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How the world wastes hundreds of billions of meals in a year, in three charts

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The UN reports that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year worldwide. | Mykola Miakshykov/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images Think twice before throwing out your leftovers. A billion meals are wasted every single day, according to a recent report from the United Nations. And that’s a conservative estimate. It’s not just food down the drain, but money, too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report — which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries — found that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year, from households to grocery stores to farms, all across the globe. Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste alone is responsible for an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be third in emissions produced, behind only the United States and China. Perhaps the most immediate harm, though, is the more than 780 million people who went hungry around the world in 2022, even as hundreds of billions of meals were wasted that same year. The world has become more efficient at producing a lot of food, so much so that there’s more than enough to go around for everyone. But in 2022, nearly 30 percent of people were moderately or severely food insecure, defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization as lacking regular access to safe and nutritious food. Food waste reduction is “an opportunity to reduce costs and to tackle some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time: fighting climate change and addressing food insecurity,” the authors of the report write. Food waste might seem like an easy problem to solve — just stop wasting food. But in order to snuff food waste out, individuals, businesses, and policymakers alike will need to make some serious changes — and those changes will look different for each country. Global food waste is not just a consumer-level problem, but also a nasty side effect of inefficient food systems that have environmental and social implications. The UN has the goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030. For that to happen, the authors of the Food Waste Index say there’s one crucial step all countries need to do: data collection. You can’t stop wasting food until you know how much food you’re wasting. How do you measure food waste? According to the report — which was spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and co-authored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK-based climate organization — households contributed to 60 percent of all food waste generated globally in 2022, compared to nearly 28 percent for food service and a little under 13 percent for retailers. However, it’s important to note that there was a lot more usable data for food waste in households than there was for food service or retail — and that’s especially true for low-income and middle-income countries. The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that. To clarify which estimates can be used for understanding the scale of a problem and which can be used beyond that, the report also assigned a “confidence” rating to each Level 1 estimate — high, medium, low, very low, or no rating. Only 11 countries were assigned a high confidence rating for household food waste estimates. Of these, Saudi Arabia had the highest amount of household food waste per person annually, at a little over 231 pounds per person. Bhutan had the lowest, at just under 42 pounds per person. The next two levels of the methodology lay out a framework in which countries can track their food waste generation. Level 2 is the recommended, baseline approach for countries and requires an actual measurement, rather than just an estimate, of food waste that is suitable for tracking food waste at a national level. Level 3 goes beyond that and gives guidances for how countries can include additional helpful data, like where wasted food goes, how much of food waste is edible, and food loss from manufacturing. While some organizations and institutions define food waste as edible food mass, the report includes both the edible and inedible parts of food. That may make it seem as if the estimations are inflated, but what’s considered edible and inedible can differ from culture to culture — think peels of fruits, or certain parts of animal meat. They also acknowledge that it’s difficult to measure edible food waste without also measuring the inedible parts, and most countries haven’t done so. Notably, the report only includes what gets thrown out at the household, retail, and food service level. That means that the Food Waste Index does not measure “food loss,” which is what gets lost in the production part of the process at farms and factories, as well as in transportation. According to the FAO, an estimated 13 percent of the world’s food is lost in the supply chain prior to hitting shelves. Why does food get wasted? The report also found that on average, household food waste in high-income, upper-middle income, and lower-income countries didn’t differ too much, but the reasons why waste happens will differ across these groups. Variables like access to electricity and refrigeration, dietary habits and behaviors, food distribution infrastructure, country temperature and so forth can all contribute to a country’s food waste levels. While there didn’t seem to be a relationship between a country’s income grouping and household food waste levels, a household’s income within that country — along with other factors — could play a part in their food waste habits. “Just as we expect the reasons for waste to vary between countries, we expect it to vary between households within the same country,” said Hamish Forbes, a senior analyst at WRAP and one of the authors of the 2024 Food Waste Index, via email. “Factors such as kitchen infrastructure, cooking skills/knowledge, cultural norms, time availability, disposable income and so on are all likely to play a role.” In the United States, the Food Waste Index found that food waste is happening mostly at the household and food service level. If we want to get those numbers down, it’s going to take every participant in our food system — from consumers all the way to big businesses and retailers. How can we stop wasting food? It would be reductive to leave the burden of solving food waste and loss to everyday people, when the problem requires solutions across industries, food sectors, governance, and consumers. “The problem is everywhere and requires solutions everywhere,” the report authors write. As of 2022, only 21 countries had made commitments to reducing food waste or food loss as a part of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the goals to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change