John Stanmeyer: There are two billion of us who live on two dollars, or less a day. So, if you earn two dollars a day, that means seventy percent of that income goes to just feed yourself. What happens when food prices rise, thirty, forty, fifty percent? You have economic food starvation.

I've had the privilege to be able to work for this magazine for eleven years now. The first story I did was on global aid, looking at the tsunami that happened in the Indian Ocean. And I happened to have been living in Indonesia at the time. I was standing in a rice field when I got a text message saying, “Did you hear a wall of water had hit?” At the time we only knew about Thailand. And I went to Sri Lanka first, spent a week there, and we finally learned what had happened in Indonesia, in Sumatra. Quarter of a million people died across the planet, quarter of a million. So, we started on this story in Sumatra, in Indonesia. This is what happens, really when the Earth burps, or moves, which is naturally done for millennia. We just never had cameras around to actually bear witness. This is a village that had seven thousand people living in it. This is one week after the tsunami. Seven thousand people, wall of water, hundred feet high, moving in, speed of an aircraft, erasing everything but one structure, a mosque. And I went back a week later, and there were only thirty some residents still living, and praying still in that mosque. It's an actual image of hope, of resilience, of standing up for the abilities to move forward, in the most crushing difficulty of nature coming at you. When the tsunami hit, people came from all over the world, everybody came in to try to help.

This is the U.S. Marines coming in. They happened to be stationed, they had a patrol ship, off the coast of Singapore. And came in immediately ferrying goods. I love small NGO's, an NGO called Mercy Corps came in. And this aid group said, “You know what? We're going to empower fisherman, to go back and be fisherman.” Well, guess what? Their boats had washed in three, four kilometers inland. It took an entire day, sometimes two days, to pull these large vessels back in, so that fisherman could be fisherman again. Re-empowerment. When aid came in, it came flooding in on massive ships. And people didn't realize the culture. And so they dropped off t-shirts, and bikinis and little bits and bobbles, but this is an Islamic nation. The world's largest Muslim country on Earth. And they just dumped it on the beach, because there was no orchestration. And here are people having to look for what the could have, because they had nothing left except the clothing that they were wearing. That part of Sumatra, there had been a separatist movement for decades. A war going on, I'd covered the war before. And all the whole culture, the children had grown up seeing nothing but blood and conflict. What happens when they come and they start building houses? The children get the wood. They make the toys they grew up seeing, Kalashnikovs.

I did another story on the rising cost of food around the world. And we call it, The End of Plenty. We are now 7.3 billion fellow human beings, in the only place we can live and in the next twenty five years, we're going to be 9 billion fellow human beings with no other place to go. How do we feed ourselves affordably? Healthy? How do we do it? I went to Egypt right before the Arab Spring. Right before the landscape of the Great Pyramids of Giza, people are fighting for food. Because they couldn't afford food anymore, due to the rising cost of wheat. They had to get government subsidized bread. And every day in thousands of these kiosks across Egypt, people were fighting just to be able to get food. Something as basic as bread. I went to Iowa, to look at the bread basket of the world, the United States. This is the Kuntz family, a fourth generation farmer. And boy, the commodity prices are going through the roof. They're making the money, They're making a bonanza. And this family is so engrained, they become literally, almost reflected in their combine. Become the product that they grow, product that they reap. But when commodity prices start to go through the roof, because of natural disasters. Like in this case, the Mississippi River, flooding the farmlands of Iowa. Commodity prices go through the roof, affecting all of us across the planet. We also are having another divergence of food, out of our stomachs and into the stomachs of pigs, and also into the stomachs of our cars. Raising again, the cost of food. And that has an enormous impact on the cost of how we feed ourselves. We may not notice it in this country, but if you live on two dollars a day, you'll see that it does.

We went to the Amazon. Brazil wants to become the next bread basket of the world. President Dilma as no issues about cutting down the Amazon. There's a brilliant statement in what she said. “Okay, if you want us to keep the trees to produce oxygen, pay us.” Because they want to have an economic bounty, because that's what we did in North America. That area of all of the midwest used to be forests and swamps. And we created it as the world's largest bread basket. And other nations want to do the same thing I was astonished by how many fires in a region was burning to make more farmland. And why? For this nineteen metric tons of soy beans going into a Greek freighter, to be shipped over to China, where we have 1.3 billion fellow human beings with a light switch of economic opportunity. They didn't have an Industrial Revolution. I went to this market in Guangzhoa, China in 1996, and most of it was vegetables. I went back to this market in 2008, eighty percent of it meat. Because they have the economic opportunity to do the things that we've been doing for eons in this country, right? For decades we've been eating meat. It's a light switch. Went to another part of China where, at a religious event, where villagers for centuries have honored their loved ones who've passed away with a feast. Well, it used to be rice and some vegetables and a little bit of meat. In this case, three thousand people coming together, simultaneously eating a thirteen course meal, all of which is hardly even eaten. And they are repeating what we've been doing in our country for decades. 1.3 billion people now. The rising cost of food causes wheat noodle prices to go through the roof. And this wheat noodle maker was finding that he couldn't find enough customers to buy his wheat noodles anymore. Because it was getting too expensive.

We went to India to look at the Green Revolution. India in the sixties was crippled, and hardly able to feed itself, coming out into independence. And in this case, now they're in a bounty because, science and technology came together, fertilizers and pesticides. This case a farmer is thrilled. Look how many people are riding on the top of a bounteous harvest. You'd never see that in America, code police would come out and say, “Too many people on your tractor.” I think it's beautiful actually. But they, they polluted their water table system. And in the Punjab region of Northwest India, birth defects and cancer rates through the roof. All in order to try to feed ourselves. In the Philippines, with the rising commodity prices, way up in the Ifugao region of Northern Luzon, children want to become farmers again. Instead of going to the city in metro Manila or overseas to work in houses in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong as housekeepers. Why? Because you can make a living to be a farmer again. And here younger children are learning, from their grandparents, how to be farmers again. So, pretty neat.

And in the Philippines, is the International Rice Research Institute where everyday rice comes in from all over the world, and hands deftly sort each grain of rice for the strongest grains. And here's how it's so important. When Pol Pot decimated the agricultural industry of Cambodia, all of their rice fields got destroyed. And they couldn't grow rice properly anymore when they brought in rice from Thailand and elsewhere. And IRRI, International Rice Research Institute, had a small packet of seeds in their vault, and they brought those seeds back to Cambodia, and to this day, the Cambodians are growing their own indigenous rice again. All because of these hands, deftly sorting out the strongest genes of seed.

I went to Bangladesh. There are two billion of us, two billion, who live on two dollars or less a day. So if you earn two dollars a day, that means seventy percent of that income goes to just feed yourself. What happens when food prices rise thirty, forty, fifty percent. You have economic food starvation. This is Mohammed. He lost his land due to river and climate change. And he was able to sell some weeds, literally as fencing, to buy a small packet of rice and two sardines. And that was the only meal he had. And he took it back home to his family, where, in a male dominated society, he ate with his two sons, his only meal, and whatever was left over, could be had for his wife, because they could no longer afford food. I had never seen this before. I was standing in a field in Bangladesh, with a farmer harvesting his rice, and this woman comes out of nowhere, two women with baskets, begging “Can I please sweep and pick up every grain of rice that had dropped?” And for an hour she swept and picked up every grain of rice, because it was the only meal she could afford to eat, because she could no longer afford to buy rice.