources that may 2,000-word message detailed worsening
provide backup) are less vulnerable to outside
market or energy shocks. The more diverse water challenges in Iran: prolonged and
these solutions, the better local systems will frequent droughts, rising salinity that
be equipped to deal with contingencies.
Is this revolutionary? Perhaps not if we
threatened natural wetlands, and irri-
think of a revolution as an event in history gation practices that were sucking the
when a group overthrows a regime and takes
country’s limited groundwater reservoirs
power. That view of revolution however,
as German political philosopher Hannah dry without producing enough food. In
Arendt once remarked, sounds more like a the understated tone of diplomatic com-
coup d’état. Changing society without seizing
power is what food-sovereignty movements
muniqués, the cable endorsed the idea of
are about. The revolution they propose is a finding a way to help the Iranians. ¶ At
silent one. It is gradual. But it is already hap-
pening all around us, proposing an alterna-
the time, U.S. President Barack Obama’s
tive to low-cost, big-food systems with which administration was just four months old,
we’ve been saddled for far too long. Q
and despite some outreach efforts by
OLIVIER DE SCHUTTER (@DeSchutterUNSR), Washington, the United States and Iran
a legal scholar focusing on economic and publicly regarded each other as enemies.
social rights, served as the United Nations’
special rapporteur on the right to food
Tehran faced crippling trade and finan-
from 2008 to 2014. cial sanctions and remained on the
official U.S. list of state sponsors of terror-
ism. Nonetheless, behind the scenes, Ira-
nian water experts were so desperate to
prevent Iran’s poor water practices from
destabilizing the country that they were urg-
ing Tehran’s chief international antagonist
to step in with technical and scientific assis-
tance. According to the cable, these experts
predicted that, if offered discreetly, U.S. aid
would “be met with a cautiously pragmatic
response from the [government of Iran] and
with grateful enthusiasm from Iran’s sci-
entific and environmental communities.”
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the
world’s water issues. Nearly 2 billion peo-
ple use water contaminated with human
waste. Each day, 44 percent of the world’s
people rely on water that must be carried
back to their homes—mostly by women
and girls who end up trapped in a kind of
slavery, unable to get good educations or
jobs, in part, because they must devote so
much time to fetching water. Meanwhile,
most major aquifers in the planet’s arid
and semiarid regions are being dangerously
overpumped.
And water woes only seem des-
tined to get worse. In the next 25 years,
the world is expected to add 1.7 bil-
lion more people, almost all of them in
water-stressed areas. Climate change
will shift rain and snow patterns, cre-
ating flooding and drought. If current
water challenges seem like brush fires—
flaring, doing damage, then subsiding—
they could soon become wildfires: sources of
much more harm and maybe even conflict.
That’s the bleak bet, anyway, and the easy
one. But there is a less apocalyptic, more
counterintuitive possibility: that the worse
water problems become, the more likely
they are to be addressed collaboratively
and effectively.
Just look at the United States and Iran.
Water has become a surprising area of rou-
tine cooperation between the two countries,
despite continuing public acrimony. Even
before the 2009 cable, Iranian and Ameri-
can water experts had met every few years.
Recently, they’ve met once a year or more,
typically for a couple weeks at a time, to
trade experience, advice, and research. The
exchanges have involved hundreds of sci-
entists from dozens of institutions. Amer-
ican experts were in Iran this January; as
of press time, a group of 10 Iranians was
expected at the University of California,
Irvine, in late June.
The unlikely alliance points to what
some see as the underappreciated power of
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 73
Food Finances
During the 2008 food crisis, the price of the world’s staples jumped to their highest levels
in decades, but dropped shortly after. They skyrocketed again in 2010 and 2011, indicating that
2008 wasn’t an anomaly, as shown here by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s food
price indices, which measure average international prices of commodities.
FOOD AGGREGATE SUGAR VEGETABLE OIL CEREAL DAIRY MEAT
1990
water: its capacity to get people to work
together, in ways large and small, both
locally and across national boundaries.
Water problems have an inherent urgency
and universality. Their outcomes can deter-
mine whether populations thrive or fail.
Unlike with shortages of energy or food,
there are no alternatives for water in almost
all of its uses.
The trick is how to spin capacity into real
progress. Thanks to research and experi-
ence, people know well the misery and
instability that a blossoming of water chal-
lenges will cause—a rare insight in a world
afflicted with uncertainty. But for water’s
future to look better than its recent past,
knowledge must translate into resources,
invention, and diplomacy that create per-
manent solutions. Otherwise, chaos looms.
WATER IS SUDDENLY on the list of urgent pri-
orities in government offices and execu-
tive suites around the world—even in the
Vatican with Pope Francis’s encyclical this
summer. In February 2012, U.S. intelligence
agencies jointly produced a dedicated
report assessing the risks water issues pose
to national security. The blunt assessment:
“[M]any countries important to the United
States will experience water problems—
shortages, poor water quality, or floods—
that will risk instability and state failure
[and] increase regional tensions.” Private
companies that are dramatically chang-
ing their operations in order to use water
74 JULY | AUGUST 2015
400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
2008 2011 2015
more sustainably include Ford Motor, Intel,
Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, Campbell Soup,
and Google. At the start of 2015, business
and political leaders attending the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
ranked water problems as the No. 1 source
of risk to societies. Five years ago, water
barely made the list.
For people who’ve spent decades tackling
water issues, this attention is both welcome
and disorienting. No society overcomes a
major obstacle it doesn’t realize it has, but
the community that works on water—so
used to operating under the radar—is wor-
ried that public awareness won’t necessar-
ily be harnessed, that momentum might be
squandered. “I don’t want to be glib about
this. I’ve been arguing for smart water man-
agement for decades,” said Peter Gleick,
president of the Pacific Institute and one of
the world’s leading experts on water. “The
problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do.
The problem is we aren’t doing it.”
In theory, virtually every water challenge
can be dealt with. Typically, there’s enough
water to go around in a given locale, and the
technical hurdles to making that happen
aren’t too high. Although international coop-
eration and aid can be important in some
situations, global treaties aren’t necessarily
required; cities in California or farmers in
northern India can address their water trou-
bles without waiting for a summit. That’s the
good news, and it’s frequently overlooked.
What’s more, with water, the really big
mistakes haven’t yet been made. Sure, cit-
ies with millions of residents don’t bother
to treat their sewage, and rivers from the
Colorado to the Tigris and Euphrates aren’t
well-managed. But current dilemmas can
be addressed. Meanwhile, big challenges
are already visible on the horizon. Scientists
know that sea levels are rising, and where;
they know that climate change is likely to
make the wet parts of the globe wetter and
the dry parts drier; they know how to feed
many more people without using more water.
Water, however, doesn’t respond to wish-
ful thinking—and that’s exactly what there’s
too much of right now in all corners of the
world. Unless reversed or prevented, water
troubles will continue to cause conflict,
strangle economic growth, and diminish
safety and stability for people. Already, we
have seen how bad water management can
be the last straw where economic, cultural,
and political volatility already exists.
That’s what happened in Syria, according
to an analysis by Gleick published last year
in Weather, Climate, and Society, a journal
of the American Meteorological Society.
“The conflict in Syria isn’t about water; it’s
about religion, ideology, economics, and
ethnic tensions,” Gleick said in an inter-
view. “But to argue that it had nothing to do
with water is wrong.” A four-year drought
starting in 2006 triggered food shortages,
price increases, and the migration of bereft
farmers to cities, where many couldn’t find
work. This piled popular unrest and pres-
sure onto the government of President
Bashar al-Assad. “I could spin a scenario
where the Assad regime had smart water
management institutions—and expanded
agricultural production, reduced unemploy-
DATA: FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS
ment, prevented migration to the cities,”
Gleick noted. “It’s not hard to see a differ-
ent scenario.”
It’s a crucial insight to keep in mind in
order to avert a repeat of the Syria case in
another region: More often than not, water
problems don’t require high-tech miracles—
they require pragmatism.
Already, there’s plenty of this hap-
pening. For example, conflict has been
brewing in the Nile Valley for years, as
Ethiopia builds the largest dam in Africa,
and Sudan and Egypt, sitting downstream,
 worry that the river they rely on will be That can mean high-level diplomacy or STILL, DESPITE SOME headway, the leap from
disrupted. In March, after years of negoti- millions more latrines. It can also mean worry to concerted, widespread action has
ations, the three countries signed a frame- innovation, which thankfully is being yet to be made. There is no uncertainty
work agreement to share both the river’s pursued on many fronts. It costs just 25 about water’s value to human life or about
water and the electricity from Ethiopia’s percent of what it did two decades ago the damage that unsound water policies
new dam. In India, meanwhile, where more to make ocean water drinkable. Water- can do. But the burgeoning water revolu-
than half of homes have no toilets, Prime cleaning systems have also become dra- tion has yet to inspire a necessary sense
Minister Narendra Modi has launched a matically cheaper and easier to operate, of determination, to prompt everyone—
nationwide sanitation campaign. His gov- to the point that individual buildings, from policymakers to businesses to farm-
ernment has constructed 6 million toilets schools, and factories can afford their own ers to consumers—to see their own vul-
and wants to install some 50 million more on-site water-recycling systems. Inex- nerabilities with clear eyes and decide to
by 2019. “The lesson,” Gleick said, “is don’t pensive sensor technology commercial- tackle them.
let water be the problem. Smart countries, ized in just the last five years means that The reason is straightforward: Water
smart leaders, will try to take water out of farmers can finally determine how dry problems don’t get solved because they
the equation [of instability] by doing the their fields are and water only when crops often aren’t really about water. They’re
things that we know work.” actually need it. about politics and economics, culture
and habit. Due to long-standing pol-
icy and practice, for instance, farmers
from Pakistan to Kansas pump ground-
Water Isn’t Free
Cheap drinking water isn’t just a matter of modern infrastructure. Denmark has water for their crops not only without
some of the world’s highest drinking-water costs, as the government encourages paying for it, but often without limit or
conservation by requiring customers to pay the entire bill themselves. Singapore, even keeping track of how much they
though, has some of the cheapest costs relative to GDP per capita; despite rising use. It’s seen almost as an entitlement;
incomes, water prices on the island nation have remained the same over the past
charging farmers for water or insisting
15 years. Here, consumption is measured in 200 cubic-meter units, the rough
equivalent to one-twelfth of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. on better irrigation technology inspires
outrage and resistance. Similarly, lei-
surely daily showers and lush lawns
DRINKING 100 200 300 400 500 600
WATER explain how Americans end up using
CHARGES, 2011
IN USD PER twice the amount of water per person as
200M3
Europeans do. Changing attitudes about
DATA: INTERNATIONAL STATISTICS FOR WATER SERVICES, “INFORMATION EVERY WATER MANAGER SHOULD KNOW” REPORT, 2012

ARMENIA water’s value, in other words, is just as

important as creating the correct mix of
AUSTRALIA
dams, treatment plants, and sustainable-
BRAZIL
agriculture policies.
A shift in attitude is what happened in
BURKINA
FASO 2009, when scientists in Iran were able to
CHILE
view their country’s risky water prospects
plainly enough to ask the Americans for
DENMARK help. The Iranians understood something
GERMANY that government officials, water man-
agers, and businesses everywhere can
IRAN learn from: One way or the other, through
action or indifference, the future of water
JAPAN
is completely under human control. The
MALAWI right choice may be obvious, but it may
also be uncomfortable or difficult, sur-
SINGAPORE
prising or even humbling. That doesn’t
SOUTH KOREA mean it shouldn’t be made. Q

UGANDA
CHARLES FISHMAN (@cfishman) is a journal-

U.S. ist and the New York Times best-selling

author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life
GDP PER
CAPITA IN USD 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 and Turbulent Future of Water.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 75
76 JULY | AUGUST 2015
C O R K E D
As former Soviet republics develop closer ties with the West,
Russia is pulling out all the stops to keep them in the fold. Amid this
battle, Moldova’s wine industry has become the unlikeliest front.
BY MARK BAKER

