Pygmies near their village in Central African Republic.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

OpinionNicholas Kristof

‘Conflict Is More Profitable Than Peace’

Perhaps the most devastating blow anyone can suffer is to lose a child. In the Central African Republic it happens all the time. Welcome to the world's most neglected crisis.

BAYANGA, Central African Republic — Perhaps the most devastating blow any human can suffer is to lose a child, and Julienne Moada has already lost three. A Pygmy living on the edge of the jungle in what may be the world’s most wretched country, she has borne five children and now cradles little Bruno, a fourth in peril, with fierce devotion and desperation.

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Julienne Moada with her son Bruno, who was being treated for malaria and anemia.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Bruno, severely ill with malaria, barely responded to his mother’s caresses. Here in a country torn apart by civil war and ethnic cleansing for 14 years, where government is mostly just a rumor, kids die routinely because of the chaos and dysfunction. Still, Moada sat beside her hut made of leaves and dared to be optimistic. “I think he’s a little better,” she said hopefully.

I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student with me on a reporting trip, and this year the winner is Tyler Pager of Northwestern and Oxford Universities. We came to Central African Republic, arguably the capital of human misery, because it constitutes one of the most neglected crises in the world.

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A woman preparing cassava, a staple in the national diet, in a Pygmy village on the edge of an endless jungle.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Central African Republic ranks No. 1 as the hungriest country, according to the latest Global Hunger Index. A quarter of the population has been forced to flee fighting, and the Red Cross warned that humanitarian conditions were “rapidly deteriorating.” Yet the United Nations says that its humanitarian plan for CAR is only 2 percent funded.

This country also embodies a larger truth: For thousands of years, humanity’s greatest challenge was poverty and disease, but increasingly it may be conflict.

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A farming village in the war-torn country, one of the hungriest in the world. The conflict has aggravated the poverty and made it much harder for aid groups to deliver services.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

That’s because we’re making huge strides in most places, with the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty dropping from about 90 percent in the early 1800s to less than 10 percent today. Yet there are exceptions like CAR, South Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo that are horribly off track — because they are ruled in parts not by governments but by gunmen.

The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of its humanitarian funding needs are now driven by conflict. The U.N. World Food Program says conflict causes 60 percent of life-threatening hunger.

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Left, a severely malnourished 5-year-old, Frederick Pandowan. Right, Michel Poundimba, who was stabbed and robbed in the capital, Bangui.Credit...Photographs by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

So we must rethink the global war on poverty. These days the world should tackle conflict as aggressively as it fought AIDS. Donors need to focus not just on building wells or schools, but also on building peace. This may make liberal doves uncomfortable, but the blunt reality is that in some places the most important humanitarians are the peacekeepers carrying weapons.

Yet President Trump has slashed assistance for U.N. peacekeeping, and his ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, boasted in a tweet that the administration was “only getting started” cutting back on peacekeeping. Ambassador Haley, please understand that without peacekeeping, you’re sentencing civilians to be raped and shot — and boys like Frederick Pandowan to starve.

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In the town of Boda, mothers held their malnourished and sick children at a hospital run by an aid group called Alima.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

We met Frederick in the western CAR town of Boda, at a hospital run by an aid group called Alima. He’s 5 years old, emaciated, with ribs pressing through his flesh, and weighs just 19.6 pounds. That’s less than half the weight of an average 5-year-old in America.

His mom, Tefole Raissa, explained that they had fled fighting and no longer have land. “I can’t farm now,” she explained. She doesn’t remember the last time she ate meat or eggs; the family gets by on one evening meal a day of cassava, a starchy tuber with negligible nutrition.

This country is lush, with vast areas of untilled land, and nobody should go hungry. But violence changes everything. Collette Lundi, the mother of one desperately malnourished boy fighting for his life in a hospital, said her husband had been killed by a militia and their house destroyed, leaving the family with nothing to eat but small amounts of cassava.

I asked if she ever eats meat.

She nodded and explained, “We try to catch rats.”

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Collette Lundi with Serge, her severely malnourished 8-month-old son, at a hospital in Boda. Most malnourished children recover, but they are often stunted physically and mentally.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Central African Republic is preyed upon by some 14 militias. At times there has been Christian-Muslim fighting, but these days the militias are less ideological than entrepreneurial. They routinely set up checkpoints to “tax” every vehicle that passes — when they don’t simply steal trucks or goods.

“Conflict is more profitable than peace,” noted Neal Kringel, a senior U.S. diplomat for the region, highlighting what needs to change.

Insecurity means that the government operates few clinics, so women die in childbirth at one of the highest rates in the world. Aid becomes expensive and dangerous to provide: Gunmen killed 16 humanitarian workers here last year, and six more so far this year, making CAR one of the most perilous countries for aid workers.

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Yacome Tatiana, 30, in labor in a small clinic in a village north of Boda. Partly because of the conflict, the country is one of the most dangerous places in the world to deliver a baby.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

“Without security, we will not make progress,” said Christophe Droeven, the director in CAR of Catholic Relief Services, an aid group we traveled with for several days.

Yet it’s not hopeless. Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Liberia have come back from chaos and civil war to establish security. In Congress, the Global Fragility and Violence Reduction Act, which has been introduced with bipartisan backing, would develop strategies to tamp down conflict. In general, top-down peacekeeping helps, as does bottom-up peace-building.

We visited peace-building programs organized by Catholic Relief Services to reduce tensions between Muslims and Christians. In one project, 125 people were paid $3 a day each to dig drainage ditches — but on the condition that Christians and Muslims work together.

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As part of a peace-building program organized by Catholic Relief Services, Muslims and Christians work together clearing a drainage system.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

“It’s my first time to be mixed with Muslims,” Marlene Wabangue, a young Christian mother with her baby daughter on her back, told me during a break. “But I’m not scared of them. I’m fine with them.”

Mercy Corps, another aid group, says that its peace-building projects in CAR have been very successful, even leading to voluntary disarmament.

“Today, conflict is the driver of extreme poverty,” said Neal Keny-Guyer, the president of Mercy Corps, and he warned that climate change might exacerbate the conflicts. The upshot, he said, is that the world needs to work on building peace as aggressively as it has tackled malaria and AIDS.

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A child in the Muslim enclave in Boda. Nearly one-fourth of the country's population has been forced to flee homes and villages because of the fighting. Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

I realize that for many Americans, these issues seem as remote as if they unfolded on Mars — and hopeless to boot. But the truth is that the war on global poverty is one of humanity’s great successes, with more than 100 million children’s lives saved just since 1990.

Now it’s not enough to build schools or clinics. To finally defeat extreme poverty, we have to tackle conflict — or there will forever be families losing child after child after child.

We must ensure that peace is more profitable than conflict. As the mayor of Boda, Boniface Katta, told us, “Without peace, nothing can be done.”

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A road in the southwestern part of Central African Republic. After 14 years of civil war and ethnic cleansing, the government is little more than a rumor in rural parts of the country.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001, and was a longtime foreign correspondent before that. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. @NickKristof Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Conflict Is More Profitable Than Peace’ . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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