as a part of the Paris Agreement. But out of those 21, only two countries had submitted NDCs to tackle both food waste and food loss, according to a report by WRAP. Those two countries were Jordan and Namibia, according to Forbes. Commitments are a great first step, but what comes next? “There’s a well-known saying that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and this is very evident in the food loss and waste space,” said Forbes. He added that measurement can show the true scale of our food wastage across different sectors, and in turn, it can also help policymakers identify solutions and where to implement them. “Beyond just measuring the total amount of food waste, measurements in countries, cities or even businesses can identify ‘hotspots’,” Forbes told me. “For example, if I measure food waste in my restaurant and see from that data that most diners are leaving some of their potato fries, then I’m probably serving too much and I can reduce that wastage.” One country that’s made progress is the United Kingdom. In 2005, the UK established the Courtauld Commitment, a series of voluntary agreements between the governments, organizations, and businesses within the UK to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improve water management. The food waste reduction policies from these agreements work on all parts of the food system: supporting waste management on farms, giving guidance to food service and retail sectors on food redistribution, implementing consumer campaigns, and more. As a result, the UK has reduced per capita food waste by 23 percent in total from 2007 to 2018. Dana Gunders, the executive director of the US-based food waste reduction nonprofit ReFED, told me that in the US, there are a few ways our government can change the consumer environment so that people waste less food. One solution is passing the Food Date Labeling Act. You’ve probably found yourself squinting at a carton of eggs that’s been in your fridge for an unknown amount of time, scouring for the “sell by,” “use by,” or “best by” date and debating how safe it is to consume. As of now, the US doesn’t have a standardized labeling process for food, which has translated into consumer confusion around food quality that leads to throwing out meals that are perfectly safe to eat. Creating a standardized label system with clearer phrasing could help consumers make better choices around food usage. Then there’s Gunder’s big legislative wish: a ban on sending food to landfills, a policy that’s in the jurisdiction of states. According to ReFED, some states and municipalities have enacted policies around limiting, diverting, or banning organic material like food from entering landfills. Gunders also wants to see food service sectors and retailers like grocery stores track their food waste — again, better collection of data helps craft better solutions. She also thinks grocery stores could improve their food donation system. There are some up-and-coming intermediaries, like Too Good To Go, which connects donations from grocery stores and restaurants with consumers. But having a more robust policy that isn’t opt-in can help redistribute perfectly edible food and make sure it doesn’t go to waste. “All companies should have a solid donation policy that is across all of their locations, across all product types,” Gunders said. “Sometimes you have grocers who are great at donating bread, but they really don’t donate milk or dairy or meat or seafood. And so there are ways to do that, and some of the grocers who are best at donating are doing that.” Of course, consumers themselves play a role. Planning meals and being more careful around purchasing food, preserving food in freezers, finding ways to take leftover ingredients and making them into a meal — all are ways individuals can personally reduce their food waste. As for food waste and hunger, the report states that “reducing food waste can increase food availability for those who need it.” Forbes told me that how food loss and waste relates to hunger will depend on the sector we’re focusing on. It’ll take a lot more than simply slashing food waste to fix hunger — which is ultimately a symptom of poverty — but reducing food waste by diverting perfectly edible foods to those who need it can certainly help.

The UK’s controversial Rwanda deportation plan, explained

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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak conducts a press conference on a plan to stop illegal migration on December 7, 2023. | James Manning/WPA/Getty Images There are already legal challenges to the new policy, but authorities detained some migrants this week. The UK is again preparing to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda after Parliament created a workaround to enact a policy the high court declared unlawful. Authorities have begun detaining migrants to deport to Rwanda under the revamped plan. But the policy faces major logistical issues, humanitarian concerns, and the likelihood that a future Labour government will scrap it. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel initially proposed the controversial law in 2022 as a way to reduce irregular migration, particularly via small boats across the English Channel, which is on the rise in the UK. Her successor, Suella Braverman, also advocated for the plan until she was fired in 2023; Prime Minister Rishi Sunak then vowed to “stop the boats” and promised that the policy would become law. Sunak succeeded on the latter front. Following legal challenges that saw the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights declare the proposal unlawful, a bill declaring Rwanda safe for migrants and that limits the courts’ ability to adjudicate the country’s safety was approved as law by King Charles in late April, despite heavy opposition from the House of Lords. The government published a video on May 1 showing law enforcement authorities detaining people to send to the East African country as soon as July. The law has been resoundingly criticized by human rights advocates, immigration lawyers, and Labour politicians who say it violates international law and is, to quote shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, “an expensive gimmick.” The law is part of a broader effort by Sunak and his Conservative Party to burnish their image as their government struggles to maintain support in the lead-up to a national election. Irregular migration has increased in recent years, but it’s not the driver of the problems that the UK is facing, including ongoing cost-of-living and housing crises. However, it is among voters’ top concerns, making the extreme anti-immigration law an appealing policy for a dysfunctional party struggling to maintain power. Now, people fleeing their home countries and making the deadly journey to seek asylum in the UK are bearing the costs. The UK’s Rwanda deportation policy, briefly explained The Rwanda plan has been a policy priority for two years now, and it’s outlived two prime ministers and two home secretaries. The ostensible goal? To deter irregular migrations via the English Channel and other routes, ostensibly for the migrants’ own safety, and to disrupt human trafficking operations. Though the government has declared Rwanda a safe country through its recent legislation, it is the threat of being sent there instead of potentially receiving asylum in the UK that is meant to deter people from entering the country. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame claimed that his country was simply trying to help out with “a very complicated problem all over the world” when Rwanda and the UK struck their initial agreement in 2022. But Rwanda will be well compensated by the British government for its purported generosity (more on that later). And critics say it also benefits Rwanda reputationally despite Kagame’s autocratic tendencies (which include threatening or jailing political rivals, repression of the media, and changing the constitution to extend his rule), not to mention the UK government’s own concerns that Rwanda is not a safe place for LGBTQ refugees. But immigration has become a key policy pillar for the conservative government post-Brexit. Former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, along with Sunak, all touted their tough stance on immigration, hoping to appeal to socially conservative party members who see immigration as a key issue. Sunak and Truss backed the Rwanda plan, which was first proposed by controversial former Home Secretary Priti Patel. The policy was deeply controversial from the start. It applies to the roughly 52,000 asylum seekers the government deems to have entered the UK illegally after January 2022. Under international law, everyone has the right to seek asylum, and countries are obligated to protect people in their territory seeking asylum under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The UK was one of the original signatories to that convention. But under the new rule, regardless of whether their claims are valid, asylum seekers can now be detained, and forced to fly to Rwanda, where their asylum claims will ostensibly be processed and they will be resettled. The plan “is effectively removing the UK from the asylum convention, because it removes the right to asylum which is explicitly guaranteed,” Peter William Walsh, senior researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox in an interview. It also could change the UK’s legal structure: the UK has threatened to withdraw from the court’s jurisdiction should it rule against the Rwanda plan. Costs are already adding up; though no one has been sent to Rwanda and just a handful detained, the UK has already paid Rwanda 220 million pounds (about $270 million) to create infrastructure for asylum seeker processing. That number could skyrocket to more than half a billion pounds total (about $627 million) to send just 300 people to the East African country, according to a UK government watchdog. Because of objections from advocacy groups, the UK Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), no migrant in the UK has ever been transferred to Rwanda under the plan. (One migrant has been sent to Rwanda voluntarily under a separate policy that pays eligible migrants 3,000 pounds if they volunteer to be sent to the country.) As seven people awaited deportation to Rwanda in June of 2022, the ECHR intervened and issued injunctions stopping the migrants’ removal and pausing the controversial policy. Though the UK left the European Union in 2020, it is still part of the Council of Europe, which the ECHR has jurisdiction over, making the court’s decision legally binding. And in November 2023, the UK’s highest court ruled the scheme unlawful. Sunak, however, doubled down on the Rwanda policy, introducing emergency legislation to have Parliament declare Rwanda a safe country, as well as working on a new treaty with Rwanda to address the court’s concerns that asylum-seekers might be sent back to their home countries. That legislation, the Safety of Rwanda Act, passed Parliament in late April and unilaterally declared Rwanda to be a safe place to resettle migrants, paving the way for King Charles’s approval and the Home Office’s moves to detain some migrants who arrived by irregular routes. Conservatives have made the case that the policy is the only way to deal with both the volume and the expense of current migration patterns. There has been a marked uptick in irregular migration to the UK, not just by the “small boats” crossing the English Channel from France. According to data from Frontex, the European border authority, there were 62,047 attempts to cross into the UK via the English Channel last year, which was down 12 percent from the previous year. Overall attempts at irregular border crossings in the EU and the UK were at the highest levels since 2016, a period of significant migration from Syria in particular. Irregular migration makes up a fraction of all immigration cases to the UK — the majority of migration cases in 2023 came on work or student visas, according to the Oxford Migration Observatory — but it is extremely expensive, as migrants claiming asylum cannot work while awaiting processing and the government must pay their costs. Some estimates put asylum seekers’ housing costs alone at as much as 8 million pounds per day. It is also highly visible, Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, told Vox, giving some British people the sense that they have no choice about who comes to their country. And the Rwanda plan is a highly visible answer to that anxiety, which the Tories hope will have political impact, Katwala said. The plan still faces legal challenges, and it’s not clear that it will ever be successful Despite this week’s detentions, the plan will still face significant challenges — not the least of which is the Labour Party’s vow to overturn the policy should it gain power in the national elections, which must take place by January 2025. In the meantime the plan is almost certain to face legal challenges, both within the UK and quite possibly in the ECHR. The primary legal challenge will likely be to the Rwanda Safety Act. The UK government’s assertion that Rwanda is a safe country doesn’t make it a fact, and measures to safeguard migrants deported to Rwanda under the UK-Rwanda treaty, like appointing independent asylum and humanitarian law experts to assess the cases of people for whom it might not be safe to stay in Rwanda, haven’t yet fully been implemented, according to an April 25 statement from the current Home Secretary James Cleverly. The major concern for asylum seekers potentially deported to Rwanda is refoulement, or being sent back to their home countries. In theory, asylum seekers flee their homes under fear of persecution, death, or other harms — and were they to be sent back, they’d again face dire circumstances. The UK-Rwanda treaty is supposed to protect against that through a provision that explicitly bars Rwanda from sending asylum seekers to third countries. However, even if Rwanda doesn’t refoul asylum seekers, it’s not clear that it would be safe for everyone sent there. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office has previously expressed concerns about Rwanda’s safety, especially the risks of extrajudicial killings, as well as the risk that LGBTQ people will be denied asylum there. “We know that [the government has] done risk assessments, and they know about the fundamental flaws” in sending people to Rwanda, Walsh said. When Israel implemented a similar scheme from 2013 to 2018, thousands of people claiming asylum there went to Rwanda and were then sent to Uganda, where many tried to make it to Europe. Based on this program, not only did Rwanda not process asylum cases, but the government either sent people on to Uganda or didn’t track them once they arrived. Advocacy groups and labor unions are challenging the law on humanitarian bases; the UK’s civil servants union claims the scheme would require them to break international law in carrying out their roles. And the ECHR could hear challenges to the law after it goes through the UK court system, and deliver a final ruling on whether the plan violates human rights, but that is unlikely to happen before UK general elections. In the meantime, the government is facing some logistical problems in carrying out its plan; for starters, the government may not legally be able to detain people in the UK’s seven Immigrant Removal Centers until the first flights to Rwanda take off, Walsh said. And space will be an issue, too; there are 1,700 people in the centers, which Walsh called “akin to prisons,” and only 500 free spaces. That could lead to people being held in actual prisons, though UK prisons are already overcrowded. Migrants have reportedly also started fleeing to Ireland, an EU country. Ireland’s justice minister Helen McEntee has said she will draft emergency legislation to send asylum seekers back to the UK, but the phenomenon has already increased tensions between Ireland and the UK. Sunak has survived a reported attempt to oust him as Tory leader before the national elections, but it’s doubtful that even this extreme legislation will carry the Tories to victory in the next national polls. What it seems likely to do, though, is further isolate the UK from the international community.

The lessons from colleges that didn’t call the police

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Pro-Palestinian students and activists face police officers after protesters were evicted from the campus library earlier in the day at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon on May 2. | John Rudoff/AFP via Getty Images Deescalating conflict around protests was possible, but many colleges turned to law enforcement instead. For weeks, police have been arriving on college campuses from New York to California at the behest of university officials, sweeping pro-Palestinian protests and arresting more than 2,100 people. They’ve come in riot gear, zip-tied students and hauled them off, and in some high-profile instances, acted violently. The aggressive crackdown started when Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, summoned New York Police Department officers to campus in mid-April to bring an end to the student encampment there, one day after she promised Congress she would quash unauthorized protests and discipline students for antisemitism. That police intervention temporarily dismantled the encampment, and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 protesters on trespassing charges. But it was also a strategic failure on the part of the university administration. If the university was trying to avoid disruption, it has ended up inviting it instead. In the days since, as support for the protesters has swelled both at Columbia and at hundreds of colleges across the country, students have set up encampments, organized rallies, and in a few cases escalated their protests by occupying university buildings. Similar protests even cropped up in other countries. In response, other universities have taken Columbia’s lead and cracked down on these protests, which seek to end colleges’ investments in firms supporting Israel’s occupation and its ongoing assault on Gaza. Nearly 50 universities have called the authorities to intervene, and students and faculty have been beaten, tear gassed, and shot at with rubber bullets by police. This week, when Columbia escalated its police response, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that “officers threw a protester down the stairs ... and slammed protesters with barricades.” A police officer also fired a gun in a campus building, and others threatened to arrest student journalists. This can only be described as a major overreaction to student protests. But it also didn’t happen in a vacuum. The police response falls squarely in a long pattern of colleges suppressing pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel speech — one that dates back many decades. Currently, universities aren’t applying their rules equally, singling out only some student advocacy as unacceptable campus speech and, in some cases, even changing rules to specifically target these protests. (The Department of Education is now reportedly investigating Columbia for anti-Palestinian discrimination.) While schools including Columbia were quick to call in law enforcement, however, a few other schools have taken an alternative approach — with vastly different outcomes. Administrators at Brown, Northwestern, and several others negotiated with students, allowed them to continue protesting, or even reached deals to end the encampments by meeting some of the protesters’ demands. As a result, they’ve avoided the kind of disruption and chaos unfolding at universities that called the police. These divergent outcomes among schools that relied on police and those that didn’t offer an important lesson on how universities should manage campus activism, while ensuring students’ safety and protecting speech. A messy and misguided response to protests It only took a day and a half after the first Columbia encampment was set up for Shafik to call the police on April 18. In her letter to the NYPD, she wrote that she had “determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” Shafik did not explain what threat the encampments actually posed. (Samantha Slater, a spokeswoman for the university, told Vox that Columbia would not offer comment beyond Shafik’s letter.) The protest itself was not especially disruptive — even the police said protesters were peaceful. They didn’t get in the way of students going about their daily activities, including attending classes. In many ways, the demonstration at Columbia