ON A SUNNY SPRING AFTERNOON THIS YEAR, WINEMAKER CRISTINA

Frolov was leading an impromptu tour through ridges of dried mud,
gravel, and shoots of green at her family’s winery in Moldova. The sea-
son’s grape vines at Castel Mimi were just beginning to flower. The central
Codru wine region, where the vineyard is located, is traditionally known
for its white grapes. But Frolov explained that they’ve had success in
recent years growing higher-value-added red varieties such as cabernet
sauvignon. The experiment is part of her plan to cater to Western wine
drinkers, who are often seen as having more demanding palates. ¶ The
270-acre vineyard, near the village of Bulboaca, about 20 miles southeast
of Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, produces an average of 1 million bottles
of wine annually. Castel Mimi is part of a network of some 100 vineyards
in Moldova that export tens of millions of bottles every year, putting
the country’s wine industry in the top 20 globally. In fact, wine is at the
core of the country’s economy, accounting for one-fifth of its GDP and
employing one-quarter of its labor force, according to a 2010 government
report. ¶ Even still, Moldovan vineyards have long been considered a
backwater in the global wine-drinking hierarchy. With the hope of finally
making Moldova a true destination for Western customers, the past five
years have seen winemakers across the country investing as much as
$100 million in renovating and expanding their properties and output.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 77
 On the main grounds of Castel Mimi, the evidence of
that investment is clear: The otherwise bucolic set-
ting is actually a massive construction zone. Dozens
of men in hard hats and fluorescent-yellow protec-
tive vests hunch over rolls of blueprints and scuttle
around the property. They’re in the final stages of a
$6 million transformation project, launched in 2010,
that will restore the neoclassical château that once
belonged to Constantin Mimi, an early 20th-century
politician who initiated winemaking on the site. When
the project is completed in the spring of 2016, Castel
Mimi will feature a brand-new restaurant, hotel, spa,
and conference center.
In a country with just over 3.5 million people and
a per capita GDP of roughly $2,200—among the low-
est in Europe—such spending is significant, to say
the least. Yet the improvements being carried out
at wineries across the country are about more than
beverages, tourism, or even the bottom line. Wedged
between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova finds itself
much like its neighbors: caught in the cross-hairs of a
struggle for influence in Eastern Europe that pits Rus-
sia against the West. And this small republic’s wine
industry has become perhaps the unlikeliest battle-
ground in that fight.
Over the past decade, the United States and the Euro-
pean Union have pledged an estimated $100 million in
grants, loans, and other sector support to assist Moldo-
va’s wine producers—and, in turn, reinforce the rest
of the local economy. Much of this largesse has come
in the form of a multiyear European Investment Bank
credit line that started in 2011 and will run through
2017. It not only promises to provide direct financing
to winemakers, but it also will add indirect assistance
as wineries tap additional lines of private equity. The
United States, for its part, has invested $17 million-plus
via development programs that have helped Moldo-
van industries, wine included, diversify their markets.
These ventures are only part of Moldova’s broader
integration with the West; in recent years, the country
has bargained with Brussels to establish a free trade
RUSSIA , OF C OURSE , HAS NOT
S AT I D LY B Y W H I L E T H E W E S T M A K E S
OV E RT U R E S I N W H AT M O S C OW
C O N S I D E R S T O B E I T S B AC K YA R D.
78 JULY | AUGUST 2015
agreement and a visa-free regime for short-term travel.
Russia, of course, has not sat idly by while the West
makes overtures in what Moscow considers to be its
backyard. Nearly two years ago, in September 2013,
Russian officials, backed by President Vladimir Putin,
announced that the country was freezing imports of
Moldovan wine—a critical blow because, prior to 2013,
Russia accounted for around 30 percent of Moldova’s
wine export market. It was the second time in less
than a decade—the first being in 2006—that Moscow
used wine as a means of punishing its former satellite.
Although Russia justified the 2013 decision on ques-
tionable grounds of sanitation concerns, the move was
widely considered retaliation for Moldova’s increas-
ingly close ties to the European Union.
The interest from the West has enabled the wine
industry to find a toehold in Europe and to ultimately
stay afloat during the Russian ban; sales of bottled
Moldovan wine in Western Europe actually grew 14
percent in 2014. The reality, though, is this aid hasn’t
been enough. The Russian moratorium has hurt many
vineyards, including Castel Mimi, which, before Sep-
tember 2013, sold around 300,000 bottles a year to
Russia. The winery had hoped to raise this amount
to 500,000 bottles by 2015, Frolov says, but that looks
increasingly unrealistic. Even with the support pro-
vided to Moldova by the United States and the EU,
Russia can still exert a devastating amount of control
over the small country.
The crisis is far from over. The main U.S. aid pro-
gram backing Moldovan wine closed its doors this
year, a result of an expiring mandate—and it’s not
clear when a successor program will begin operating.
While relations between Russia and the West only
grow increasingly acrimonious, Moldova’s vineyards
and the country itself remain caught in the middle of
this geopolitical dispute between major powers—one
with very real stakes. The embrace of the West may ulti-
mately be a boon for Moldovan vineyards, but given
the possibility of further Russian aggression, it might
prove to be the very salvo that sinks them.
 Employees fill a brandy barrel at a distillery in the contested region of Transnistria in 2014.
IN MOLDOVA, WINEMAKING IS MORE THAN A
business: It’s also integral to the country’s history
and has long been a point of national pride. When
the Romans arrived some 2,000 years ago in what
would become Moldova, production was already thriv-
ing. The industry’s golden age, locals say, came in the
15th century under the rule of Prince Stephen the
Great. Revered as a heroic defender of the medieval
Moldovan principality against incursions by Ottoman
Turks, Prince Stephen is lauded as a champion of wine.
He imported new grape varieties and created a posi-
tion in his court specifically to oversee operations.
Over the next two centuries, wine production and
quality began to fluctuate, as the territory of modern-
day Moldova became a vassal state of the Ottoman
OLEG NIKISHIN/KOMMERSANT PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Empire. The Russian tsars who finally pushed out
the Ottomans in 1812 helped revive the industry, even
steering it through a deadly infestation of phylloxera
aphids, a grape pest, near the end of the 19th century.
So Moldovans like to joke that their wine survived
the Ottomans, phylloxera, and two world wars—but
not the Soviets. When Moldova was part of the Soviet
Union, from 1940 to 1991, wineries actually received
relatively lavish investment. In the aftermath of World
War II, the Soviets even expanded Moldova’s vineyard
lands, purportedly reaching 220,000 hectares by 1960.
But quality during the Soviet era suffered. Moldo-
van wines were traditionally dry, in keeping with the
best French and Italian varieties. Russians, though,
had long preferred heavier, semisweet wines that
were inexpensive to make and didn’t typically bring
home blue ribbons. Moldovan winemakers shifted to
cater to these tastes, planting lower-quality, higher-
yield grapes and in turn developing a reputation for
“cheap and sweet” wines—a slight that mattered little
at the time because nearly all Moldovan wines were
sold to its Soviet neighbors.
After declaring independence from the Soviet
Union, Moldova’s government sought to distance
itself from Moscow, forging closer ties to a range of
European institutions and even switching from Cyrillic
script to the Latin alphabet. But the country remained
economically and culturally tied to Russia. Ethnic
Moldovans, who are nearly all Romanian-speaking,
have long shared the same small country with Rus-
sians and Ukrainians. According to the 2004 census,
the most recent for which full results are available,
around 80 percent of the nation’s population iden-
tified as either ethnic Moldovan or Romanian. The
next two leading groups were those who identified
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 79
 as ethnic Ukrainians (8.4 percent)—most of whom
speak Russian—and ethnic Russians (5.9 percent).
(In Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of
some 500,000 people, Ukrainians and Russians made
up around 60 percent of the population.)
Meanwhile, Moldova’s wine industry had a difficult
time untangling itself from the Russian Federation,
which continued to provide reliable sales. In the 1990s
and early 2000s, some 80 to 90 percent of Moldova’s
annual wine exports continued to go to Russia, accord-
ing to a 2007 International Monetary Fund report.
This cozy state of affairs abruptly ended in 2006,
when Russian officials banned the import of Moldovan
wine, citing quality concerns. Just the year before, Rus-
sia had also cut off wine imports from Georgia. In both
cases, the trade crackdown was seen as political retal-
iation. In Moldova, it was interpreted as punishment
for Chisinau’s attempt earlier that year to impose cus-
toms controls on goods moving in and out of Transn-
istria. Russia, which supports the region’s efforts toward
greater autonomy, labeled Chisinau’s actions a blockade.
William Hill, who served as the head of the Organiza-
tion for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
mission to Moldova from 2003 to 2006, says there’s
“no doubt” that the 2006 wine ban was an attempt to
coerce political action from Moldova. “Economic bans
like that have been a Russian modus operandi for ages
in that part of the world,” he says.
The ban was effectively lifted a year later, after Mol-
dova set up a new quality-control regime for its wine
and signed a bilateral deal with Moscow under which it
explicitly agreed to support Russia’s membership in the
Oak barrels filled with wine at a vineyard about 15 miles north from Chisinau.
80 JULY | AUGUST 2015
World Trade Organization. But the damage was already
done: Moldova’s wineries—which had changed their
profile to satisfy Russian customers and, as a result,
had made their products unpalatable to European mar-
kets—lost some $180 million in just eight months. (The
entire industry was only worth around $300 million at
the time.) Wine output, which accounted for a third of
the country’s GDP before the ban, dropped 60 percent
that year, according to Moldova-Vin, one of the coun-
try’s main export agencies at the time.
IF THE 2006 WINE BAN SHOWCASED RUSSIA’S
willingness to use trade penalties as a political weapon,
it also provided the West with a perfect entree for pry-
ing Moldova out of Moscow’s grasp. Since the 1990s, the
United States and its European allies had been operat-
ing aid programs throughout much of the former Soviet
Union, but these programs had relatively modest goals.
Kent Larson, the current head of the U.S. Agency for Inter-
national Development (USAID) in Moldova, explains:
“Much of that early work was in assisting land privatiza-
tion as a way of helping the economy transition from a
communist system to competitive markets.” But Larson
notes it wasn’t clear at that point how U.S. aid could most
effectively serve post-Soviet transition efforts. “We had
to feel our way around to focus on areas where we could
make a contribution,” he says.
By the early 2000s, though, the political landscape
in the Western-leaning former Soviet republics, such
as Ukraine and Georgia, had changed. Democracy
movements like Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, which
swept President (and former Soviet Foreign Minis-
ter) Eduard Shevardnadze from
power, and Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution a year later, which
enabled the rise of pro-Western
reformer Viktor Yushchenko,
had put Moscow on the defen-
sive. These events also solidified
the involvement in the region of
the United States and Europe,
both of which played at least
an indirect role in the political
uprisings. In Georgia, for exam-
ple, OSCE-funded foreign elec-
tion observers and USAID were
instrumental in computeriz-
ing voter lists that ultimately
helped secure President Mikheil
Saakashvili’s victory.
 While Moldova didn’t have its own democratic rev-
olution at the time, it was still caught up in regional
events. Hill claims Russia’s wine ban was actually a
direct outgrowth of Yushchenko’s coming to power in
Ukraine: The new Ukrainian president was pushing
an “action plan” that gave Chisinau greater customs
control in Transnistria. This, Hill says, was “what the
Russians were reacting to in the first place.”
In light of regional political developments, Lar-
son explains, the United States saw an opportunity
to build on its previous work in Moldova and promote
the country’s democratic aspirations through more-
targeted economic assistance. In 2005, USAID launched
the Competitiveness Enhancement and Enterprise
Development (CEED) program, which went through
two iterations—totaling more than $17 million over
10 years—before closing its doors in June 2015. On
paper, CEED aimed to identify promising Moldovan
industries and help producers find export markets to
bolster the economy. But in reality, the program had
a deeper—if explicitly unstated—geopolitical aim: to
reduce Moldova’s economic dependence on Russia. Lar-
son notes that CEED and later its successor program,
CEED II, were designed “to help Moldovan companies
diversify away from what were highly unstable markets
[in the former Soviet republics]” and toward more reli-
able and less politically sensitive markets in the West.
Given its cultural and economic importance to Mol-
dova, wine was one of the sectors CEED chose to focus
on. And Russia inadvertently gave the fledgling pro-
gram its first big boost when it slammed the door on
Moldovan wine imports in 2006. After Moscow dropped
the hammer, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin,
who had actually risen to power advocating closer ties
to the Russian Federation, publicly admitted, as Hill
tells it, that Moldova needed to reorient its industries
away from the East.
Larson, who has been working for USAID since 1994,
says, “CEED is unique. I’m not aware of any other aid
program quite like it.” It hired consultants and sent
winemakers on fact-finding trips abroad, including a
trip by Castel Mimi’s Frolov to the Finger Lakes region
of upstate New York in 2011. It also shaped Moldova’s
outdated legislation on wine production to allow new
VADIM DENISOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
privately owned wineries to compete more effectively
with old Soviet-era behemoths. (While a part of the
Soviet Union, wine production and exports in Mol-
dova were concentrated in the hands of a few large
state-owned enterprises. Since independence, the
