The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Bauer, Jean-martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593467140 ISBN 13: 9780593467145

Verlag: Vintage Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE

A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we can take to change course.

"This book should be required reading for the entire human race."
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of We Are the Weather

At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 150 countries pledged to eradicate hunger by 2030. But with only a few years left, we’re far from reaching that goal. Instead, hunger is on the rise—America itself recently experienced levels of food insecurity not seen since the Great Depression. How could the richest nation in the world have so many people going hungry?

In The New Breadline, aid worker and activist Jean-Martin Bauer unravels this paradox. Bauer’s family fled to America during the terrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Now on the brink of mass starvation, Haiti and its grim history inspired Bauer to make food justice his life's work. During his long career with the UN, Bauer learned firsthand that the problem of hunger is always political—and like all political conditions, hunger, he knew, was something we could work to change.

Drawing from his fieldwork in the most hunger-prone countries across the globe—from Haiti, where elites hoard imported French cheese, to Madagascar, where foreign corporations are snatching up valuable land from local farmers, to right here in America, where the lines at food banks continue to grow—Bauer weaves profound personal insight with a keen understanding of the structural systems of racism, classism, and sexism that thwart true progress in the battle against hunger. The New Breadline is an inspiring call to action to end what he persuasively argues is one of the greatest threats to our society, boldly envisioning a world where we can always feed ourselves and one another.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEAN-MARTIN BAUER has served with the World Food Programme in the Sahel and central Africa and has responded to food emergencies in Afghanistan and Syria. Bauer has led WFP country offices in the Republic of the Congo and in Haiti. His work has also focused on leveraging digital tech and analytics to fight hunger. A Washington, DC, native, Bauer holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School.

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It had been decided they would die by firing squad. The two young men, Marcel Numa and Louis “Milou” Drouin, were tied to posts next to the stone wall at the entrance of the National Cemetery in Port-au-Prince. Marcel, a tall, athletic Black man, and Milou, a wispy mulatto, were the only members still alive from an ill-fated expedition to overthrow President François Duvalier. Their public execution would serve as a warning to anyone foolish enough to threaten the regime. Duvalier had ensured there would be a massive crowd for the execution of the captured rebels by ordering all government workers to attend and trucking in people from the countryside.

Police officers in khaki shirts signaled the start of the proceedings, pushing the onlookers back. Some in the crowd were silently praying, holding out hope that the dictator might change his mind and spare the condemned men. A white Catholic priest appeared, Bible in hand, and approached Marcel and Milou. Stoic and resolute, both men refused the last rites. Soon after, the nine members of the firing squad raised their rifles, aimed, and fired; the commanding officer delivered the coup de grâce with a pistol. It was November 12, 1964.

The story looms large in Haitian history. The execution, which was recorded for television, is proof of the brutality the Duvaliers inflicted on the Haitian people for decades. The fate of the young rebels also looms large in my own family history. Many of my relatives supported Duvalier, just as others quietly plotted the regime’s overthrow.

One of the latter was my uncle Serge Picard. It turns out Serge nearly found himself alongside Marcel and Milou that day in 1964. In fact, Serge had seen their deaths coming. A few years earlier, as a recent high school graduate, Serge had left the country for New York, where he began studying sociology. In New York, he naturally reconnected with other members of the growing Haitian diaspora, including his childhood friends Marcel and Milou, who hailed from the same town in southern Haiti. They were all part of a group of young exiles in the city who’d known one another from their days as Boy Scouts and who had formed a rebel group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti. They were fiercely opposed to Duvalier’s regime, which had been responsible for the arrest, torture, and murder of many of their friends and relatives. Like Serge, many had felt compelled to join when Duvalier declared himself president for life in April 1964.

Jeune Haiti occasionally met at Serge’s apartment on 77th Street on the Upper West Side, opposite the American Museum of Natural History. The group soon hatched a bold plan to overthrow Duvalier: they would buy weapons, rent a boat, sail to Haiti, and land in their hometown of Jérémie. They would take over the town’s barracks and armory, and set in motion the downfall of the dictator, just as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had done with Fulgencio Batista in Cuba a few years before. Serge was initially on board with the plan. But as he listened to his friends, he knew in his gut that they were doomed. He pleaded with them to cancel the plan, but it went ahead without him.