was a standard student protest: Demonstrators were raising awareness about a problem and asking their university to do something about it. Encampments have been used as a protest tactic on college campuses for decades, including in recent years, like when students ran divestment campaigns against fossil fuels. In the 1980s, when Columbia students protested against South African apartheid, with virtually the same divestment demands as the current protesters have, they blockaded a campus building for three weeks. In that case, the school came to an agreement with the student protesters rather than turning to the police to break up the demonstration. While other campus protests historically have led to arrests, few have attracted such a massive national police response so swiftly. What’s taking place now looks similar to how schools responded to anti-war protests in the 1960s and ’70s, when schools, including Columbia, violently cracked down on students. And in 1970, the National Guard infamously shot at protesters at Kent State in Ohio and killed four people. Yet, as my colleague Nicole Narea wrote, the protests then were more aggressive than the encampments on campuses today. The line between legal and illegal protest is often clear. Students have a right to protest in certain campus areas, but occupying a building constitutes trespassing. Enforcement of these rules, however, is seldom applied equally. In many cases, universities have alleged that the protests were disruptive and pointed to the fact that some Jewish students felt that the encampments created an unsafe environment for them on campus. While harassment and intimidation can be reasons to involve law enforcement, the accusations against these protesters mostly focused on their chants and campaign slogans — and in many cases wrongly conflate anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism. (It’s worth noting that the arrested student protesters have largely been charged with trespassing, not harassment or violent acts.) One of the other problems with how many universities and officials have responded to pro-Palestinian demonstrations is that they have changed their protest rules since October 7, in some instances specifically targeting Palestinian solidarity groups. At Columbia, for example, the university issued onerous protest guidelines, including limiting the areas students are allowed to protest and requiring that demonstrations be registered weeks in advance. Northwestern University abruptly imposed a ban on erecting tents and other structures on campus, undermining ongoing protests. Indiana University preemptively changed its rules one day before its students set up an encampment by disallowing tents and changing a decades-old rule. And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order requiring that public universities change their free speech policies and singled out pro-Palestinian groups that he said ought to be disciplined. Such moves have only added fuel to the protests. They also put students and faculty in danger, as police have conducted violent arrests. (Why were there snipers on roofs at Indiana University, anyway?) It can also ultimately be ineffective; after state troopers arrested students at the University of Texas, for example, the Travis County Attorney’s Office dismissed the criminal trespassing charges, saying they lacked probable cause. Is there a better response to campus protests? Not all universities have turned to the police in response to pro-Palestinian protests. Those that chose a different path have seen much less tension than those that did. Evergreen State College, for example, agreed to its student demands, promising to divest from businesses profiting off human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Students agreed to end their encampment in response. Schools that didn’t necessarily acquiesce to protesters’ demands took other, non-escalatory steps to quell demonstrations. Brown University, which had last year called police to disband protesters, took an alternative approach this time around: The university negotiated with protesters, and organizers agreed to clear the encampment earlier this week after the school’s governing body announced that it will hold a vote on divesting from companies with ties to Israel later this year. Northwestern University similarly reached a deal with its students by reestablishing an advisory committee on its investments. At Michigan State University, President Kevin Guskiewicz visited the student encampment himself and talked to the protesters about their concerns. He allowed students to continue the protest, so long as they applied for a permit, which the students did and the university granted. As a result, the school has avoided the kind of disruptions seen at Columbia and other universities. There’s a simple way for universities to handle these protests: Treat them like other protests. As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in an open letter to college and university presidents, schools can announce content-neutral rules and enforce them — that is, set up guidelines that don’t just target certain protests, such as the ongoing pro-Palestinian ones. “The rules must not only be content neutral on their face; they must also be applied in a content-neutral manner. If a university has routinely tolerated violations of its rules, and suddenly enforces them harshly in a specific context, singling out particular views for punishment, the fact that the policy is formally neutral on its face does not make viewpoint-based enforcement permissible,” the ACLU wrote. At Columbia, where the aggressive police response started a national pattern, it’s hard to argue that enforcement was neutral from the start of the encampment. “Just imagine these students were protesting, say, in solidarity with women’s protests in Iran,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at Princeton and author of the book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, in a post on X. “I don’t see how [the] NYPD would have been called in to arrest them 36 hours into their then small protest.” Instead, Columbia called law enforcement, and now campuses across the country are environments that are unsafe for students and faculty alike. Pro-Israel counterprotesters, for example, attacked student encampments earlier this week at the University of California Los Angeles with pepper spray, wooden planks, and fireworks. (Notably, while schools acted swiftly to uproot the encampments, UCLA was an example of how slow they have been in actually protecting the protesters from violence.) Ultimately, the moment Shafik called in the NYPD set the stage for a far more disruptive end of the semester for schools nationwide than what the original protests would have achieved on their own. “From the very beginning, calling in the police quickly has been an escalatory dynamic,” Tufekci wrote on X. “It almost always is.”