industry has been largely privatized, and today only
a couple of wineries remain in government hands.)
Diana Lazar, CEED II’s wine industry manager, explains
that Moldova also needed help reforming layers upon
layers of outdated regulations—like the unnecessar-
ily large amount of storage space that wineries were
required to have on-site—in order to get smaller pro-
ducers into the market and foster competition within
the sector, a critical factor in improving quality. “The
rules have allowed for a whole new generation of win-
eries to emerge,” Lazar says. Legislation also created a
national wine fund, paid into equally by the state and
individual wineries, to shift some of the economic
muscle away from old state-run operations.
Perhaps most importantly, CEED worked to reorient
Moldova’s wine toward Western markets. Its money
supported participation at international trade fairs
such as the annual ProWein exhibition in Düssel-
dorf, Germany, and the CEED team helped revamp
Moldova’s international wine branding, including cre-
ating a French-style appellation d’origine contrôlée,
or a seal of approval, affixed only to bottles and wine-
makers that meet higher European export standards
as determined by the country’s new National Office
for Vine and Wine. The program also helped produce
a splashy marketing campaign—“Wine of Moldova,
a Legend Alive”—which aims at making Moldovan
wine appealing to Western customers used to buy-
ing European, American, and Australian wines. At
the heart of that campaign is a new logo depicting a
medieval Moldovan legend in which a stork delivers
a beakful of grapes.
USAID’s Larson explains that a lot of wineries,
hooked for years on high-volume, low-quality exports
to Russia, were initially skeptical of cracking the more
demanding Western markets. “It’s a familiar problem of
moving from a centrally planned economy to a market
economy,” he says. “The winemakers had great tech-
nical skills, but they lacked skills in marketing and
understanding the needs of consumers.” Neverthe-
less, they slowly adjusted as CEED’s efforts in training
winemakers and its assistance with promotion came
to bear fruit. Not only are sales of bottled Moldovan
wines to the EU rising rapidly—sales to Lithuania in
2014 grew by roughly 35 percent and to Romania by
60 percent—but Moldovan wines have begun winning
over critics as well. Just in June, wines from Moldova’s
highly regarded Château Vartely, an active participant
in the CEED II program, won two gold medals and two
silvers at the Festival of European Wines and Enotour-
ism, held in Oeiras, Portugal.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 81
 Meanwhile, EU support for Moldova’s wine industry
has been centered largely on a $100 million line of credit
from the EU’s European Investment Bank, plus a much
smaller technical-assistance program funded by the Dutch
government. Moldova and the European Union have also
now established a “deep and comprehensive free trade
area,” which has made it easier for Moldova to export
many goods, including wine, into the rest of Europe.
IN SPITE OF THESE RELATIVE SUCCESSES, RUSSIA’S
second wine ban came down in September 2013,
exposing yet again the vulnerabilities of Moldova
and its wine industry. As before, Russian officials
were very careful not to explicitly link the move to any
aspect of Moldova’s foreign policy. Gennady Onish-
chenko, the head of Russia’s public health authority,
said only that impurities had been found in the wine:
“We don’t intend to act as a nanny for the Moldovan
economy.… The ban is a necessary step that we have
undertaken reluctantly, but it is the only possible way
of solving the present situation.” (Subsequent tests by
the Moldovan government could find no evidence of
such contamination.)
But the wine ban didn’t emerge from a vacuum.
From 2006 to 2013, in step with USAID’s efforts to
reform Moldova’s wine industry, the country had
drawn ever closer to the EU, with visa facilitation in
2007 and more formal labor, migration, and travel
agreements in 2008. The real turning point came in
April 2009, when mass protests erupted over allega-
tions that Moldova’s then-ruling Party of Communists
had rigged parliamentary elections earlier that month.
The demonstrations eventually brought to power a
coalition of four pro-European parties. While the new
leadership was wary of antagonizing Moscow, it put
at the forefront of Moldova’s foreign policy European
integration and the signing of an association agree-
ment with the EU that would bring the country eco-
nomically and politically directly into Brussels’s orbit.
Russia, unsurprisingly, was deeply critical of the
shift. Referring to the protests after the disputed 2009
vote, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used excep-
tionally harsh language, describing the protesters
as “pogrom-makers” set on destroying the country.
So the timing of the wine ban, just two months
ahead of when both Moldova and Ukraine were set
to sign formal association agreements with the EU
in Vilnius, Lithuania, left little doubt that Russia was
again up to its old tricks. “They were trying to put
pressure on the Moldovan government ahead of the
82 JULY | AUGUST 2015
[Vilnius] summit and the signing of the association
agreement,” Hill, the former OSCE head in Moldova,
says. (In a similar move the following year, Russia
also banned Moldovan apples, another key export, in
an attempt to turn farmers against the government
just ahead of parliamentary elections. The vote in
the country’s north, where apples are grown, ended
up falling heavily in favor of Moldova’s pro-Russian
Party of Socialists.)
Nevertheless, Moldova agreed to ratify an associa-
tion agreement with the EU in Vilnius; Ukraine fate-
fully did not. (Kiev’s new government eventually did
sign an agreement in June 2014.) Though Moldova
hasn’t been plunged into violence by Russian-backed
separatists as its neighbor has, it has hardly survived
unscathed. Moldova has lost around one-third of
its wine market—a significant improvement from
the nearly two-thirds loss in 2006, thanks in part to
CEED, but devastating nonetheless. Russia’s actions
have even jeopardized Moldova’s traditionally sec-
ond-largest wine market in Ukraine. “The Donbass
[area of eastern Ukraine], where the fighting is tak-
ing place, is Ukraine’s wealthiest region outside of
Kiev,” Castel Mimi’s Frolov says. “And there’s no sell-
ing there anymore.”
The ban couldn’t have come at a worse time for
the Moldovan economy. Adrian Lupusor, director of
the Chisinau-based think tank Expert-Grup, predicts
the economy will stagnate this year, after expanding
4.6 percent in 2014. In a now-infamous banking scan-
dal, around $1 billion disappeared in November 2014
from the three largest domestic banks, equivalent to
more than one-fifth of the country’s GDP at current
exchange rates. As of June, the Moldovan currency had
lost roughly 30 percent of its value since that scandal.
Moscow, though, may be showing signs of eas-
ing its punishment—at least in the more Rus-
sia-friendly parts of Moldova. In May, it partially
relaxed the ban for a handful of winemakers in the
autonomous Gagauzia region, in Moldova’s south,
after Russia’s public health agency announced that
tests showed those wines again complied with its
standards. To observers in Chisinau, it wasn’t clear
whether the move heralded a wider rollback or was
simply a reward for Gagauzia’s behavior: In April,
the area’s 160,000 residents elected a stridently pro-
Moscow lawyer, Irina Vlah, as regional governor.
And in a 2014 referendum, 98 percent voted in favor
of integrating with a Russian-led customs union.
It’s no accident that the Kremlin excluded more
 Workers put labels and authenticity stamps on bottles of wine at a vineyard near Chisinau.
Western-leaning areas of Moldova, but it’s uncer-
tain whether this political jockeying will persuade
the rest of the country to follow Gagauzia’s example.
WHILE RUSSIA CONTINUES TO TOY WITH THE
Moldovan economy’s largest sectors, the general pop-
ulation, it seems, blames its own government, not
Moscow, for the fiscal woes. “Things like the bank-
ing scandal,” Hill says, “very much play into Russia’s
hands.” Moldovans think, he explains, that “if this is
democracy, let’s go east.” A public opinion poll con-
ducted in the spring by the Chisinau-based Institute for
Sociological and Marketing Research, in fact, showed
a 3-to-2 majority of the population favoring Moldova’s
OLEG NIKISHIN/KOMMERSANT PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic
Union over joining the EU. Moreover, the Party of
Socialists has emerged as the single largest party in
Parliament and a force on the political landscape.
This Eastern-looking shift comes during a lull in
Western assistance for the wine industry as CEED II
formally ended in June. In theory, the program has
left Moldovan winemakers with a clear path forward,
but the real test may be whether Russia does in fact lift
the wine ban wholesale. Lazar says that winemakers
are convinced by the strategy of producing higher-
quality, smaller-batch wine for Western markets but
admits that wineries would welcome a lifting of the
ban. “Of course,” she says, “they want to sell their
wines on the Russian market again.” A repeal of the
ban would lead to an immediate injection of cash for
many Moldovan wineries, including Castel Mimi,
which in addition to bottled wines makes wine distil-
lates used in brandies that are popular with Russian
consumers and that were also affected by the ban. But
there’s always the danger that some wineries could
fall back into their old bad habit of depending on the
unpredictable market to its east.
In the meantime, Moldova’s winemakers continue
to hope for the best—and to look for a way out of
this geopolitical tug of war. “We were so hopeful in
2009 with the democracy movement,” Castel Mimi’s
Frolov says. “Now we are simply tired of politics and
are losing faith in the country.” Q
MARK BAKER (@markbakerprague) is a Prague-based
writer and has authored numerous guidebooks
on Central and Eastern Europe for Lonely Planet,
Frommer’s, and Fodor’s.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 83
 Operation Underground Railroad, a small Mormon-led group, is going
undercover
to rescue kids from sex trafficking. But is its brand of salvation working?
By Thomas Stackpole | Photos by Jared P. Moossy
 just under Paul’s nose, their faces hidden
behind balaclavas.
“You’re working with the cops, are ya,
Mario?” Brian yells as he drops to the
ground. “You’re fired. You’re all fired!”
Stone-faced, Mario slips out of his chair
and slithers belly down. A policeman grabs
his arm and drags him into the middle of
the grass before searching him. The teen-
age girls, now lying on the floor of the
living room where they’d been left, put
their hands over their heads. One begins
to cry quietly. A female social worker co-
operating with the cops arrives at their side,
cooing that they’re not in trouble.
Their grotesque fun over, the Ameri-
cans are led uncuffed into a ground-floor
a warm morning in March, an American man named Paul stands on the balcony of a sprawl- room of the house. Plucked from his perch,
ing stucco mansion in Acapulco, Mexico. In the distance, the spring sun glimmers on the Paul is among the last hauled inside. “So
city’s harbor, nestled among iconic white beaches and lush peaks. Acapulco is quiet—rel- this is where they’re going to interrogate
atively speaking anyway. Caught in the cross-hairs of the country’s gruesome drug war, a us?” he asks.
city that once bustled with cruise ships and spring-breakers now has the ignominious dis- But it’s a deadpan question. Paul smiles,
tinction of being Mexico’s murder capital: 590 people were killed there in 2014. and some of the other Americans laugh.
The co-founder of a multibillion-dollar real estate investment fund, Paul is on the The mood in the room quickly loosens.
cusp of middle age. His short, graying hair is thick with gel, and he wears a pale blue Everything in the sting, the men agree,
shirt, sunglasses, and a Bentley-edition Breitling watch. He has come south of the bor- went according to plan. “Oh, man, did you
der to take advantage of Acapulco’s seedy underbelly. He isn’t after property or drugs, see Mario’s face?” Brian asks. “These guys
however. He’s looking for sex with underage girls. are going to jail for a long time.”
Down below, a dozen other gringos are scattered around the mansion’s pristine infin- Not a security guard at all, Brian is really
ity pool. A mix of associates and Paul’s imposing security detail—hulking ex-military named Tim Ballard. He’s the founder of
types in Oakley shades—they sip beers and chew on cigars. On the balcony’s railing, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR),
Paul carefully props an iPhone against a wine bottle so that he can look at the live visage a U.S.-based organization that goes under-
of a friend in Silicon Valley, beamed in on FaceTime to watch the lurid show. “I have to cover to rescue children forced into the sex
apologize,” Paul says. “There are only two girls coming.” trade. The Acapulco trip was the group’s
A little after midday, the girls arrive. They have long, dark hair and are squeezed into first foray into Mexico. In total, three peo-
strapless dresses. Leading them into the backyard is Mario, their squat, grim pimp. Men ple, including Mario, were arrested; they
around the pool shout, “Hey, hey, Super Ma-ri-ooo!” face prison sentences of up to 25 years,
The girls greet the gringos with cheek kisses and totter in stilettos into an airy liv- according to OUR.
ing room next to the lawn. There, a thick-armed security guard with a drooping blond Paul, a member of the OUR team who
mustache introduces himself as Brian and expresses some concerns to the pimp: Paul keeps his real identity private to protect
and his entourage got some young girls a few months ago, Brian explains, but when the his cover, holds up his phone: “It was awe-
boss started touching them, they flipped out. “If it happens again, I’m fired,” he says. some,” proclaims the disembodied voice
“So are these girls going to do everything?” Anal sex, Mario answers, “depends on how from Silicon Valley. An executive at a major
big” Paul is. But he insists the girls are game. Brian turns to one of them and asks how technology firm—OUR won’t provide his
old she is. “Voy a cumplir diez y seis,” she replies—almost 16. name—the man on FaceTime had donated
At a wrought-iron patio table, the final details are hashed out as Paul and the Sili- the money needed to set up the operation.
con Valley voyeur watch from above: $1,000 for the girls—half up front, half after the “Let’s fund another,” he says.
sex—plus a tip for Mario’s troubles. “You’re just like us,” Brian tells the pimp. “You’re “This is going to end—and I’m not
not afraid to get a little dirty from time to time.” lying—in the rescue of thousands and
When two flashbangs explode in the street outside the mansion, the pops echo dully thousands,” Ballard rhapsodizes, still
around the pool. For a moment, no one really seems to notice. But then more than two wearing his fake blond mustache. With-
dozen police officers in black SWAT gear come pouring into the yard. “Abajo! Get down!” out it, he’s the epitome of the all-American
they yell, their assault rifles raised. A second column swarms in from a side entrance man: tanned and fit, with bright blue eyes.