According to Serge, Jeune Haiti’s failure was the result of a combination of betrayal, errors, and bad luck. Its members had talked so much that their plan had become an open secret in New York. Inevitably, informants infiltrated the group. In August 1964, thirteen Jeune Haiti members set out for their homeland aboard the Johnny Express, a Miami-based freighter whose mysterious skipper refused to land in Jérémie as planned, instead dropping them off like packages farther west, out of reach of their supporters. The missed landing was a disaster for the expedition. The young exiles, used to the comforts of New York, found themselves facing the fight of their lives high in the towering mountain ranges of southern Haiti.

In the years following, Serge was able to piece together some of their ordeal. He met a Catholic priest who had risked his own life to shelter the young men on the night of the landing. The area was crawling with Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier’s ruthless militia, who were looking for the already demoralized rebels. The priest gave them coffee and sent them on their way before sunrise, knowing their attempt was certain to fail. A few days after they set out, the expedition found itself facing the fury of Hurricane Cleo, a powerful storm that hit Haiti in late August. As Serge searched for evidence of what had happened to his friends, he spoke to a farmer in the countryside who said he’d given them shelter in his isolated mountain hut as the storm raged. The men were drenched and cold, the farmer said, and one was coughing uncontrollably, while the hurricane toppled trees and torrential rain fell. One of the group, probably Marcel, according to the farmer’s description, seemed convinced that Duvalier himself had used his diabolical powers to summon the storm.

Betrayed, unlucky, and unprepared, the Jeune Haiti members were also brave and resourceful: over the weeks of their attempted insurrection, they trekked two hundred kilometers through rugged mountains and managed to shoot down a Haitian Air Force plane. But in the end, short of water, famished, and out of ammunition, the men were reduced to fighting off Duvalier’s soldiers with stones. At a series of engagements that September, the dictator’s forces picked off the rebels one by one. Only Marcel and Milou were captured alive to face the firing squad.

The regime didn’t execute just the rebels. Duvalier’s men also murdered their families in cold blood, including twenty-seven elders, women, and children, all from Jérémie’s embattled and largely mulatto upper class. The mulatto families that had long dominated business and politics in the port town were opposed to Duvalier’s brand of radical, anti-elite politics. Duvalier built his following by opposing the rule of a tiny light-skinned minority. To those who committed them, the massacres were revenge—visited upon a hated bourgeois class who despised people like them. Jeune Haiti’s landing had given them the perfect pretext to unleash their fury and get even.

The killings took place near the airport, where the victims were buried in a mass grave. The murders were atrocious. It is said that two of Duvalier’s henchmen tortured a four-year-old child in front of her mother, throwing her in the air and impaling her on a knife. They put their cigarettes out in the eyes of crying babies. The massacre took place over a series of nights, and people living in the nearby hills could hear the shouts of soldiers and the echoing screams of their victims. Soon after the killings, the assassins were seen driving the cars of the people they had just murdered.

As for Serge, he was tormented by guilt and grief for the rest of his life.

The executions of Marcel and Milou, and the murder of the rebels’ families, were only some of the innumerable sins of the Duvaliers, father and son, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986. The regime’s ideology was noirisme, a form of Black fascism, a reaction to the light-skinned elite’s domination of Haitian society. Haiti’s mulatto bourgeoisie had rigged society to their benefit. They controlled the government and institutions and amassed great wealth, while the darker-skinned masses moldered in abject poverty. Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat calls the arrangement “social and economic apartheid.” For all his revolutionary swagger, Duvalier didn’t end the hated system.

Papa Doc, the elder Duvalier, created a corrupt and murderous police state in which the entire nation was kept in a state of terror, and a hideous personality...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593467140
• ISBN 13: 9780593467145
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland