Unlike any other. We need to preserve, protect and defend it. We need to retake it from the elites who are bullying us and forcing us into conformity. We need to crush Political Correctness and encourage all of you, barnes and noble are here with advanced copies of my book. I am happy to personalize and sign them for you. If you love america and hate Political Correctness, this is the book for you. We saw an opportunity for the National Center for policy analysis, please ask us. We stood at a place called little round top, gettysburg. When you talk about standing and facing adversity, about the common man who became uncommon in his valor, a professor at boutin college, not a professional military officer but there he stood in charge of the 20th may regimen, they start coming up that hill, he knew he was the last in the line of the army of the potomac, cannot surrender. Casualties mounted, casualties mounted, they ran out of ammunition. Alabama ready for one last time in charge. Colonel Joshua Lawrence chamber said the one word that had never been set in the entire union army up to that point in the civil war. He said bayonets. There is a moment that will come standing on little round top, where we have run out of ammunition, when we fear there is no other recourse, cannot retreat, cannot surrender. Say that one word that is the embodiment of spiritual embodiment of the United States of america, the american citizen. Thank you so much for being here today. Next month we have the former head of the Defense Intelligence agency, Lieutenant GeneralMichael Flynn will be with us march 31st stu and it will be a great session to hear from someone who understands what is going wrong with our intelligence gathering apparatus in the United States. God bless you all, good morning, thank you for being with us. [applause] when i tune in on weekends, authors sharing new releases. Watching nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation. Booktv weekends they bring author after author after author, fascinating people. I love booktv and i am a cspan fan. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening, welcome to midmanhattan library. Take a moment to silence your cell phones if they are on. This event is being taped by cspan booktv. The microphone will be there microphone and it will not project into this room so please speak loudly and clearly. Tonights program is based on the book the reproach of hunger food, justice, and money in the twentyfirst century. By david reiff. The war on worldwide hunger recently was thought by leading intellectuals to be winnable, is called into question in david reiffs new book. Here david reiff discusses complex factors that are pushing the goal of eradicating hunger out of reach, the rise in the price of food staples, practice of using corn to make ethanolbased foods fuel instead of food, the Global Warming and its resulting extreme weather patterns creating severe drought particularly in africa, increased Meat Consumption in china and india reducing supply of grain for direct consumption by people, the the reproach of hunger food, justice, and money in the twentyfirst century received a start reviewing Publishers Weekly which stated that it is a stellar addition to the canon of Development Policy literature. David reiff is a political analyst, and cultural critic, he graduated with a degree in history from princeton university. His books have focused on immigration, International Conflict and humanitarianism. He is the author of eight previous books and a member of new York Institute for the humanities, collaborated as editor of the policy journal, the new republic in harpers magazine is written for New York Times magazine and Los Angeles Times book review, he is founder of the war crimes project at American University in washington dc. Please give a warm welcome to david reiff. Thank you for coming out in unspeakable weather, Global Warming or no Global Warming, we seem to have a little bit of winter even if at the wrong time and in strange places. I am very old now bleed even so it is strange to see myself described like an obituary. In fact i happen for a long time to have started writing migration in the us, i wrote two books called miami in case you dont know my work and one about los angeles, the transformation, great immigration in the 80s and 90s, i was interested in cubanamericans so i wrote a book about them as well as have some connections to that world. I became by accident a war correspondent. Between 1992 in bosnia in 2004 in baghdad, i was pretty much in all the predictable places you can think of, the balkans, Great Lakes Region of africa, afghanistan, iraq, i am too old to do that now so i wasnt that interested, didnt feel i had much to contribute about military questions. I was already 40, a preposterous age to begin and i thought i had something to say about the humanitarian facts of war in terms of relief. I spent a long time following relief workers around in all these places and many others. I was in liberia, sierra leone, central america, i did that for a long time. This book represents for me a move from emergency relief to a more general question about development. The book is really about whether the current Mainstream Model of development can work and whether the optimism surrounding it which i referred to is warranted or justifiable or not. I thought because in the end the starkest measure of poverty is hunger, i try to write a book about development and the debate over development, the effort to reduce or end extreme poverty, to end hunger which are the stated goals of major un agencies, the great philanthropies or the Melinda Gates foundation and they really believe this is the first generation in Human History that can end extreme poverty and hunger. I lay my temperamental cards on the table. I am sure if you spent 15 years of your one and only life thinking about war, watching war up close, you are not the most optimistic people, but i nonetheless found it very startling as i began to think this through, took me seven years to write this book and endless amount of travel in all kinds of places, rich and poor alike, i was at a loss to understand, hunger, famine along with war is the great killer in Human History. There has been a famine every generation, as far as most experts believe, whether it is the great Irish Economic historian the estimate is in every Society Since the beginning of time or at least since the neolithic, a great famine every 30 years. 