86 JULY | AUGUST 2015

“[The Mexican police] just learned how to
do something.”
After Mario and the girls have been
removed from the mansion, the Americans
pile into police trucks queued up to take
them to Acapulco’s airport. A loaned private
plane is waiting on the runway. Ballard and
Paul are due at a dinner in León hosted by
former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and
they’re already running late.
uman trafficking
is one of the world’s
fastest-growing crim-
inal enterprises,
according to the
United Nations. Pre-
cise figures are hard to come by, given the
inherent challenges of collecting data on
illegal activity. But according to estimates
from the International Labour Organi-
zation (ILO), trafficking is a $150 billion
industry affecting 20.9 million people
worldwide, nearly a quarter of whom are
marketed for sex.
The ILO estimates that 5.5 million chil-
dren are victims of the trafficking indus-
try, and many are sexually exploited. Some
young people are held or live in brothels,
while others are forced into the hands of
international criminal rings; still more are
marketed by relatives seeking cash. What
typically unites their stories is poverty.
Pimps or networks of traffickers usually
target people who are “poor, isolated and
Police raid an OUR party in the
Dominican Republic.
weak,” according to a report by the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime.
Efforts to eliminate sex trafficking have
enjoyed prominent backing in the United
States for about 20 years, ever since strange
bedfellows—feminists who opposed sex
work, politicians from both political par-
ties, and right-wing Christians—rallied
behind the cause of defeating modern-day
slavery. In 2003, three years after Congress
passed the Victims of Trafficking and Vio-
lence Protection Act, which established
new laws against trafficking and rights for
victims, President George W. Bush called
sex trafficking a “special evil” in an address
to the U.N. General Assembly.
Responding to the call for a moral cru-
sade, a handful of private organizations
has adopted what is now widely known as
a raid-and-rescue strategy: identify where
people are being sold for sex, send in police
to haul them out, and arrest traffickers.
Among the groups using this method is
the International Justice Mission (IJM), a
Washington, D.C.-based Christian legal
organization with a presence in 11 devel-
oping countries; it claims to have rescued
at least 258 people from sex trafficking and
abuse in 2014 alone. The FBI uses the same
model and says its busts have saved more
than 3,600 trafficked children since 2003.
OUR is a new entrant in this field. Ballard
was a U.S. government agent for a dozen
years, including a stint at the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS), for which he
posed as a pedophile to infiltrate child-traf-
ficking rings. But he became frustrated
with red tape. While working abroad, Bal-
lard says, “I could find children who were
being sold into the sex trade, but if there
was no U.S. nexus”—if the case would never
land in a U.S. courtroom for jurisdictional
or other reasons—“I couldn’t pursue it.”
So in 2013 he struck out on his own and
formed OUR, a small group of indepen-
dent operatives who could set up stings
anywhere in the world.
Ballard’s Mormon faith also heavily
influences his work. “The other option was
to face my maker one day and tell him why
I didn’t do it,” he says of his decision to
start combating crimes against children.
Ballard insists that religious belief isn’t a
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 87
requirement to join OUR but notes that
the staff members often pray together. If
someone isn’t “comfortable praying,” he
says, “they’re not going to be comfortable
working with us.” (In a February interview
with LDS Living magazine, Ballard was
more candid about his faith: He said he
launched OUR after being instructed by
God to “find the lost children.”)
Today, OUR has a full-time staff of 12
people and a stable of trained volunteers,
most of them Mormon. They include for-
mer military and intelligence officers,
nurses and Army medics, cops and mar-
tial arts instructors. From small offices in
Salt Lake City, Dallas, and Anaheim, Cali-
fornia, OUR has coordinated more than a dozen raids in Latin America and the Carib- The night before the raid in the
Dominican Republic, Dutch Turley points
bean. It claims to have saved at least 250 trafficking victims, including 123—55 of whom at a ledger that documents how many
were children— in three stings coordinated across Colombia last October. girls each trafficker plans to bring to
Simultaneously, OUR is making a public splash by amplifying the drama of its tactics the party (left); Turley, a former Navy
SEAL, does crossfit (right).
and the ways people can support the group’s cause without ever busting into a brothel.
A documentary movie, called The Abolitionists, has been screened privately in select
U.S. theaters, and a proposed TV series about OUR is currently being filmed. The orga-
nization’s “give a Lincoln, save a slave” campaign, which like the term “underground
railroad” conjures noble notions of 1800s anti-slavery efforts, asks people to become our days after the
“abolitionists” by giving $5 a month. Supporters can sign up to receive text-message Acapulco bust, Ballard
alerts “when children are saved.” If they’re big funders, they can get front-row seats: The is sitting on a plastic
tech executive watching the Acapulco operation gave more than $40,000. lawn chair on a beach
As of this writing, OUR has 229,000 likes on its Facebook page, 3,000 more than the in Sosúa, a town on the
veteran IJM has. According to Jerry Gowen, OUR’s chief operating officer, the organiza- Dominican Republic’s
tion has raised almost $5 million since its founding less than two years ago. Celebrities, north shore. It’s late morning, and behind
many of whom are Mormon, are getting on board too. The Walking Dead star Laurie him is a strip of tourist restaurants and
Holden and Dancing With the Stars’ Chelsie Hightower have participated in raids. tchotchke shops. On another chair nearby,
Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes went undercover with the group. This March, OUR Dutch Turley, a 6-foot-3-inch, 230-pound
announced its merger with the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, a child-protection NGO former Navy SEAL, is getting a $10 pedi-
run by the family of the young Mormon woman famously kidnapped in Utah when she cure from a woman with dyed red hair who
was just 14 and held in captivity for nine months. carries a small nail kit in a bucket up and
OUR and its growing network of backers are nothing if not committed and well inten- down the beach.
tioned. But do their chosen methods actually work? The answer is anything but clear-cut. The lazy scene belies an early step in
Though most people can get behind fighting human trafficking, how to wage the OUR’s next raid: The men are waiting for
war is another matter. Nor is claiming victory necessarily quick or simple. After a raid, two young Dominican traffickers who the
there’s long-term support to consider, such as psychological care and rehabilitation for day before had promised they could deliver
victims; this could take months, if not years. “To realize success in a lot of these cases girls, maybe even some as young as 12.
takes a lot of time,” notes Rebecca Surtees, a senior researcher at the Nexus Institute, When the men arrive, they’re wearing
an international human rights research and policy organization. board shorts; one sports a Lakers hat. Stand-
But time, OUR argues, is exactly what children being sold for sex do not have. Getting ing near the Caribbean surf, they tell Ballard
them out of a horrendous situation as fast as possible is the top priority. “The children and Turley that they have pictures of the teen-
are desperately waiting for us,” Ballard testified before Congress in May, advocating agers on offer. “I know you guys are tourists,”
that the U.S. government do more to combat trafficking. “I know. I have seen them.” one says, “but you can’t have cameras.” It’s
Right, wrong, or flawed, this urgent mission only seems to be gaining steam. Between too risky to let evidence leave the scene. In
February and April, OUR staged five operations in as many countries, including its first in the end, they promise to bring 13 girls the next
Thailand. “This idea of actually doing something is very powerful,” says Anne Gallagher, day to a party—the cover for the operation.
an expert in trafficking and an advisor to the United Nations. “It’s addictive to people.” The Sosúa sting is following OUR’s usual

88 JULY | AUGUST 2015

pattern. The first phase is finding a govern-
ment, in a country with high trafficking
rates, willing to cooperate with the group.
OUR’s staff members reach out to people
they know from their former lives as agents
and soldiers: local police and prosecutors
with whom they’re already friendly or rep-
resentatives from the State Department,
FBI, or DHS who know the territory. In the
Dominican Republic, the group secured a
memorandum of understanding with fed-
eral police before getting to work.
That work is done by what OUR calls
its “jump team.” Ballard coordinates trips
and inhabits fake identities as needed. Paul
plays the moneyman; lest anyone ques-
tion him, he has created a false, elaborate
identity online, complete with a Facebook
profile boasting pictures of yachts and pri-
vate jets to advertise his lavish playboy life.
Turley handles tactical details—who goes
where and when during raids—and can
act as muscle if necessary. Matt Osborne,
OUR’s senior vice president for rescue and
rehabilitation, acts as the main liaison with
local law enforcement. Then there’s Krista
Rykert, a tall, blond CrossFit instructor and
gym owner from a Salt Lake City suburb
who plays the “groomer”: She talks to the
children as a sting is happening, gives them
candy, plays games—whatever is needed
to keep them distracted. The film crew for
the TV series is in tow as well; cameramen
shoot the jump team using lenses hidden
in backpacks, water bottles, and sunglasses.
OUR operatives walk the streets of which-
ever city or town is their latest target and
pose as potential sex customers. They go
to bars, talk to hustlers, explain that they’re
throwing a party and want to cut a deal that
will satisfy their boss’s desires. Sometimes
Paul himself goes looking for traffickers;
he throws money around, buys strang-
ers drinks, and telegraphs that he wants
particularly exotic partners—meaning,
underage girls. (The group is careful not to
entrap potential targets.)
In Sosúa, the jump team has trolled
beaches and the local red-light district,
thick with frumpy Americans and Euro-
peans in town for sex. “Some guy will almost
always come up to you and ask you if you
want something,” Ballard says. “‘You look-
ing for some smoke? Maybe a girl?’” One
woman at a roadside restaurant even offered
her daughter, who she claimed was 17, and
five of her friends. (The age of consent in the
Dominican Republic is 18.) Wearing tank
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 89
tops and heavy makeup, the girls smiled at
Osborne as he pretended to check them out.
The goal is to get as many children as
possible to the site of a bust. By the night
before OUR’s party in Sosúa, seven people,
including the young men from the beach,
have said they can bring more than 26 girls
for Paul and his friends.
OUR has rented two houses—one for
the faux celebration, the other across the
street as a hideout for cops. Both are mod-
ern, all stone and glass, and sit in a tony,
gated community a short drive from the
beach. The documentary crew carefully
places more than 20 cameras throughout
the party house. (Police often use this foot-
age as legal evidence.) Some $7,000 in cash
is meticulously laid out on a bed and pho-
tographed before being divided into enve-
lopes for each trafficker.
For final preparations, police officers and
members of the local prosecutor’s office stop
by. The logistics are explained: Some police
officers will come in through the driveway,
while others will enter a side door by the
kitchen. The cues for storming will be a text
90 JULY | AUGUST 2015
message from an undercover Dominican cop
working alongside OUR when Ballard shouts
the words, “Bring in the wine!”
The prosecutor, who will ultimately try
the case against the people arrested, is sat-
isfied. “Remind everyone to keep straight
faces,” admonishes a contact from the
U.S. Embassy who has come to survey the
setup. The mission is a go.
UR says its method
of collaborating with
l aw e n f o r c e m e n t
and luring traffickers
works like a charm. At
a $200-per-plate gala
in Washington, D.C., last November, Ballard
regaled more than 260 guests with success
stories. Wearing a dark suit and a slightly too
wide red necktie, he told the crowd at the
JW Marriott, “I don’t care about borders and
boundaries when they’re kids.” A teaser for
The Abolitionists played. OUR makes slam-
dunk cases, Ballard’s voice-over explained,
and then ensures they’re “delivered to [law
enforcement] on a silver platter.” The gala
raised more than $150,000.
Critics, however, are quick to pick apart
claims of triumph, as they have been
since the advent of raid and rescue. IJM
largely pioneered the field in the early
2000s when it conducted high-profile
stings across Southeast Asia; during a
March 2003 bust in Cambodia, journal-
ists from Dateline tagged along to pro-
duce a widely watched segment called
“Children for Sale.” Later, in 2011, IJM
took New York Times’ columnist Nicho-
las Kristof along for an operation in India.
IJM’s approach quickly gained acolytes.
An Internet search reveals numerous raid-
and-rescue groups with names like Des-
tiny Rescue and The Exodus Road. “The
undercover and mass-mediated model of
activism that IJM propounds has become
the emulated standard,” Barnard College
professor Elizabeth Bernstein, a promi-
nent critic of raids, has written.
Detractors, including many health and
human rights advocates, argue that stings
are only as good as their ability to actu-
Tim Ballard speaks on the phone at the sting
house in the Dominican Republic (left); cam-
eras are used to document OUR raids (below).
ally improve lives—and that they often
do the opposite. “The appeal of the res-
cue is that it’s a happy ending,” says Janie
Chuang, who teaches courses on traffick-
ing at American University’s Washington
College of Law. “But it’s not. It’s a really
hard life.”
In some cases, victims are quickly
cut loose because governments lack the
resources or concern to assist them. Others
choose to leave protective services; some-
times they fear that authorities will abuse
them or that traffickers will do the same
to their families. (This is to say nothing of
rescued adults who weren’t trafficked at
all but had chosen to be sex workers, a dis-
tinction that raid groups often fail to make.)
Mother Jones found in 2003 that girls and
women saved in an IJM bust in Thailand
were “locked into two rooms of an orphan-
age by Public Welfare authorities” and were
allowed outside for only one hour each day.
Following up on the operation featured
on Dateline, the Nation reported in 2009
that some of the rescued children were
addicted to intravenous drugs and made
deals with the police to keep using; at least
a dozen ran away and returned to broth-
els. “You hear about the raid, but you don’t
hear a lot about the safe houses, the rehab
process,” says Gretchen Soderlund, a pro-
fessor at the University of Oregon who
studies trafficking.
Sometimes, the consequences can be
even worse. In the same investigation,
the Nation learned that IJM didn’t track
minors rescued in Thailand, including
young girls from Myanmar who subse-
quently may have been deported back to
their oppressive homeland. It also found
that busts in Cambodia disrupted health
NGOs’ efforts to educate women and girls
in brothels about HIV; pimps believed
the groups had aided IJM and no longer
wanted them providing care.
Holly Burkhalter, IJM’s vice president
of government relations and advocacy,
shot back in 2012 in the Anti-Trafficking
Review, “This view suggests that there is
some level of backlash by brothel owners
against health workers that would justify
leaving the children to their fate.” Critics,
she added, “have not offered any alterna-
tive to police operations to apprehend per-
petrators and bring them to justice. That
is because there are none.”
Still, IJM has tweaked its approach over
time. “It’s not just a … drop-in to get a couple
of children out of a brothel and then leave.
We did that in the early days,” Burkhalter
said in an interview with FOREIGN POLICY.
IJM now sets up offices in countries where
it works—it recently opened one in the
Dominican Republic—and places greater
emphasis on training police and building
the capacity of judicial and social-service
systems. “We want to walk away from the
image of the Western superhero going into
places of darkness to rescue … the little girl,”
says Pablo Villeda, IJM’s vice president of
regional operations for Latin America.
Ballard knows the criticisms that have
plagued other raid-and-rescue outfits, and
he is wary of OUR being characterized as a
group of vigilantes. He insists that his orga-
nization has strong relationships with its
police partners and that its missions are
intended to set examples for future stings.
OUR is also developing software that could
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 91
flag international travelers whose comput-
ers are known to have downloaded child
pornography—a tool that could help for-
eign officials intervene before customers
even get to traffickers.
Still, the organization has opened itself
to plenty of reproaches. Busts, Soderlund
says, are “very strategic events that are
almost tailor-made for the media.” OUR
has embraced this notion, using the Inter-
net, television, and film to push a slave-
to-saved narrative. But Chuang says this
story is an oversimplification that “just
seems to be glorifying the savior.” She
also worries that flashy campaigns divert
donor funding from “the mundane work
that needs to be done on the prevention
side” of the trafficking equation—a con-
cern shared by Randy Newcomb, presi-
dent and CEO of the San Francisco-based
philanthropy Humanity United, who
wrote in the Anti-Trafficking Review in
2014 that donors’ desire for visible results
has had “the unintended consequence of
growing the capacity of only a select group
of organisations that may, in fact, be more
successful at marketing and far less suc-
cessful at actually ending trafficking.”
Unlike IJM, OUR doesn’t have plans to
shift from its parachute approach. “We
really feel like we’re not in the building-
homes business,” says Gowen, OUR’s chief operating officer, referring to planting roots n the day of the
in foreign locales. “That’s not our … core competency.” This isn’t to say that the group Dominican raid,
isn’t concerned with aftercare: OUR routinely links up with local entities that can assist a bevy of teenage
the children gathered during raids and says it is hoping, with resources from the Eliza- girls arrives in a
beth Smart Foundation, to provide these groups with a best-practices guide and funding. caravan of vans,
This model, however, doesn’t always work. In 2014, after OUR’s first operation in shuttle buses, and
the Dominican Republic, a local organization called the National Council for Children SUVs at the house rented for the fake
and Adolescents (CONANI when abbreviated in Spanish) quickly discovered it didn’t party. Some have come from as far as
have the capacity to handle the 26 girls rescued. They were released in less than a week. Santo Domingo, the Dominican Repub-
Some still went on to testify against the men arrested in the sting—as of press time, a lic’s capital; the city sits 125 miles away,
verdict had yet to be delivered in the case—but CONANI lost track of others. “The influx on the country’s opposite coast. Wearing
of a large number of victims at once is very challenging to the social-service side,” says colorful dresses, the girls stand around the
Fernando Rodriguez, IJM’s field office director in the Dominican Republic. (IJM has backyard pool, chatting nervously. At one
coordinated with OUR on two raids.) “To some degree, it is potentially a disservice and point, all of them start singing. Rykert,
creates more problems than it would solve.” the OUR groomer, has told them it’s her
Sometimes, OUR takes matters into its own hands. After the Acapulco bust, which birthday—a way to keep the girls busy as,
was much smaller than anticipated—and one of the two girls saved turned out not behind sliding glass doors, other opera-
to be a minor—OUR decided to take care of the almost-16-year-old’s financial needs. tives negotiate the day’s deal. To further
She was placed at a shelter in Mexico City and “wants to be a beautician,” Osborne the lie, the deck has been decorated with
says, estimating that OUR will provide $20,000 raised over the next few years for her pink and yellow balloons, and the gringos
care and education. “In the small rescues you don’t get as many,” he explains, “but saunter around drinking Red Bull poured
you can really, really make a difference in the life of this girl.” into Presidente beer bottles.

