Students, faculty and staff gathered on the first floor of Burling Library to hear Leif Brottem, department chair of global development studies, and Parikshit Roychowdhury `26 present their research. The pair spoke about the central African region including two villages in Southeastern Chad, of which Brottem described as “truly the poorest region in the world.”
The reasons behind why this region has been under so much duress, according to Brottem and Roychowdhury, is due to lack of food, flooding and an influx of refugees entering the country.
“Eighty-five percent of people do not produce enough food for their households,” said Brottem. While these issues are dire, there have been efforts made to better these issues by the World Food Program, an international food assistance program, he said.
The importance of the World Food Program was brought up during the presentation alongside some of its downsides. Brottem talked about how the program began efforts to start stocking from local farmers in an attempt to support the local villages.
However, the downside to these efforts is competing with the deficit producing farmers in each area. Brottem and Roychowdhury explained that only 5 to 10 percent of local farmers are producing surplus, with most not even being able to grow enough to support their families.
This deficit stems from an inability to gain access to enough resources to support more ambitious farming. The farmers producing in deficit are unable to afford adequate land, tools and labor, said Roychowdhury and Brottem.
The food deficit in this area has always been a problem, however it has been exacerbated within the past couple of years, with the floods causing even more land loss.
“A lot of farmers were completely wiped out,” said Brottem. “Reliance on the market was suddenly much higher.”
However, the market prices for food are also unreliable and often inaccessible.
Roychowdhury talked about the major spike in price of sorghum, a type of cereal that serves as the main food source in these areas. “The spike in the market caused people to eat less,” said Brottem.
Roychowdhury said that there is “less food going around, but the World Food Program continues at the same pace.” Almost everyone had a fall in their food consumption in 2024 due to these rising costs, said Roychowdhury.
There were also refugee flows from breakout wars in Sudan, which added onto the struggles the locals in Chad had been experiencing. Brottem said that there are currently 1.2 million Sudanese refugees residing in Chad.
On top of food distress, locals also take issue with refugees for reasons involving land. Brottem said that the locals sometimes resent what they see as entitlements from refugees and have complaints often of environmental destruction.
Brottem brought attention to what he describes as an invisible aspect of Chad — the debt economy. This type of economic trap reinforces the poverty that groups are already experiencing by making it near impossible for people to make enough surplus to rise out of poverty.
Brottem talked about how increases in market costs for sorghum affects poorer households more than wealthier homes and puts more emphasis on loans.
Brottem said that these loans enforce the poverty trap. “Food deficit households are living in constant debt to cereal merchants,” he said.
Working opportunities outside of farming and domestic and child-rearing work are made up of collecting and selling dry grass for women, while for men, the main mode of work is chopping wood and light construction work.
Brottem said that these sources of income are often extremely low-paying and often very temporary. When these sources of work run out, people in these situations resort to wage labor on farms, often resulting in landlessness.
These compounding issues within these types of communities are why Brottem describes the area as the “site of some of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.”