5000 years of Human History as we think of it in definable terms, you have famines in every society and every confident continent. Seemingly with regularity. Why do people think, this is my question, i read through this literature, talked to people within the un system in these foundations and many different contextss, why is there so much optimism . I want to distinguish if you will indulge me between optimism and hope. Optimism should be empirically justifiable. Hope doesnt have to be. You can hope, hope in the religious sense, hope is a religious idea among other things, you dont have to think that a good outcome is likely to hope for one but if you say you are optimistic you are saying something very different. You are saying you believe a rational person on empirical ground should believe things are going to get better. That is what optimism is. The better doesnt have to be total. I dont want to caricature optimism as, if you permit me, optimist caricature custom pessimism. Optimism, want things to be this way, to abandon optimism is to abandon humanity. Even though people have come to the division of optimism and hope, the distinction between optimism and hope has lessened and see less of a difference. Why was there this optimism . One reading of the world, one might have thought lead one to be pessimistic. I am not telling you about war, diminished over the last hundred years. I dont agree with psychologist Steven Pinker about everything in his argument the world is Getting Better and better, he is absolutely right that both the prevalence and lethality of war has diminished in the last century. He is also right that we made extraordinary progress, the human also be in a particular region or set of powers, there has been great progress made in famine. Famine is less lethal than it has ever been. There are whole continents in which famine is unknown, even though it was known everywhere and in all civilization since the beginning of time. The historic home of famine which is not africa despite what you read, but is asia, has not seen a major famine since the chinese famine of 195862 which was manmade, not largely a function of the weather, though the weather played a role, but a function of terrible decisions in the chinese peoples republic of china. You are already talking about a famine that could have been averted with sounder state policy or the kind of murderous industrialization mao and his colleagues decided to impose on the chinese people. I am not diminishing the lethality, the most lethal event in Human History, around 40 Million People, that is in one event. You could say we dont have those anymore. Even in africa, for all kinds of reasons the last readout of famine. Famines are less lethal. A classic example, there was a famine in the 1970s which killed a quarter of 1 Million People. There was another one in 2005. Only 60,000 people, a terrible thing, but still a fact this was a famine in the same place, and confluence for disastrous things and many fewer people died because there were technologies to make, to allow many people, particularly the vulnerable to survive, despite this optimism, the world is a complicated place, there is a great german marxist philosopher, and some of you know better than i do, every document of civilization is a document of barbarism, the record is mixed and it would be foolish to play cassandra in all of this. The assertions come from all kinds of brilliant people at the institute, bill gates, bill and Melinda Gates are extraordinary people, i am in complete disagreement with their philanthropy, to say that doesnt change the fact that they are very brilliant and they have done something very remarkable. Also very wrongheaded. It seemed to me there was just as much reason for pessimism as optimism for one simple reason and that is Global Warming. Climate change. When we are talking even in these declarations in paris, we are talking 2 degrees celsius rise in global temperature and that is if we are lucky. People will be very satisfied if this can be kept to 2 degrees celsius and yet 2 degrees celsius climate rise is going to make vulnerabilities of all sorts of agriculture, plants that wont survived. Yields will decline. These are not, this is not speculative. We have run these tests in labs and controlled environments to see what a particular germplasm of wheat for example does to raise the temperature. Not talking about the apocalypse here, but it seems to me with climate change, anything why are people so confident that if you drive on first avenue to pass the un, you will see banners the organization has put up that say poverty will be eliminated by 2030, a slogan way of saying that is the gist of the argument. Since we dont know whether we will have 2 degrees celsius if we are lucky or 4 degrees if the deal falls through. These are pressing issues. If i can do a global summary there are 7 plus billion people in the world today is certainty there will