92 JULY | AUGUST 2015


Rykert towers over the teenagers, her
wrestler-size arms stretching out of a
cobalt-blue tank top. She hams it up, con-
ducting the singing with her hands: “Cum-
pleaños feliz!” The chorus peaks in an off-key
“Deseamos Mariaaaaa”—the fake name
Rykert is using—“cumpleaños feliz!” The
girls, gathered in an arc, burst into applause.
As the teenagers and Rykert take selfies,
Ballard, Turley, Osborne, and undercover
Dominican police hand the traffickers
the cash. “Vino!” Ballard yells to his asso-
ciates, as one of the cops shoots off the
text-message signal.
What happens next is much the same as
in Acapulco. The Americans pretend to be
shocked as the cops rush in. The teenagers
begin to cry. The traffickers, who had been
grinning at their good luck, turn dumb-
struck. Afterward, the Americans and the
police congratulate each other, but the cel-
ebration is once again short-lived: Ballard
Dominican police arrest alleged traffickers
and OUR members during a raid.
has to get to the airport to make a meet-
ing back in the United States. “Can we get
a quick wrap-up?” asks one of the cam-
eramen as OUR’s founder grabs his bags.
“Some of [the girls] were crying on the way
here,” Ballard says to a camera before pull-
ing off his hidden wire. “These were truly,
truly kids being trafficked.”
A few members of the OUR team stay
behind, planning to lay low for the night at
one of the tawdry all-inclusive resorts that
dot the Dominican Republic. They drive
away from the house not long after Ballard,
in the vehicles that brought the girls to the
house. The teenagers have all been taken
to CONANI and been given access to IJM
psychologists. A few hours after the raid,
OUR’s Twitter feed boasts:
JUST IN
UNOFFICIAL NUMBERS:
29 SAVED
6 ARRESTED
YOUNGEST AGE: 13
Less than three weeks later, the girls
are released to their families on a judge’s
order—well short of the three months
of targeted care the rehabilitation orga-
nizations had hoped to provide. IJM’s
Villeda claimed in an interview with
FOREIGN POLICY that his group asked OUR
to consider a smaller operation “knowing
that the Dominican government didn’t
have the capacity to house the number of
victims that they were expecting to rescue.”
OUR, however, insists it was the govern-
ment’s call. “Were there too many that were
brought? Perhaps,” Ballard said in a phone
interview in June. “But that’s the number
that the Dominicans wanted.”
He also detailed his plans for his group’s
future. “It’s not just a bunch of sex parties,”
he explained. “It’s going to be raids on broth-
els; it’s going to be buying one kid on the
beach from one trafficker … [and] military-
style raids on a slave-labor camp.” OUR, in
other words, is just getting started. Q
THOMAS STACKPOLE (@tom_stackpole) is an
assistant editor at FOREIGN POLICY. He
embedded with OUR operations in Mex-
ico and the Dominican Republic.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 93
GLENN DENNING SURESH NAIDU JEFFREY SACHS MERIT E. JANOW DOUGLAS ALMOND ESTER R. FUCHS BEN S. ORLOVE

Columbia SIPA
Where the World Connects
With a rigorous curriculum that teaches core analytic skills and offers
six practical, career-oriented concentration areas, SIPA prepares the
next generation of world leaders to address critical issues.

sipa.columbia.edu
MAPPA MUNDI NATIONAL SECURITY ECONOMICS ENERGY BOOKS  CULTURE THE FIXER
Today’s macro- Could the just- Singapore grew its Climate change “Trash cooking,” Waqar Gillani
economists will ification for the economy large by is remaking more Australian wagyu, on the best places
never be able to NSA’s mass starting small. than geography. and other foods on to eat daal and
compete with the surveillance pro- Why a liberalizing Just look to the the newest front spot famous
coming big-data gram be rooted Cuba should do South China line of soft diplo- cricket players
revolution. | P. 96 in a lie? | P. 98 the same. | P. 104 Sea. | P. 106 macy. | P. 108 in Lahore. | P. 110

Illustration by GEL JAMLANG

 mappa mundi
by DAVID ROTHKOPF

Requiem for the

Macrosaurus
The beginning of the
end of the Jurassic
Period of economics.

This summer’s biggest movie

is Jurassic World. Apparently,
people have an endless appe-
tite for dinosaurs, which could
also explain much about the
popularity of Flintstones vita-
mins or, for that matter, Vladi-
mir Putin. Fortunately for these
people, there remain dinosaurs
among us who are producing
mayhem on a scale unimagined
by even Hollywood’s CGI wiz-
ards. ¶ We call them economists.
¶ The term may initially evoke
visions of kindly bespectacled
wonks droning on about arcane
theories or perhaps government
big shots mumbling unintelli-
gibly before Congress. But we
know better: These are power-
ful women and men. They have
made giant policy decisions that
have affected the lives of billions,
often while working behind
closed doors with data and on
strategies that few understand
and fewer still believe in.
Economics has long been known as the dismal science. Thomas
Malthus, a cleric who also wrote about economics, has become the
poster child used by many to illustrate the rationale behind this label.
(Thomas Carlyle actually first coined the term in reference to the study
of the business of slavery.) In the very last years of the 18th century,
Malthus posited the argument that population growth would ulti-
mately derail human society’s efforts to perfect itself. “[T]he power of
population is,” he wrote, “indefinitely greater than the power in the
earth to produce subsistence for man.” It is indeed a grim prognosis.
But it highlights another reason economics might be seen as dismal:
that is, just how off the mark its predictions can be.
Being wrong has long been a special curse of economists. You
might not think this would be the case in a so-called “science.”
But, of course, all sciences struggle in those early years before sci-
entists have enough data to support theories that can reflect and
predict what actually happens in nature. Scientists from Galileo to

96 JULY | AUGUST 2015 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER


Einstein have offered great discoveries but,
due to the limits of their age, have labored
under gross misconceptions. And in econom-
ics we are hardly in the era of Galileo quite
yet. It is more like we are somewhere in the
Middle Ages, where, based on some care-
ful observation of the universe and a really
inadequate view of the scope and nature
of that universe, we have produced proto-
science—also known today as crackpottery.
(See long-standing views that the Earth was
the center of the solar system or the belief
that bleeding patients would cure them by
ridding them of their “bad humors.”)
Modern economic approaches, theo-
ries, and techniques, the ones that policy-
makers fret over and to which newspapers
devote barrels of ink, will someday be seen as
similarly primitive. For example, economic
policymakers regularly use gross estimates
of national and international economic
performances—largely aggregated measures
based on data and models that are some-
where between profoundly flawed and crazy
wrong—to assess society’s economic health,
before determining whether to bleed the eco-
nomic body politic by reducing the money
supply or to warm it up by pumping new
money into its system. Between these steps
and regulating just how much the govern-
ment spends and takes in taxes, we have just
run through most of the commonly utilized
and discussed economic policy tools—the
big blunt instruments of macroeconomics.
I remember that when I was in govern-
ment, those of us who dealt with trade
policy or commercial issues were seen as
pipsqueaks in the economic scheme of
things by all the macrosauruses beneath
whose feet the earth trembled, whose
pronouncements echoed within the can-
yons of financial capitals, and who felt
everything we and anyone else did was
playing at the margins.
But think of the data on which those deci-
sions were based. GDP, as it is calculated
today, has roughly the same relationship to
the size of the economy as estimates of the
number of angels that can dance on the head
of a pin do to the size of heaven. It misses vast
amounts of economic activity and counts
some things as value creation that aren’t at
all. Even the guy who pioneered the idea in
the 1930s, Simon Kuznets, warned against
using it as the prime measure of national
economic well-being. Trade data, such as
that used in measuring national surpluses
and deficits, misses a big chunk of trade in
services and much Internet activity, among
many other swaths of trade—and is widely
reported inaccurately. Labor statistics, such
as unemployment rates, are cooked and
deceptive. The list goes on. The reality is
that only two things are known about most
of the data that policymakers use to make
decisions: It is late and it is wrong.
But today the world stands at the dawn of a
new era thanks to the advent of big data and
enhanced computing power. Already there
exist data flows that will show economic fluc-
tuations in real time and down to an incredi-
ble level of detail: by community, by block, by
family, by business, by however you want to
slice it. The world will also be able to find cor-
relations never before imagined. Old ideas,
like tracking national economic performance
based on geography, will give way to new
ones, like tracking customizable groups that
share much closer correlations than bor-
ders. There is a “you-istan” out there full of
millions of people who act more like you,
who respond to stimuli more like you, and
who rise and fall more like you than do your
neighbors. Next-generation economists will
be able to target their actions more surgically.
Whereas today’s economic models rely on
a relative handful of variables, future mod-
els will be able to utilize a limitless number,
creating opportunities for policymakers to
develop new tools. Many of these new mod-
els and tools will require not the insights
of microeconomists, but those of nano-
economists, superspecialists in the relation-
ship between much smaller economic units
and the larger economy as a whole. Economic
policymaking will therefore devolve from
central governments to state and local gov-
ernments, which are not only closer to the
issues and the solutions that workers, com-
OBSERVATION DECK
panies, investors, and citizens require, but
are better equipped to work with the local pri-
vate sector in real time to solve those issues.
New economic theories will also emerge
based on growing sources of real-time data
about every aspect of markets and the fac-
tors affecting them—and new, ever more
powerful tools will be created for analyzing
that data. Some will relate to the fact that
soon money as we know it will be replaced
by alternative bit-based and mobile-
payment systems, knocking old-school mon-
etary policies for a loop. Others will have to
do with the new ways we not only create jobs,
but define work. There may ultimately be a
need to revisit the issue of the redistribution
of wealth as big companies harness capital,
technology, and data to grow rich—but in
so doing, benefit comparatively few inves-
tors and employees, while displacing many.
Just as the 20th century saw the advent of
the weekend, the hyperproductivity of the
intelligent-technology-empowered 21st
century might see labor demand fall and
four- or three-day weeks become the norm.
Taxation will transform as methods by which
we track activity and levy fees within the
economy change; such processes will eas-
ily cover more kinds of activity in real time,
while algorithms will constantly adjust for
the economic circumstances of those being
taxed. Gradually, there will be a recognition
that most of the economic value in the global
economy is created and exchanged in virtual
rather than real space, with important con-
sequences for the metrics and ideas we use
for measuring that value.
Indeed, tomorrow’s economics will be
so unlike that of today’s that it might just
take a Hollywood device—like a mosquito
preserved in amber, carrying, for example,
the blood of Alan Greenspan, from which
viable DNA can re-create this macrosau-
rus—for future generations to fully grasp
the Jurassic Period economic thinking and
approaches that have governed and guided
our daily lives. Q
DAVID ROTHKOPF (@djrothkopf) is CEO and
editor of the FP Group.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 97
 national security
by JAMES BAMFORD

Missed Calls
Is the NSA lying
about its failure to
prevent 9/11?

On March 20, 2000, as part of

a trip to South Asia, U.S. Presi-
dent Bill Clinton was scheduled
to land his helicopter in the des-
perately poor village of Joypura,
Bangladesh, and speak to locals
under a 150-year-old banyan
tree. At the last minute, though,
the visit was canceled; U.S. intel-
ligence agencies had discov-
ered an assassination plot. In
a lengthy email, London-based
members of the International
Islamic Front for Jihad Against
Jews and Crusaders, a terror- They monitored the line 24/7. But at the time, the agency now
ist group established by Osama claims, it had no technical way of knowing who was placing the
bin Laden, urged al Qaeda sup- call. The culprit, it would later be revealed, was Khalid al-Mih-
porters to “Send Clinton Back dhar, one of the men bin Laden had picked months earlier to lead
in a Coffin” by firing a shoul- the forthcoming 9/11 attacks. He was calling from his apartment
der-launched missile at the in San Diego, California.
president’s chopper. ¶ The same The NSA knew about Mihdhar’s connection to bin Laden and
day that Clinton was supposed had earlier linked his name with the operations center. Had they
to visit Joypura, the phone rang known he was now reaching out to bin Laden’s switchboard from a
at bin Laden’s operations center U.S. number, on the day an al Qaeda-linked assassination plot was
in Sanaa, Yemen. To counterter- planned, the agency could have legally obtained an order to tap
rorism specialists at the National the San Diego phone line. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Court, in fact, approves eavesdropping on suspected terrorists
Meade, Maryland, the Yemeni and spies in the United States. By monitoring Mihdhar’s domes-
number—967-1-200-578—was at tic calls, the agency certainly would have discovered links to the
the pinnacle of their target list. 9/11 hijackers living on the East Coast, including Mohamed Atta.

