National security journalist speaks on food security reporting project
Pulitzer Prize-winning national security journalist Josh Meyer spoke about food insecurity to an audience of international studies and journalism students during a visit to campus Feb. 4.
The talk, “Hunger Pains: How Intractable Problems in the U.S. Food Aid Program Perpetuate Global Food Insecurity and Instability,” was sponsored by IU’s Center on American and Global Security.
Meyer is a lecturer and director of education and outreach of the National Security Journalism Initiative at the Medill School at Northwestern University. His talk was based on findings of Northwestern’s National Security Reporting Project, an immersive three-month experience in which students report globally in collaboration with professional media partners in Washington, D.C.
For the past five years, in conjunction with media organizations such as USA Today, Meyer and his students have selected a national security topic and collaborated on a final project.
The biggest challenge, he said is finding an angle the reader can connect with.
“That’s one of our jobs as journalists,” Meyer said. “How do you do these stories so that we explain how they affect people? Everything these days is interconnected.”
Meyer’s interest in food insecurity was piqued when he heard from a source that the CIA had created a climate change and national security center.
“The issue is that as the planet gets hotter, food gets scarce,” he said. “It’s doing a job on the ecosystem and food system, creating food deserts where they haven’t before, and drought and water issues.”
Meyer spent 20 years at the L.A. Times, where his reporting received many awards, including two staff Pulitzer Prizes and an Overseas Press Club award for his investigative reporting on al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 plots on America. He is co-author of the book, The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of The Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
But over time, he wanted to move towards emerging, “less sexy” issues, he explained.
“Experts are predicting that real wars are going to happen over food and water,” he said. “When food prices are driven up, unrest has always followed. The next generations of militants are already using food shortages as a grievance.”
The American reaction to increasing world food shortages is inadequate, the project found.
“The U.S. response to these crises is essentially to get a bunch of U.S. grown products and put them on boats and send them overseas,” he said. “A lot people are mad about the way food aid is distributed, and they have been for some time.”
One issue is special interests that control U.S. food aid he said, including agriculture and shipping companies.
The investigation by the Northwestern students found that the distribution system is basically the same as during World War II.
“Experts, including many in government office, have said for decades now that system is really unwieldy, and people are dying as a result,” he said.
Emily Metzgar, an associate professor at the Media School and a member of the CAGS advisory board, said the food aid project is an excellent example of public affairs journalism.
“Meyer’s visit was a great opportunity for the IU campus to see the breadth and depth of reporting on an issue that isn’t always associated with national security, but certainly should be,” she said. “The domestic political resistance to fixing what are well documented problems with the delivery of aid is particularly galling, and provides a grim case study of the ways that foreign policy can be unduly influenced by actors others than those often considered the ‘usual suspect’ in the realm of international affairs.”
While here, Meyer also spoke with journalism students In Steve Raymer’s class J448 Global Journalism class.