40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World

Howard G. Buffett, a farmer, photographer, and philanthropist, is the son of legendary investor Warren Buffett. In this nonfiction work, co-written with his son Howard W. Buffett (referred to as HWB), he presents 40 stories drawn from over a decade of work attacking global hunger through the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The book traces how Buffett shifted from wildlife conservation to food security, what he and his team learned from successes and failures, and why he believes urgency, soil health, and sustainable approaches must replace the status quo of aid and development.

The book opens with a dramatic 2012 encounter in South Sudan, where Buffett photographed General Caesar Acellam, a recently captured top lieutenant of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a group blamed for displacing 2 million people and abducting 60,000 children. Buffett used cameras, peanut butter sandwiches, and a Tootsie Pop to put Acellam at ease, producing photographs later printed on 565,000 laminated flyers dropped over the jungle to urge remaining LRA fighters to surrender. The episode establishes the book's central argument: Conflict is one of the leading causes of hunger, and addressing food insecurity demands engaging with its full complexity, including violence, corruption, and failed policies.

Part 1 recounts the roots of Buffett's mission. At a farm equipment event in central Illinois in 2001, a speaker reframed farming as finite: Most farmers get roughly 40 planting seasons in a lifetime. This idea, which gives the book its title, transformed Buffett's thinking about both farming and philanthropy. Through his travels, he recognizes that endangered species and disappearing rain forests are inseparable from human hunger, as starving people will poach animals or slash and burn forests to survive. The scale is vast: Roughly 870 million people suffer chronic hunger globally, nearly 50 million Americans are food insecure, and the world's population is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, requiring what the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates is a 70 percent increase in food production. After his mother Susan's death in 2004, Warren Buffett pledged the equivalent of more than $1 billion to each of his three children's foundations, giving Howard the resources to tackle hunger on a dramatically larger scale. Buffett commits the foundation to dispersing all funds by 2045, embracing urgency and a willingness to make mistakes rather than pursuing only safe decisions.

Buffett traces his path through formative experiences. At 14, he traveled alone to Soviet-occupied Prague to visit Czech exchange student Vera Vitvarová, who had stayed with his family. He witnessed tanks in streets, severe food shortages, and protesters beaten by secret police. Standing in grocery lines for hours, he experienced hunger for the first time and learned that food insecurity can arise suddenly from conflict. His path to farming was equally circuitous. After drifting through college and working odd jobs with heavy equipment, he discovered farming while helping a local mechanic disk cornfields. He contrasts American agriculture, where one farmer feeds 155 people, with the reality facing hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers who lack roads, markets, storage, credit, and land rights. His foundation's pyramid analysis of African farmers identifies fewer than five percent as commercial "elites," a slightly larger group as "stable" farmers who mostly eat what they grow, and roughly 90 percent as "fragile" farmers like Adanech Seifa, an Ethiopian woman whose tiny plot cannot feed her family of 11.

Photography became central to Buffett's advocacy after his wife, Devon, gave him his first quality camera. A harrowing experience in Senegal, where he photographed boys chained by a marabout, a powerful religious leader, and narrowly escaped a vehicle hijacking, exemplifies how his camera both exposed him to danger and produced evidence that could prompt action. During his years at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a global agricultural processor, CEO Dwayne Andreas tasked Buffett with supporting Vice President Al Gore's push for biodiversity. The research gave Buffett an intellectual framework: Maximizing production on fertile US farmland helps protect fragile ecosystems elsewhere, because when productive cropland is idled through subsidies, developing nations clear rain forests to fill the gap.

Part 2 presents individual faces of hunger and profiles of people fighting it. Buffett describes a girl in Niger with the swollen belly of protein deficiency who died days after he photographed her, despite the existence of therapeutic foods costing about $45 per child. He recounts meeting Maria, an 11-year-old in Guatemala who appeared healthy but had chronic micronutrient deficiency from a diet of only corn and beans. In Sierra Leone, he interviewed "Little Cromite," a former child soldier who was abducted at age six, injected with cocaine, and forced to commit atrocities. Among the dedicated individuals Buffett profiles are Joe DeVries, a seed breeder who launched seed companies across 16 African countries; Padre David Beaumont, a Franciscan priest in Mexico's Sierra Madre, where drug cartels force subsistence farmers to replace food crops with marijuana; and Emmanuel de Merode, director of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who protects mountain gorillas while pursuing development to benefit a million local people.

Part 3 examines hard-learned lessons. Visiting a starving village in Angola, Buffett estimated it would cost $5 million to save 1,600 people through emergency intervention but realized that spending $500 million village by village would still not change underlying conditions. Governments must invest in roads, credit, training, and land rights. He examines the legacy of agronomist Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, which saved an estimated billion people in India and Asia through high-yield wheat and fertilizer but produced environmental fallout and cannot simply be replicated in Africa's diverse geography. At the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, Buffett discovered that local farmers applied nitrogen fertilizer with only 31 percent efficiency, contaminating groundwater. He advocates instead for a "Brown Revolution" focused on soil health through techniques such as planting basins, cover crops, intercropping with legumes, and no-till farming.

Buffett addresses cultural disconnects through experiences at a cheetah reserve in South Africa, where a witch doctor blocked land transactions and employees removed a new stove to cook over an open fire pit. HWB recounts his disillusionment after visiting post-tsunami Thailand, where nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) built inappropriate homes Thai villagers refused to use and competed for visibility while neglecting less accessible communities. Buffett criticizes "monetization," the practice by which NGOs sell US food aid on local markets to fund operations, depressing prices for local farmers. He praises the aid organization CARE for stopping the practice in 2006, though it cost CARE $45 million in annual revenue. He also evaluates his foundation's $70 million Global Water Initiative, which largely failed because partner NGOs reverted to short-term thinking and refused to collaborate.

Parts 4 and 5 explore ongoing challenges and reasons for hope. Buffett argues for reforming US farm subsidies to incentivize soil and water conservation. He describes the roller crimper, a low-tech implement that can be pulled by oxen to flatten cover crops into weed-suppressing mulch, enabling no-till planting for subsistence farmers. Buffett contends that empowering women in development is essential but insufficient without also engaging men. HWB reports on research at Texas A&M University suggesting that agricultural development aid reduces conflict, while aid flowing to elites can increase inequality and spark violence.

Among the reasons for hope, Brazil transformed itself from a net food importer to a major exporter through government-funded research on farming acidic cerrado soils, a model Buffett highlights for Africa's similar savanna regions. Ghanaian scientist Kofi Boa demonstrated that no-till techniques with cover crops increased maize yields by 45 percent; the foundation commits to helping him build Africa's first Center for No-Till Agriculture. The World Food Programme's Purchase for Progress program, which the foundation helped launch in 2007, buys food from smallholder farmers for local distribution, creating stable markets while training farmers in business skills. Additional stories highlight Map the Meal Gap, a tool providing county-level food insecurity data across the United States, and a land-titling initiative in Nicaragua that secured ownership for over 1,376 farmers. Buffett argues that sustainable progress ultimately requires functional government institutions, profiling former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Africa Governance Initiative as a model for building governance capacity in countries including Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

In the epilogue, Buffett returns to Prague with HWB in 2012 and reconnects with Vera. The city's transformation from a grim occupation zone to a vibrant capital reinforces his conviction that challenges can be overcome. He reaffirms his identity as a "pessimistic optimist" and his belief that the effort to lift people out of food insecurity, while difficult, will always be worth it.