98 JULY | AUGUST 2015 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER


It’s likely, in other words, that 9/11 would
have been stopped in its tracks.
A decade and a half later, that call and
half a dozen others made from the San
Diego apartment are at the center of the
heated debate over the NSA’s domestic sur-
veillance activities—namely the agency’s
collection of the public’s telephone meta-
data, which George W. Bush’s and Barack
Obama’s administrations have claimed was
authorized by the 2001 Patriot Act. (That
law expired this June and was replaced
with the USA Freedom Act, which states
that, without a warrant from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA
will no longer have access to telephone
metadata records.)
According to Michael Hayden, the NSA’s
director from 1999 to 2005, the failure to
realize that the man phoning Sanaa was
located in San Diego was evidence that
mass surveillance is vital to U.S. national
security. “Nothing in the physics of the
intercept, nothing in the content of the
call, told us they were in San Diego,”
Hayden told Frontline in 2014. “If we’d
had the metadata program … those num-
bers in San Diego would have popped up.”
It’s a sentiment shared by a host of
national leaders, including President
Obama. “One of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid
al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San
Diego to a known al Qaeda safe house in
Yemen,” he said in a 2014 speech at the Jus-
tice Department. “NSA saw that call, but
it could not see that the call was coming
from an individual already in the United
States. The telephone metadata program
under Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] was
designed to map the communications of
terrorists so we can see who they may be in
contact with as quickly as possible.”
But according to some former senior
NSA officials, the agency did have the
technical capability in 2000 to determine
that the calls to bin Laden’s operations
center came from California. “They’re
trying to cover up the failure of the NSA,”
said J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior analyst
who worked at the NSA for 32 years, until
October 2001. “And I think they’re embar-
rassed by that.”
THE COVERAGE OF THE OPERATIONS center in
Yemen was what NSA veterans describe
as “cast iron.” Wiebe explains: “You have
a target so important to the system that
you don’t ever tune a receiver away from
that frequency or off of that target.” And,
of course, every phone transmission is
“THEY’RE TRYING TO COVER
UP THE FAILURE OF THE NSA,”
SAYS A FORMER SENIOR NSA
ANALYST. “AND I THINK THEY’RE
EMBARRASSED BY THAT.”
automatically accompanied by informa-
tion required to charge the correct phone
companies. “You know the phone numbers
involved, who’s making the phone call, and
who it’s going to because the billing system
has to have that metadata to charge you,”
Wiebe notes. All that was required to track
a number of interest, in short, was access to
phone companies’ records or technology.
During a private lunch in Washington,
former NSA Senior Executive Service mem-
ber William Binney, who was in charge
of automating the agency’s worldwide
eavesdropping operations, detailed how
interception worked. “When you have a
[cast-iron] number like that, it’s tasked at
OBSERVATION DECK
multiple sites, so any call coming into or out
is hit by multiple sites and recorded, first
of all, but also transcribed as soon as [NSA
analysts] have a transcriber available,” Bin-
ney said. The signal “could go by satellite
or cable, or a mix,” he said, adding that the
cooperating phone companies then “would
pop it right into our recorders.”
Beyond eavesdropping on satellite sig-
nals from dishes on the ground, the NSA
was also able to get inside satellites them-
selves, often through covert agreements
with personnel of telecommunications
companies and occasionally without the
knowledge of upper management. With
access to satellites, the NSA could pick and
choose what country codes, city codes, and
specific phone numbers it wanted to inter-
cept and secretly transmit information to
an agency facility.
According to another high-ranking NSA
veteran who asked not to be named, among
the businesses with which the agency had
relationships was Inmarsat, a satellite tele-
com company whose services bin Laden
had used to communicate with contacts
while in Afghanistan. “It’s Inmarsat for
Christ’s sake. We have certain arrange-
ments,” the former NSA staffer said,
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 99
national security OBSERVATION DECK

adding that the setup was similar to Prism,

the NSA’s program in which it cooperated
with major Internet companies, such as
Google and Yahoo, to collect user data.
The NSA, the source said, was also able
to covertly eavesdrop on another major
satellite system: Thuraya. Based in the
United Arab Emirates, Thuraya provides
mobile coverage to more than 160 coun-
tries throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and
the Middle East. This company, like most
others of its ilk, encrypts communications
signals as they travel up to a satellite and
then down to a ground station; however,
the NSA cracked the encryption. “Our
secret was that the Thuraya system had
been broken for a long time—deep state
secret,” the source said. “Routinely, we
could intercept [the satellite transmis-
sion] at will. We could take any number
that was being dialed in or out … [and]
listen in literally live on any conversation
or after the fact.… One of the things NSA
became very good at was breaking satel-
lite communications systems.”
IN AN AGENCY FILLED WITH
SECRETS, THE NSA’S FAILURE TO
DETECT THE 9/11 PLOT OR HELP
OTHER AGENCIES DO SO IS PROBABLY
ITS DEEPEST AND DARKEST.
The NSA, in other words, was able to
monitor every call going into and out of
the al Qaeda operations center in Yemen—
including the 221 calls that came in from
bin Laden’s phone in Afghanistan.
AFTER 9/11, THOMAS DRAKE, a member of
the NSA’s Senior Executive Service, was
assigned to provide an overview of what
the agency knew at the time of the attacks
to a Senate subcommittee during a closed-
door hearing. In his research, Drake dis-
covered the transcripts of the calls from
Mihdhar to the Sanaa operations center.
“We essentially had cast-iron coverage
on that safe house at least since 1996.…
People don’t realize how much NSA actu-
ally knew about the network,” he told me
during a recent dinner. “Some of the best
analysts, traditionally trained analysts,

BOOKS FOR SERIOUS THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION

Meeting China Halfway US Foreign Policy
How to Defuse the and Defense Strategy
Emerging US-China Rivalry The Evolution of
Lyle J. Goldstein an Incidental Superpower
cloth, $29.95, 978-1-62616-160-3 Derek S. Reveron, Nikolas K. Gvosdev,
and Mackubin Thomas Owens
The Global Village Myth cloth, $49.95, 978-1-62616-158-0
Distance, War, and paper, $29.95, 978-1-62616-091-0
the Limits of Power
Patrick Porter Nuclear Authority
cloth, $49.95, 978-1-62616-193-1 The IAEA and the Absolute Weapon
paper, $29.95, 978-1-62616-192-4 Robert L. Brown
Not for sale in the UK, the British cloth, $54.95, 978-1-62616-182-5
Commonwealth (excluding Canada),
Europe, and Africa. paper, $32.95, 978-1-62616-183-2
Not for sale in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India,
the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,
and Afghanistan

AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS FROM FOLLOW US @GUPRESS

SELECT EBOOK RETAILERS.

100 JULY | AUGUST 2015

Expand Your Global Reach
Earn Your Master of Arts in Diplomacy – Online
Norwich’s Master of Arts in Diplomacy online program can help you develop
the specialized skills you’ll need to build cooperation and solve problems on an
international scale. Whether your background is business, military, government
VYPU[OLUVUWYVÄ[ZLJ[VY`V\»SSNHPUHUL^WLYZWLJ[P]LVU[OLJVTWSL_P[PLZVM
communicating and negotiating global affairs.

It’s time to think globally.

Visit diplomacy.norwich.edu/fpp
VYJHSS L_[[VSLHYUTVYL
national security
had essentially in early ’01 put together
a pretty good picture,” Drake added. (He
left the agency in 2007 and was later
indicted for leaking NSA documents to the
Baltimore Sun. Those charges were even-
tually dismissed; I was a member of his
defense team.)
When Drake heard Hayden’s denial
that the NSA had the technical capa-
bility to determine that Mihdhar was
calling from San Diego, he completely
disagreed. “Not true. That’s an absolute
lie,” he said. “Every number that comes
into that switchboard, if you’re cast-iron
coverage on that switchboard, you know
exactly what that number is and where
it comes from.… You know exactly—
otherwise it can’t get there.”
Another problem, according to Drake,
was that before the 9/11 attacks, the NSA
didn’t share what it knew with other fed-
eral intelligence agencies—and it has
sought to cover up its negligence after
Secure the world–
and your future.
Earn your master’s degree in
international security studies with
UMass Lowell online or on campus.
uml.edu/international-security
the fact. Drake put this in his report for
the subcommittee, he said, but the docu-
ment was rejected by his boss at the NSA,
who subsequently removed him from the
hearing’s roster of participants.
Confirmation of what Drake uncov-
ered comes from Michael Scheuer, who
ran the bin Laden desk at the CIA prior
to 9/11. He knew the NSA had succeeded
in developing cast-iron coverage of the al
Qaeda operations center in Yemen, but
that it refused to share the raw intelligence
with his agency. “Inmarsat calls were very
important,” he said, “and we knew that
because NSA had told us … not only [in]
the run-up to 9/11, but to the attacks in
East Africa [in 1998] and other places.”
In desperation, according to Scheuer,
the CIA constructed its own satellite
dish in the Middle East to intercept calls.
“Eventually, CIA built its own collection
capability, but we could only collect one
side of the conversation—I can’t remem-
OBSERVATION DECK
ber if it was the up-going side to the sat-
ellite or the down-coming side.” After
collecting and translating its part of the
intelligence, the CIA would request the
remaining intelligence from the NSA “so
we could better understand it,” he said.
“But we never got it.”
“We sent about 250 electronic mes-
sages … and not one of them was ever
answered,” he claims. To make matters
even worse, nor did the NSA share the
information with the FBI, according to
the 9/11 Commission.
IN AN AGENCY FILLED with secrets, the NSA’s
failure to detect the 9/11 plot or help other
agencies do so is probably its deepest and
darkest. For years, rather than reveal the
true nature of the blunder, the agency has
instead propagated the fable that it missed
that San Diego call in 2000 for technical rea-
sons. Consequently, the Bush and Obama
administrations conducted what amounted
to ironclad surveillance of Americans’
phone activity for more than a decade.
The dragnet metadata operation, finally
declared illegal by a federal appeals court
this year, was likely the largest and most
secretive domestic surveillance program
ever undertaken. Yet the public only
became aware thanks to the information
leaked by Edward Snowden. Today, other
NSA whistleblowers are claiming that the
program was based on a lie. They’re also
demanding answers to tough questions:
How were certain key phone numbers
missed in surveillance—or were they at
all? And why did the NSA refuse to share
with the CIA and FBI the full details of
what it collected from bin Laden’s oper-
ations center in Yemen?
Fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks,
it seems time for the NSA and the White
House to reveal what really happened—
and to replace, once and for all, fiction
and lies with facts and the truth. Q
JAMES BAMFORD (@WashAuthor) is a colum-
nist for FOREIGN POLICY and the author of
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA
From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on Amer-
ica. He also writes and produces docu-
mentaries for PBS.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 102
 economics
by DEBORA L. SPAR

The Secret
of Singapore
Why Cuba should
look to Lee Kuan
Yew’s thriving city-
state for economic
inspiration.

Sometime in the next few years,

the Cuban people will be faced
with a huge decision: how to
develop their nation. As the Cas-
tro brothers fade from the scene
and relations with the United
States continue to thaw, a new
generation of Cuban leaders will
be forced to grapple with the
inevitable challenges of political
and economic reform. Like the
governments of Eastern Europe
after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
they will have to plot a path from
communism to capitalism; like
their neighbors across Latin Whoever these new leaders will be and however they will come
America and the Caribbean, they to power, they will face a panoply of development options and
will have to juggle a historical an avalanche of advice. But they would do well, in the early days
distaste for Western (and partic- of their decision-making, to heed the model of another island
ularly U.S.) imperialism with nation—one dealing with the loss of a legendary leader and that
a desire for Western goods, tech- arguably handled its post-colonial development better than any
nology, and capital. And like other small country. I’m referring, of course, to Singapore.
leaders everywhere, they will Between 1965 and 1991, the tiny city-state grew at an astonish-
almost certainly have to strike ing compound annual growth rate of nearly 14 percent. Critics of
a balance between the demands the island’s performance accused its celebrated leader, Lee Kuan
of economic prudence and Yew, of thinly veiled tendencies toward communism and author-
political expedience, forming itarianism; they argued that the country’s pace of growth was
institutions that will serve their being artificially inflated by investment rates that would quickly
country over the long run while prove impossible to sustain. Yet Lee and Singapore outlived, and
heeding their citizens’ call for outperformed, their detractors. The country maintained strong
more immediate change. growth throughout the 1990s, stumbling only slightly during the

