Famine Aversion, Ivory Coast PM, Brazilian Numbers
March 12, 2021
Yesterday’s Newsletter / March 12, 2021
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UN appeals for $5.5 billion to avert famine for 34 million
Summary: The UN Secretary General announced that about 34 million people in more than three dozen countries are facing famine brought on by conflict in the region, while the chief of the World Food Program warned that 270 million people are facing a “hunger crisis” this year.
Context: This comes on the heels of similar warnings, also from the UN Secretary General, that at the end of 2020, more than 88 million people were suffering from “acute hunger” because of instability and local conflict, which is an increase of 20% over the previous year, and that if these pre-famines aren’t tackled while they’re manageable, at a cost of around $5.5 billion, they’ll become full-blown crises that could have been prevented had more international attention and resources been forthcoming.
—The Associated Press
Shock and uncertainty after death of Ivory Coast PM Bakayoko
Summary: Ivory Coast Prime Minister Hamed Bakayoko died of cancer yesterday: the second Ivory Coast PM to die in eight months.
Context: The former PM, Amadou Gon Coulibaly, was a favorite in the nation’s upcoming Presidential election in 2020 before he died of heart complications, and Bakayoko was by all accounts quite popular due to his ability to bring competing interests to the table for negotiations over the course of his political career, including soldiers who led a series of mutinies in 2017; now that Bakayoko is also dead, there’s concern that some previously bandaged wounds of that kind will open back up, and that the nation will suffer a leadership gap in the interim.
—Reuters
Brazil COVID surge reaches new level as daily deaths pass 2,000
Summary: Brazil has suffered more than 2,000 COVID-linked deaths in a day, setting a new record for the country with the second-highest death toll in the world after the United States.
Context: Intensive care units across Brazil are at more than 80% capacity and a local doctor and researcher with the scientific institute Fiocruz has said that the current figures and trajectory of the pandemic, locally, point to the “overload and even collapse of the health system”—in contrast, the country’s President Bolsonaro recently told Brazilians to “stop whining” about the increasing death toll.
—BBC
Visual
55.5 million tons
Amount of total agricultural exports from the United States to China in 2020, which is about 25% of total US farm exports.
This is up from not quite 15 million tons in 2018 and nearly 28 million in 2019.
This increase is thought to be the consequence of trade relationships normalizing (somewhat) between the US and China after a tumultuous several years defined by a Trump administration-led trade war with the US’s largest agricultural customer.
—The Wall Street Journal
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Yesterday’s Newsletter is published by analytic journalist and host of the Let’s Know Things podcast, Colin Wright.