A group of Sudanese women stand, huddled together for protection against the sandstorm. They have likely fled the Janjaweed (current RSF), or maybe the army, or maybe both. All they have in the world is a tin pot and a bag of USAID rice. Pretty crazy to think that this painting is now protest art, and that it would elicit howls of rage on social media. I wonder what is wrong with us?

There’s a sub-plot to this painting. For the last five years I worked as part of the Louisiana delegation on the hill. There, one of my jobs was to support the state’s rice industry, which is always under such threat from shrinking markets and unfair competition from inferior quality product from India or Thailand (I even received the 2026 Staff of the Year award from USA Rice, though I was not on the Ag committee, in appreciation for my efforts for the farmers of Louisiana). Rice is a settled market, stable, so when a client vanishes they are hard to replace. Under PL480, the US government’s food assistance program called Food for Peace, USDA or USAID purchased between $1b to $2b a year of US agricultural products, rice being one of them. When USAID was wiped out our ricers lost a market worth tens of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the Sudanese, the Somalians, the Yemeni, the Nigerians, many more lost access to staple foods to feed their babies. Many hundreds of thousands have died.

While the Sudanese women huddle there still, and I think of them every day. https://www.artpal.com/joeldhirst?i=319328-52