104 JULY | AUGUST 2015 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER


1997-1998 Asian economic crisis and
achieving levels of per capita income
that approached those of the industrial-
ized West. Even in the early years of the
21st century, as Lee slipped from politics,
Singapore maintained an average annual
growth rate of around 5 percent.
In retrospect, it is easy to attribute Sin-
gapore’s extraordinary trajectory to luck, or
to a hardworking culture, or to Lee’s unde-
niable record of micromanaging his cit-
izens and quashing dissent. But the real
reason behind Singapore’s success was the
country’s unique understanding of what
it had to offer the world and how to craft
a development strategy around an honest
appraisal of those assets.
At independence, Singapore was little
more than a rock in the sea—a small colo-
nial outpost half the size of modern-day
Los Angeles, wedged between Malaysia
and Indonesia. It had no natural resources,
no industrial infrastructure, and a popula-
tion split among ethnic groups that shared
no true common language. It had a deep-
water harbor, however, and a port situated
at the southern entrance to the strategically
important Strait of Malacca. It was from this
port that Lee and his comrades built their
nation. They invested all the capital funds
they could muster into the port’s develop-
ment. Several years later, they financed
repair and refueling facilities that would
induce ships to come—and stay.
Singapore’s leaders trained a labor force
to service both the port and a subsequently
constructed airport, leveraging the island’s
location to become a regional hub for ship-
ping, commerce, and eventually foreign
investment. They kept these workers com-
pliant and content by investing heavily in
housing. Simultaneously, they developed
a sophisticated method of forced savings
that channeled the nation’s capital into
internal investments. This all worked
because it was a system—a carefully ana-
lyzed, constantly re-examined plan for
taking what Singapore had and maximiz-
ing its use.
In contrast, the history of post-colonial
development is littered with great visions
brought down by limited or mismatched
resources. Brazil, for example, has a legacy
of overinvesting in grand projects (dams,
ports, railways) that never meshed with
either its assets or the world’s needs. Kenya
constructed major fish-processing plants in
the 1970s, neglecting to consider that most
of the local population had no history of
eating fish and that the economy had no
means of providing the freezers and clean
water that the plants required. The Pales-
tinian Authority once briefly considered
growing its fragile economy by luring Scan-
dinavian tourists to the beaches of Gaza.
None of this is to say that developing
countries such as Cuba need to think small.
On the contrary, the lesson from Singa-
pore is that starting from a realistic assess-
ment gives countries the power over time to
THE HISTORY OF POST-COLONIAL
DEVELOPMENT IS LITTERED
WITH GREAT VISIONS
BROUGHT DOWN BY LIMITED OR
MISMATCHED RESOURCES.
think big. In the 1980s, for example, Costa
Rica leveraged its political stability and
extreme biodiversity to position itself as
a center for ecotourism in Latin America
and to then entice investment from foreign
manufacturers, many of whose executives
had first visited the country as vacationers.
Similarly, once Botswana had crafted a
stable structure of property rights around
its vast underground wealth of diamonds,
which elsewhere are typically exported in
their rough state, it formed an integrated,
profitable industry around polishing and
cutting the stones.
This basic maxim of starting small to
grow large isn’t confined to countries; it
OBSERVATION DECK
extends to corporate and nonprofit entities
as well. Far too frequently, these organiza-
tions falter because their plans are based
on dreams—on how they would grow or
what they would do if myriad improbable
factors fell perfectly into place. Start-ups
long for an angel investor or a sudden burst
of attention that launches an initial pub-
lic offering. Nonprofits imagine what they
could do with greater funding or a surge of
interest in their cause or programmatic
offerings. Sometimes dreams come true,
of course—but not always.
The Singaporean model is more pow-
erful than dreaming and more likely to
achieve results. And it is widely replica-
ble, not with regard to the details of what
Lee and his colleagues did, of course, but
with regard to how. They were honest and
clear about what their country did and did
not have; methodical in their planning
and execution; and steadfast in their fol-
low-through. These are lessons that Cuba’s
next generation of leaders, unshackled
from their predecessors’ ambitious but
ultimately unrealistic goals, would be
well-advised to consider. They should build
gradually from the assets that Cuba has—
fertile land, an enviable location, and an
eager and wealthy diaspora—rather than
aim for utopia. Q
DEBORA L. SPAR (@deboraspar) is a colum-
nist for FOREIGN POLICY, the president
of Barnard College, and the author, most
recently, of Wonder Women: Sex, Power,
and the Quest for Perfection.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 105
 energy
by KEITH JOHNSON

Same Game,
New Board
Climate change is
destroying the
geopolitical
playbook. How will
nations survive?

Just over a century ago, in a lec-

ture to the Royal Geographi-
cal Society, British geographer
Halford Mackinder laid out the
fundamental tenets of a new dis-
cipline that came to be known
as “geopolitics.” Simply put,
he said, international relations
boiled down to the intersection
of unchanging physical geogra-
phy with the vagaries of human
politics. Only one constant was
ever in that equation: “The
social movements of all times,”
he said, “have played around
essentially the same physical Sure, nations and empires have disappeared from history plenty
features.” ¶ But here’s the thing: of times. And, of course, wrenching natural transformations have
Today the “geo” in “geopolitics” happened before (12,000 years ago, the Younger Dryas cooling
is actually changing, chiseling snuffed out the first shoots of global civilization, for instance).
away at one of the core princi- Humans themselves have intentionally been dramatically reshap-
ples that has guided foreign pol- ing the natural geography of the world for centuries (just see the
icy in the United States, Europe, massive canals that tore continents asunder). But watching entire
and Asia for the past 100 years. countries become submerged beneath the waves will be a novel
Oceans and islands are appear- experience. Today’s changes, which will become only more appar-
ing where they weren’t before, ent in the decades to come, are both man-made and unintentional.
once-constant coastlines face a They’ve created a shifting Earthscape that promises an uncertain
salty dissolution, and formerly revolution, affecting the way states relate to each other and to the
fertile breadbaskets are doomed world around them. This, in turn, has the power to reshape every-
to be barren. So what do we do thing from international law to the makeup of the world’s militaries.
when both parts of Mackinder’s The geopolitical upheaval is most evident in the South
equation are in flux? China Sea, long a flash point where an ascendant China is now

106 JULY | AUGUST 2015 Illustration by MATTHEW HOLLISTER


meeting nervous neighbors and a wary
American hegemon. The region is nearly
alone in seeing a collision of unintentional
climate-related changes with drastic man-
made geographical alterations. Here, sea
levels are rising almost a centimeter a year,
nearly three times the global average, and
the Pacific trade winds that for centuries
dictated the course of empires are showing
unprecedented strength. Waves and water
driven westward now threaten to erase tiny
nations like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands,
which rise just a body’s height above the sea.
And increased moisture in the air over the
Western Pacific, many scientists believe, is
intensifying tropical storms, like the ones
that keep battering the Philippines.
Coming on top of these unnatural
changes are frenetic, artificial geographical
transformations. Over the past year, China
(as well as, to a lesser extent, Vietnam) has
embarked on an unprecedented campaign
IT’S INEVITABLE THAT
POLITICIANS AND POLICYMAKERS
WILL HAVE TO JETTISON SOME OLD
CERTAINTIES IN ORDER TO SURVIVE.
to create islands out of reefs, dredging up
and piling on millions of tons of sand and
spending billions of dollars to physically
stake its claim to what until recently was
just watery blue. Thanks to this reclamation
effort, China has essentially, if not legally,
expanded land in the Spratly and Paracel
island groups and has effectively pushed
out the Middle Kingdom’s borders—and
its military—hundreds of miles from its
coast. (Vietnam, on a much smaller scale,
has also built up reefs into possible mili-
tary waypoints.)
This dredger-fueled muscle-flexing has
already spurred alarm in Southeast Asian
capitals and in the U.S. Defense Depart-
ment. Within its broader rebalance to Asia,
the United States is trying to pivot more
specifically toward the South China Sea—
an effort that includes more-robust military
alliances with Australia, the Philippines,
and Japan, in addition to much closer ties
to Vietnam. Meanwhile, China’s actions
potentially have huge implications for inter-
national law: Reefs, rocks, and islands each
confer vastly different benefits on their
owners, with issues of sovereignty and
the title to billions of barrels of oil yet to
be decided. Were China’s outposts legally
deemed islands, Beijing could take hun-
dreds of square miles of energy-rich waters
currently claimed by other countries.
The developments here and elsewhere are
also pushing militaries everywhere to rein-
vent themselves. In fact, China’s official jus-
tification for building 10,000-foot airstrips
in the middle of one of the world’s busiest
trade routes was its need to better respond
to stronger typhoons and other climate-
related disasters. Just the specter of climate
upheaval in the Western Pacific, in other
words, gives land-grabbing Chinese leaders
an excuse to create their own geographical
realities and burnish their own geopolitical
fortunes. More broadly, humanitarian assis-
tance and disaster response have become
increasingly important missions for militar-
ies around the world, including those of the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Aus-
tralia. Preparing to respond to widespread
devastation is shaping decisions about what
platforms to build (more hospital ships or
multimission coastal vessels), where to deploy
them, and even what kinds of troops best fit
into expeditionary forces in disaster-prone
areas, though new missions tend to strain
already overburdened forces. Australia’s
navy, for instance, is building its biggest ves-
OBSERVATION DECK
sels ever—amphibious assault ships—with
just such humanitarian missions in mind.
As China learned to its chagrin a decade ago
after the Indian Ocean tsunami, countries
like the United States that have the tools and
the reach to rapidly respond to disasters can
reap geopolitical dividends for years.
On the other side of the globe, climate
change is already tearing open the Arctic,
raising the curtain on a new stage of poten-
tial conflict among Russia, the United States,
and even would-be Arctic nations that have
no business there in the first place, such
as China. Now that massive and formerly
inaccessible oil and natural gas reserves
are thawing out, countries everywhere are
scrambling to resolve long-dormant border
disputes and establish a new framework for
international coexistence in a place where
it simply never mattered before.
The mutating landscape isn’t only about
a scramble for resources, but is sometimes
also about a race for survival. The Ganges
and Nile river deltas, long two of the Earth’s
most fertile regions, are threatened by the
double whammy of rising sea levels and
rising salinity. That could put millions of
people at risk of not just losing their homes,
but their daily bread. Up to 20 million Ban-
gladeshis could be displaced by the middle
of the century. Dealing with hordes of ref-
ugees was hard enough in times past—just
ask Indians about the impact of Bangla-
deshi refugees during the 1971 liberation
war. But this wave will likely accelerate a
fundamental rethinking of how to integrate
new climate norms—or lack thereof—into
the canons of international refugee law.
As the very game board of international
affairs is redrawn, it’s inevitable that politi-
cians and policymakers will have to jettison
some old certainties in order to survive in
a world that’s busy remaking itself—and is
being remade. “[W]e should expect to find
our formula apply equally to past history and
to present politics,” Mackinder concluded in
1904, long before the maps he so confidently
pointed to began to morph. Past history, per-
haps; present politics, not even. To the future
world, little doubt remains. Q
KEITH JOHNSON (@KFJ_FP) covers the geopol-
itics of energy for FOREIGN POLICY.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 107

Fare Trade
Elite chefs are swapping
kitchens, and shaping the world’s
culinary and cultural future.
Earlier this year in the hushed private dining room
of the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin in New
York City, chef Eric Ripert emerged from the kitchen
to greet lunch guests and escort them to their seats.
Although the setting was his seafood-forward
dining temple, the dishes that hit the table that after-
noon weren’t Ripert’s handiwork at all. Rather, they
had been created by English-born chef Martin Benn,
who had jetted in from Sydney with a small team
from his award-winning Sepia restaurant, known
for its focus on sustainable ingredients and avant-
garde dishes that fuse classic French techniques
with Japanese-influenced visual artistry. Cooking at
108 JULY | AUGUST 2015
books & culture
by CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN
Le Bernardin for one day, Benn dazzled
American eaters with a butter-poached
Hawkesbury River squid; tender Austra-
lian wagyu beef with Japanese pickles
and samphire, a briny sea vegetable; and
a golf-ball-sized “pearl” dessert that, when
cracked open, released a slightly fizzy, tart
gingerade with finger-lime powder.
Kitchen sharing or even relocating a
restaurant to a faraway continent is trending.
This year, for the first time, Britain’s Heston
Blumenthal uprooted his 20-year-old flag-
ship establishment, The Fat Duck, moving
it from Bray, England, to Melbourne, Aus-
tralia, for six months. In January, Danish
chef René Redzepi temporarily relocated
Copenhagen’s Noma—regularly a “World’s
Best Restaurant” contender—to Tokyo,
where he opened a Noma pop-up serving
a 15-course tasting menu priced at 40,200
yen (about $336). Such exchanges generate
publicity, to be sure, but on a deeper level
they are a form of culinary diplomacy, a
first step in the demystification of a far-
away culture. Food, after all, is the way to
a nation’s heart, an easy gateway to under-
standing—witness the long-standing cus-
tom of monarchs exchanging tribute gifts
of tea, local delicacies, and livestock.
Some of the recherché ingredients and
techniques shared by chefs ultimately fil-
ter down to the masses. Consider that,
until the 1970s, sushi was a rarity in West-
ern countries and is now a mainstay in cities
around the world. Or that currently Euro-
pean Union officials are debating whether
British Birmingham Balti curries, derived
from Pakistani fare, should be given an offi-
cial protected food name designation. Along
with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emir-
ates, Britain boasts one of the world’s largest
Pakistani diaspora communities, one whose
cuisine has been embraced by generations
of Britons from a diversity of ethnic back-
grounds. Consequently, curry has become
“a great part of the U.K.’s food heritage, along
with fish and chips and pork pies,” Eliza-
beth Truss, Britain’s secretary of state for
environment, food, and rural affairs, told
the New York Times in January.
While culinary border crossing bestows
pleasure on the plate, it also often spreads
virtue. Globalization, the two-edged sword
Illustration by ALVARO DOMINGUEZ

that disseminates Big Macs, makes widely
available the “bright flavors from the
Mediterranean to Southeast Asia to Latin
America,” wrote Greg Drescher of the Culi-
nary Institute of America in a 2013 CNN
Eatocracy blog post. This can “often tip a
menu balance more towards healthier, plant-
based foods and away from meat,” he wrote.
Chefs, he added, “have a unique opportunity
to leverage our new, collective culinary wan-
derlust on behalf of public health.”
South Korean-born food-truck pioneer
Roy Choi is a case in point. He and Daniel
Patterson, a Michelin-starred San Fran-
cisco chef, are working to put cheap, healthy
Asian- and Latin American-inflected fast
food in low-income California neighbor-
hoods, and the two are spreading their pro-
active gospel abroad, as they did in 2014 at
Redzepi’s Copenhagen symposium, known
as MAD (drawn from the Danish word for
food), an annual gathering of chefs, scholars,
and activists that has been called the Davos
of food. Chefs have become thought leaders
on everything from plating and slaughter-
ing methods to food justice.
Exposure to foreign approaches is part
of a venerable culinary tradition, but one
that used to be emphatically Franco-centric
and top down: A jaunt in a Paris kitchen was
almost compulsory for chefs who aspired
to the pinnacle of the profession. The bri-
gade system established by chef Auguste
Escoffier in the late 19th century militarized
training, with protégés working their way
through “stations,” ranks including plongeur
(dishwasher) and poissonnier (fish cook).
In recent years, however, a stint with Span-
chefs “outside their comfort zone,” in the
words of Andrea Petrini, co-founder of the
global chefs collective Gelinaz!. Notably,
that organization has no national base but
orchestrates events like this summer’s “chef
shuffle”: In early July, 37 chefs from Asia,
Europe, North and South America, and Aus-
tralia, including Redzepi and Alain Ducasse,
swapped kitchens for a day.
The cross-fertilization is both professional
and philosophical. In Japan, Redzepi was
struck by the primacy of personal relation-
ships, as opposed to transactions, in his deal-
ings with fishmongers and other purveyors.
At the same time, Michelin-starred Japanese
chef Shinobu Namae, who facilitated Redze-
pi’s intense research of Japanese ingredi-
ents, was impressed by what the Dane calls
“trash cooking”—the mindful use of often
discarded byproducts, such as pig tails, fish
WHILE CULINARY BORDER
CROSSING BESTOWS PLEASURE
ON THE PLATE, IT ALSO OFTEN
SPREADS VIRTUE.
heads, and potato skins—part of his mission
to eradicate waste from his kitchen. Anita Lo,
co-author of Cooking Without Borders and
owner of New York City’s acclaimed Annisa
restaurant, which fuses American, Asian,
and French cuisine, says guest-cheffing in
a Russian kitchen gave her a more intimate
insider’s view of Moscow. And award-
winning tapas chef Jamie Bissonnette
not only discovered local crustaceans like
bay bugs and mud crabs while cooking at
Melbourne’s Bomba in March, but he also
learned about Australia’s unique style of
butchering domestic wagyu: “They take
some muscles out of the back legs,” render-
ing a tender and flavorful cut. The American
chef was so inspired that he plans to experi-
OBSERVATION DECK
to churn out traditional vegetarian tem-
ple dishes in New York. Even street fare
often percolates up into high-end rep-
ertoires. “Cooking in Singapore when I
was 25 changed my life,” says Ethiopian-
born, Swedish-raised Marcus Samuelsson,
whose New York City restaurants include
Red Rooster Harlem and Streetbird Rotis-
serie. “All that hawker food, the ethnic Malay
food,” he says, made him “think about what
[culinary] diversity means.”
But cuisine is almost incidental to
Samuelsson’s most salient guest-cheffing
memory. In the late 1990s, he was invited
to cook at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New
Orleans. The place started out as a sandwich
shop in 1939 and became a bar and restau-
rant that drew leaders of the civil rights
movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
“It was one of the first integrated restaurants
in America, and it’s really a part of American
history,” Samuelsson says. “Cooking there
went way beyond being a badass chef for
me—it was being able to walk in history.”
Today, he and his peers have become
unofficial culinary ambassadors abroad and
change agents back home as they soak up
ideas on their walkabouts. In this role, they
too are making history, leaving an enduring
imprint in distant geographies and forever
reshaping the way food is produced, pre-
sented, and relished in their homelands. Q
ish molecular-gastronomy darling Ferran
Adrià or sushi maestro Jiro Ono in Japan
might be more prized. Today’s interna-
tional guest-cheffing is a collaborative,
multilateral phenomenon that places
ment with the method back home in Boston.
This knowledge sharing can also involve
exalted chefs learning from more hum-
ble practitioners. In February, for exam-
ple, Ripert invited a South Korean monk
CHERYL LULIEN TAN (@cheryltan88), a
Singaporean writer based in New York,
is the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A
Memoir of Food and Family. Her first novel,
Sarong Party Girls, is forthcoming.
FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 109
 the fixer
interview by MIRA SETHI • photographs by SAAD SARFRAZ

Lahore, Pakistan
Waqar Gillani
on what to wear, how to do
poondi, and where to find a little
pomp and circumstance.

ON A HOT, DUSTY DAY in May, Lahore fixer Waqar

Gillani snakes his blue Mitsubishi Lancer
through the fabled old city. As he parks
near Gawalmandi, a street bustling with
food vendors, he smiles. Here—where the
scent of jalebis, a sweet deep-fried dough,
hangs in the air—is the best spot to take WHERE TO SPOT GOV
ERNMENT MINISTERS:
in local culture, he says. Just a few kilo-
Usually it’s not the
meters away, the Badshahi Mosque, one of style of our min-
Pakistan’s most famous holy sites, looms in isters to be public;
its sandstone majesty. The country’s top art they think of them-
selves as VIPs. CAFÉ
and design school, the National College of AYLANTO is an excep-
Arts, where Rudyard Kipling’s father was the tion. It’s a posh
first principal, also stands nearby. More than restaurant in a posh
area serving
any other place in Lahore, it is the old city Western-inspired
that stirs devotion in the hearts of Lahoris. food ranging from
While Islamabad is the capital and Kara- steak to pasta. It
has spacious sofas
chi is the commercial heart, it is Lahore, and is kind of
with its Mughal monuments, spice-heavy arranged like a vast
WHERE TO FIND food, and progressive literati, that con- unending lounge.
LOCAL FASHION:
GENERATION sells
slightly modern-
+92 42 35751886
tinues to be hailed as the cultural center.
Despite this, a nostalgia about the 1950s WHERE TO SEE AND
ized versions of our
national and cul-
tural dress, the sal-
war kameez, a long
tunic with loose
pants. The tunics
are usually made
of cotton because
it’s hot here eight
months of the year.
But the genuinely
authentic forms
are not often
worn anymore.
BE SEEN: COSA NOS
and ’60s—when the city’s bars sat atop
TRA is an upscale
grocery stores and locals celebrated their
continental restau-
country’s nascent independence—still sad- rant where you
dens and delights. Delight for the potential frequently find
Pakistani celebri-
of such freedoms; sadness because those ties. The cricket star
freedoms, to converse and dress freely, turned politician
no longer exist. Beginning in the 1980s, a Imran Khan has
been spotted here.
national reorientation known as “Islam- THE LAHORE SOCIAL
ization” began under Gen. Muhammad (pictured above) is
Zia-ul-Haq. The media were censored, a new restaurant
with a similar menu
and textbooks were infused with nation- to Aylanto, but
+92 42 35761523
alism and religion. Public displays of piety, more sophisticated.
such as communal prayers and long beards, They even offer
duck rolls! It has
slowly became the norm. Nevertheless, the beautiful architec-
repression engendered creativity: Lahoris ture and jazz music;
have revived modern miniature art, paro- everyone seems
to be going there
died the political elite in TV comedy, and these days.
reimagined Eastern classical music. COSA NOSTRA
+92 42 35792161
On a recent afternoon, Gillani guided
THE LAHORE SOCIAL
FOREIGN POLICY through his city, nav- +92 42 35773142
igating its modern present and Mughal-
British past.

110 JULY | AUGUST 2015

 OBSERVATION DECK

WHERE TO EAT:
COOCO’S DEN —
owned by the art-
ist Iqbal Hussain,
whose paintings
focus on Lahore’s
dancing girls—is
popular. From here,
you can see the
Badshahi Mosque.
Rumors persist LOGISTICS
that the food is out-
sourced from the CLOSING TIME
vendors nearby. There are no official
The menu offers clubs in Pakistan!
barbecue and veg- But if people are
etarian dishes, like out at restaurants,
saag [spinach] and they close late—
daal [lentils]. last orders around
+92 42 37635955
11:30 p.m.
DINNERTIME
Quite late. It’s not a
good habit, but usu-
ally 9, 10, 11, even 12,
if you’re eating in
a private home.
TIPPING
There should be
a tip, though a tip-
ping culture, as
such, doesn’t exist.
SPENDING
Eating out, the
primary recre-
ational activity,
usually costs 1,000
rupees [about $10].
WHY ALL EYES
WHERE TO TAKE IN TOURIST MUSTSEE: WHOM TO READ AND ARE ON YOU
POLITICAL CULTURE: TRUCK ART , which is LISTEN TO: MOHSIN Pakistanis love to
Every day, 25 kilo- the Pakistani tra- HAMID is known in stare. If you hap-
meters from Lahore, dition of painting the West because pen to catch them,
is the famous WAGAH trucks in bright pea- of The Reluctant chances are they
BORDER CEREMONY . cock colors, with Fundamental- will not look away:
It’s all about the snippets of playful ist, a novel written They will continue
snobbery and pomp poetry. The driver against the back- looking at you as
of both the Indian travels long dis- drop of 9/11. But in if it is their right to
and Pakistani sides. tances, so he eats, Lahore, he is known do so. In the ’90s,
The flag-lowering rests, and may even and loved for his a concept called
and -raising cere- nap in his truck; it’s debut novel, Moth poondi—boys
monies are patri- his home. Smoke, which was, checking out girls
otic scenes, but in a sense, an ode and vice versa—
the guard salute is to the city, which is entered Urdu slang.
also mocking: The also his home. It is
Indian and Paki- a book about love
stani guards com- and lust and class
pete to see who set in the Lahore
can raise their legs of the 1990s. The
higher in their singer RAHAT FATEH
marching. ALI KHAN is very pop-
ular. He sings qaw-
FP (ISSN 0015-7228) July/August 2015, issue number 213. Pub-
wali songs, a form
lished six times each year, in January, March, May, July, September, and of Sufi music, and is
November, by The FP Group, a division of Graham Holdings Company,
at 11 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20036. Sub-
the nephew of
scriptions: U.S., $59.99 per year; Canada and other countries, $59.99. legendary qawwali
Periodicals Postage Paid in Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing
offices. POSTMASTER: Send U.S. address changes to: FP, P.O. Box 283,
singer Nusrat Fateh
Congers, NY 10920-0283. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses Ali Khan.
to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill, ON L4B 4R6.
Printed in the USA.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 111
 the futurist
by JAKE SCOBEY-THAL _

In a 1900 article in
Ladies’ Home Jour-
nal, civil engineer
John Elfreth Wat-
kins imagined the
Stanford Univer- ways in which elec-
sity professor Paul tricity might rev-
R. Ehrlich believed olutionize food
the pressure of production over
population growth the next 100 years:
could not be miti- “At night [the farm- In 1950, New York
Paul R.Ehrlich’s Times science edi-
influential book gated. In his 1968 er’s] vegetables
book, The Popula- will be bathed in tor Waldemar
tion Bomb, Ehrlich In a 1967 article powerful electric Kaempffert envi-
wrote, “[T]he battle titled “The Won- light, serving, like sioned significant
to feed humanity drous World of sunlight, to has- advancements in
is already lost, 1990,” U.S. News ten their growth. synthetic-food
in the sense that we & World Report Electric currents production that
will not be able to foresaw a time applied to the soil would help feed
prevent large-scale when there would will make valuable a quickly growing
famines in the next be “food enough plants grow larger population. Saw-
decade or so.” for all the world,” and faster.” dust and wood
in part thanks to pulp, he wrote in
“fabricating syn- Popular Mechanics,
thetic protein from could be converted
such sources as to sugary foods
crude oil.” by 2000.
BU

LL
’S
EYE
Hubert
Humphrey

SO
CL Speaking in 1966
OSE
! at the University of
Minnesota, Duluth,
U.S. Vice President
RIG
HT Hubert Humphrey
ISH
In a 1967 paper, forecast new fron-
“Predictions: tiers of agricultural
HA Zero Population expansion. Experts,
LF
RI
GHT Growth,” demog- he said, projected
rapher Donald J. In 1798, English an improved food
Bogue argued that economist Thomas supply by 2000—
MO
ST
a net food short- Malthus famously a result of “the fab-
LY
WR age was unlikely. predicted a future of rication of syn-
ONG
Rather, he wrote, widespread famine. thetic proteins”
“[t]he really crit- Population growth, and “large-scale
WA ical problem will he surmised, would ocean-farming.”
YO
FF continue to be one at some point over-
of maldistribution take Earth’s food
of food among the resources, leading to
world’s regions.” pervasive shortages.

THE IMPENDING population boom will demand a 70 percent increase in food production to keep everyone fed by 2050, according to
PHOTOS VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It’s a lofty goal, but FAO officials are cautiously optimistic—in
contrast to some of history’s prognosticators, who have been much less sanguine about a food-secure future. For centuries, sci-
entists and policymakers have hypothesized about how a bulging population might affect Earth’s capacity to provide sustenance.
Their forecasts have included everything from inevitable worldwide starvation to questionable technological advancements—
protein wrought from crude oil, for instance—that humans might deploy to protect their diets.

112 JULY | AUGUST 2015 Illustrations by ELIAS STEIN

Addressing the critical issues
facing Asia in the 21st century
South Asia is one of the most densely populated, water scarce regions in
the world. In India, demand for water is greater than ever before with
increasing urbanization, energy consumption, and food production. India
draws most of its fresh water supply from large, internationally-shared
river basins. The Asia Foundation is focused on convening multi-stake-
holder and multi-country dialogues on shared rivers. Read our report:

STRENGTHENING TRANSPARENCY AND ACCESS TO

INFORMATION ON TRANSBOUNDARY RIVERS IN SOUTH ASIA

asiafoundation.org