be tween 9 absent the asteroid coming and killing us all it is a certainty there will be 9,000,000,000 x 2050. That is not an unalterable fact. The question then becomes will there be 12 billion in 2100 . Or will there actually be a stop to this plateau . If you talk to demographers who are not the happiest people they have been wrong so often, most flatline demographic predictions have been wrong, extrapolating from the present into the more distant future have been wrong, the inventor of demography more or less, Thomas Melton argued in the early 19th century that because Food Production could only increase automatically but population could increase geometrically, people were going to starve to death in the near future and yet that is not what happened. It is dangerous to talk to demographers. I dont think even the most optimistic among us would suggest there will be less than 10 billion people by 2100. That is an increase, you will have a third more human beings on this planet in 85 years than you do now and a steady increase along the way. How are you going to feed these people . How is one going to order the world so that the world doesnt become a place where the poor starve, the poor areas and Global Warming has been very unfair, if you will, you cant call a global phenomenon unfair because a phenomenon cannot have that agency but it will be the poor parts of the world, parts of the middle east and africa that will be most affected. The poorest people are getting the worst of it. The least resilient toward it are going to get the worst, just to keep it on food of their agriculture, the worst affected. Why all this optimism . The optimism is pervasive. I invite you to go on the websites of any of the major un agencies of the world bank, major philanthropies, most of the major relief and Development Ngos of the world and many governments in the global south, the optimism is not restricted, it is quite widespread. There is an organization based in ghana which the former secretarygeneral of the United Nations, kofi annan, is now the president , calls for a green revolution in africa. You are talking very smart people who think things are going to be steadily better, that these disasters are going to be averted. And that in the end we are going to come out with these goals of ending extreme poverty and hunger, the definition of extreme poverty is those making numb 1. 25 a day or less income of an individual. There are probably 1 billion people like this in the world, one in seven of them. Why shouldnt, if these regions, some of which are also the areas that have not begun what is called the demographic transition, that is to say falling birth rates that have coming many parts of the world, look at mexico, mexico is a very good example of a country that in 30 years has gone five kids a family to more or less replacement level, mexican birthrates in freefall and coming back to my skepticism about what can or cant be predicted i dont think anyone saw that. There was a roman writer who wrote somewhere he didnt understand soothsayers met in the road white both didnt burst out laughing. Why the optimism . I freely admit my bias which is having spent so much time in parts of the world i spent time in, optimism is hard for me. There was a profile of me in Time Magazine called mister pessimism. Be warned, full disclosure, whatever the giclee cliche, i can deploy on this. With i couldnt figure out why people felt this way so i tried to look at the mainstream view, to try to understand it and to look at critics of that view, most of whom can be, some of whom are freemarket libertarians. And economist at nyu called william easterly, wrote a famous book that was very controversial that bill gates announced in the most savage terms, a critique of Development Aid but the main opposition to the mainstream view that asserts we are going to abolish extreme poverty and hunger by 2030 is going to be found among members of the antiglobalization movement, people think fundamentally the problem capitalism cannot solve the problem it has created. In the end the slogan is, one of its most famous slogans is another world is possible, and without that other world a political and moral transformation, no amount of technological wizardry will solve these problems, will make hungry people have enough to eat or poor people not be poor anymore. Why do all the smart people, i understand the critique of the antiglobalization movement and to some extent i share it. In the book i talk about that at some point. Why do all these smart people think hunger is at the end, will or can be ended. Why jeff sachs, the end of poverty, why does the secretarygeneral ban kimoon of the United Nations continually say, in this he is firmly seconded by the head of the world bank, why is brilliant people think we reached this genuinely millennial, millenarian moment unknown in all Human History, short of abolishing mortality, people in Silicon Valley may pull that off. They are pretty much ending poverty is about as unheardof as you can imagine. All the major religious traditions take poverty for granted. The poor will always be with us the bible said. And equivalent views in hinduism, tells you that you deserve your fate. You have obviously done something terrible the last time out. At least that is a commonplace interpretation, in india. Why are they so optimistic. All these people, very smart people, to some extent the great ideological battles of the past are over or should be over. It is whether explicitly or implicitly, they accept what you might call the Francis Fukuyama end of history point of view. It does not say also a very smart guy he said basically not that bad things would no longer happen, not that we r