Should humans get their own geologic era?

The debate over the Anthropocene epoch, explained. The word “Anthropocene” has gained cultural resonance in recent years, as it’s become clearer that humans have made an indelible and destructive impact on our planet. But it’s also a term with a specific technical meaning: an epoch, or geologic unit of time, named for humans. In 2009, a group of s

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The longshot plan to end the war in Gaza and bring peace to the Middle East

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President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrive for a photo during a summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 16, 2022. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images The US and Saudi Arabia say they’re close to a historic mega-deal. There’s just one problem. As an old saying, often attributed to President Dwight Eisenhower, goes, “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Given how torturously difficult it has been to reach a ceasefire deal to halt the fighting in Gaza, it might seem like the height of hubris that even as the Biden administration is trying to curtail the war, it is simultaneously hoping to reach an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would fundamentally reshape the politics of the Middle East. But advocates say such a deal may be the only way to convince Israel to step back from the war and recommit to a wider peace process with the Palestinians. Under the potential deal, the basic details of which have been reported, Saudi Arabia would agree to formally recognize and establish diplomatic relations with Israel, Israel would take meaningful steps toward a Palestinian state, and the US would grant security guarantees to Saudi Arabia. Negotiators have suggested a deal may be imminent. One anonymous diplomat told Haaretz that the government of Saudi Arabia “has decided to go for an agreement with Israel … as part of the rapprochement with the US.” According to the New York Times, the Saudis made clear they were “eager” to conclude the deal during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to the kingdom. Bloomberg has reported that “officials are optimistic that they could reach a deal within weeks.” CNN reports that Saudi and US diplomats are “finalizing the details” of the accord. This may feel a bit like deja vu. Just last September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a speech at the United Nations that his country was “at the cusp” of a “historic peace” with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News that “every day we get closer” to normalization. The stumbling block that prevented it from happening back then was the Palestinian issue: While Netanyahu badly wanted the deal, it wasn’t clear he was willing or politically able, given his hard-right coalition, to give enough ground on the issue of a two-state solution to satisfy either the Saudis or the Americans. Everything that’s happened since then — the trauma of the October 7 attacks; more than six months of carnage in Gaza — hasn’t made the politics any easier. So why is so much diplomatic time and energy still being devoted to it? A slow thaw Saudi Arabia has refused to recognize Israel since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948. The Sunni kingdom backed other Arab countries in their early wars with Israel and was long a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. In recent years, however, as the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate has dragged on and Iran’s regional influence has grown, Saudi priorities have shifted. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, is also reportedly less attached to the Palestinian cause than his father, King Salman. Riyadh has also cut its financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. It’s an open secret in the region that there is already extensive security and intelligence cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia with the aim of containing their mutual adversary, the Shiite government of Iran. This cooperation paid dividends for Israel during the Iranian missile attack last month, when Israel’s overwhelmingly successful air defense was reportedly aided by intelligence cooperation from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. It’s not just the Saudis who’ve been shifting. Under the Trump administration, the United States helped broker a series of deals, known as the Abraham Accords, in which several Arab countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan — agreed to normalize relations with Israel. This was a landmark diplomatic development for the region, a significant win for Israel — and a major setback for the Palestinians. It showed that after decades of conflict and isolation, Arab governments were willing to make peace with Israel even without the establishment of a Palestinian state. But not all Arab governments. The Trump team pushed hard to extend the accords to Saudi Arabia. Israel and its supporters in the US badly want normalization with the kingdom, both because of its own military and economic clout and its leadership role in the wider Muslim world, but the kingdom’s rulers held out. The other Abraham Accords countries could be enticed with what, from the US perspective, were relatively painless concessions: The Trump administration recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara, while it took Sudan off a State Department sponsors of terrorism list. The Saudis will require more. “The Saudis have a global and regional leadership role in the Islamic world that the others don’t have,” said Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They have [more than] 30 million people and a lot of regional factions and divisions, so they have to worry about their internal political stability as well as their Arab leadership role.” Enter Biden The Abraham Accords was one of the few Trump initiatives that the Biden administration was happy to pick up and build on. And though Biden had vowed on the campaign trail to make the crown prince a global “pariah” over the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — the prince has denied involvement in the Washington Post columnist’s death, but US intelligence agencies have concluded that he ordered it — concerns over energy prices in the wake of the war in Ukraine, regional security fears, and a desire to counter China’s growing influence in the Middle East eventually took precedence over human rights. Biden, who was deeply involved in Middle East politics for decades even before becoming president, has worked to reset ties with the kingdom, culminating in the infamous “fist bump” during the president’s trip to Riyadh in 2022. The sought-after prize for the administration’s Mideast diplomacy has been, as it was for Trump’s, an ambitious three-way normalization deal. As part of the agreement, the US would give Saudi Arabia security guarantees modeled on the defense pacts it has with non-NATO countries like Japan and South Korea. According to a column this week from the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, the US and Saudi sides are “90 percent done with the mutual defense treaty.” The deal also reportedly includes US assistance to help Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear program, something that the country has long sought for its own economy, but which critics fear could be converted quickly into a weapons program. The deal may also include US investments in Saudi Arabia’s technology sector and a pledge by the Saudis to continue pricing their oil in US dollars rather than Chinese currency. As a formal treaty, the security guarantee would also require ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. That would be a tough lift, but from the Saudis’ point of view, that’s exactly the point. They want a defense commitment that will not be subject to the vagaries of US politics or which president is in the White House. “The Saudis want to know when the United States will act and when it won’t, they want it in writing,” said Ibish. “They want it ratified by the Senate, so they don’t have to worry about the JCPOA scenario” — the Iran nuclear deal which was agreed to without a formal, congressionally ratified treaty by the Obama administration, then reversed by Trump. A deal like this with the United States would be a big ask for any country; the US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any country since Japan in 1960, and much less one as controversial as Saudi Arabia, which only recently extricated itself from a long and brutal war in neighboring Yemen and has had diplomatic crises with several other countries in recent years. The Biden administration may believe the deal is worthwhile on purely realist national security grounds, but likely the only way it could be sold in Congress — particularly among members of Biden’s own party, who have generally been more critical of the Saudis — is if it’s tied to meaningful progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace. “I think it will be hard to get a US-Saudi security agreement ratified by the Senate,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Vox. “There’s not a lot of enthusiasm right now for getting pulled even deeper into Middle East security dynamics, and any agreement would have to have a clear, actionable pathway to a Palestinian state, which feels unlikely in the short term. But no one is going to judge a deal that doesn’t exist, so let’s keep an open mind.” That “clear, actionable pathway” is going to be tough to chart. The official Saudi position, dating back to a 2002 agreement known as the Arab Peace Initiative, is that it will establish relations with Israel only after the “establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state.” Israel wouldn’t have to go quite that far in the deal under discussion — nor is there any chance it would — but it would have to commit to what Blinken has called a “practical pathway” toward a Palestinian state. It’s not clear exactly what this pathway would look like in practice, but to satisfy the Saudis, the Israeli commitment toward restarting two-state talks would have to be “very serious,” Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator and analyst close to the royal court, told Vox. This was the main stumbling block when the three parties appeared close to an agreement last fall. Netanyahu has boasted of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and at times has supported fully annexing the West Bank. Still, as strident as he can sound, Netanyahu’s firmly held positions should be taken with a grain of salt: He also briefly accepted the idea of Palestinian statehood, in principle, with significant conditions and limitations, back in 2009. But the same cannot be said of his right-wing coalition partners. In particular, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a West Bank settler, “would rather jump off the Azrieli Tower than agree to land transfers,” David Makovsky, an expert on Arab-Israeli relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me last September, referring to a well-known Tel Aviv skyscraper. Accepting this deal could mean Netanyahu losing his coalition and then his job, which, given his current legal troubles, could land him back in court or even jail. The new landscape Tricky as the politics were last fall, they didn’t get any easier after the October 7 attacks, which were at least partly motivated by Hamas’s sense that the Palestinian cause was being abandoned by other Arab states. Smotrich has said that recognizing a Palestinian state now would be a “prize” for the attackers. Netanyahu has made similar comments. On the other side, the fury provoked in the Arab world by the war means it’s likely that “the price has gone up” in terms of what concessions will be required from the Israelis, said Ibish. In addition to a pathway toward statehood, Israel would likely also have to withdraw its troops from Gaza. Still, while talks on normalization were paused for a time after the attacks, all three sides have indicated that they’re still interested in a deal. The past few days have consistently brought new comments from diplomats saying an agreement may be imminent. In what may be a sign of its seriousness, Saudi Arabia has even stepped up its arrests of citizens who’ve criticized Israel and the United States online. Shihabi predicts that any public backlash to normalization would be manageable since “people understand that the Saudi normalization is the only card of leverage the Palestinians have with the Israelis.” The talks have only taken on a greater urgency as US and regional diplomats have been pushing Hamas and Israel to reach a ceasefire and avert a potentially catastrophic Israeli assault of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where roughly half of Gaza’s population has taken refuge. As much as or even more than before October 7, it’s impossible to imagine the current Israeli government agreeing to a deal. But for supporters of normalization, that’s a feature, not a bug. “I would not be surprised if [Netanyahu has] reached the conclusion that this coalition has outlived its usefulness,” said Nimrod Novik, a former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Shimon Peres now with the Israel Policy Forum. Novik laid out a scenario in which Netanyahu could form a new coalition government with more mainstream partners “to replace the lunatics in return for going for the Saudi regional package, including a serious change in policy vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority.” Still, he noted that there was no evidence such a plan was actually in the works. The Israeli public, who polls show have grown more skeptical of the two-state solution, would still have to be sold, but Novik, who served in a Labor Party government and is a longtime critic of the prime minister, conceded, “I believe the government can market it, and to my great regret, no one could market it better than Netanyahu.” The long shot It all sounds very neat: the war ends, the two-state solution gets back on track, two key US allies end 75 years of bitter rivalry. But making it happen requires quite a few things to go right, and without a lot of time to spare. A ceasefire would have to be reached in Gaza, the issue of Hamas’s Israeli hostages would have to be resolved, and an agreement on Palestinian statehood would have to be found that would satisfy both the Saudis and their critics in the Democratic Party. Making that happen might very well require Israel to form a new government. In the meantime, the US presidential election is rapidly approaching, which could upend all of this. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine Democrats in Congress agreeing to a deal with Trump in the White House. “The sun, the moon, and the stars have to align pretty close together in record time, in order to make this happen,” Aaron David Miller, a veteran Mideast peace negotiator now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox. Unfortunately, said Miller, “in my experience, Arab-Israeli negotiations work at two speeds: slow and slower.” In a possible sign of frustration, the Guardian reported this week that the Saudis are also proposing a “plan B” agreement under which the US-Saudi components of the deal would be completed even without any Israeli involvement. That would seem to be a nonstarter for Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), generally a strong supporter of US-Saudi ties, tweeted, “Without normalizing the Israeli-Saudi relationship and ensuring the security needs of Israel regarding the Palestinian file, there would be very few votes for a mutual defense agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.” Another possible plan, according to Friedman’s column, is that the deal could be presented to Congress “with the stated proviso that Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel the minute Israel has a government ready to meet the Saudi-U.S. terms.” On a call with reporters on Thursday, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby wouldn’t comment on the recent press reports, saying only that negotiations were ongoing and that “We still want to see normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and we believe that that could have a significant impact on our ability to get closer to a two-state solution.” Israeli-Saudi normalization is a dream that has now captivated two different US administrations who otherwise agree on little else, and even the seismic break of October 7 wasn’t enough to kill it off. It may very well be the best offer on the table to induce Israel to step back from the war. At the moment, however, it’s far from clear that Israel is actually interested in stepping back.

No one wants to think about pandemics. But bird flu doesn’t care.

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vox.com

Rescued chickens gather in an aviary at Farm Sanctuary’s Southern California Sanctuary on October 5, 2022, in Acton, California. | Mario Tama/Getty Images A pandemic response that amounts to hoping and praying isn’t nearly enough. The so-called “bird flu” H5N1 virus only rarely infects humans. Over the course of several decades during which it has circulated and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of birds, about 880 cases in humans have been reported, generally in humans who work very closely with livestock. But when it does make the leap to human hosts, H5N1 is often lethal — out of 26 cases reported since 2022, seven people died. That’s why it’s troubling that H5N1 has been recently discovered to have quietly spread across the country’s dairy farms, with testing finding genetic material of the virus present in 1 in 5 milk samples across the country. (Pasteurization kills the virus, so milk remains safe to drink.) That prevalence suggests that H5N1 is now spreading in mammals — and since cows on dairy farms are in frequent contact with farm workers, it seems likely the virus will have many chances to evolve to spread more easily among humans. If it does that, we may have another pandemic on our hands. None of that is great news, but the thing that has struck me most about the bird flu outbreak is that among the general public, it’s been greeted with a weariness that borders on indifference. The dominant attitude I’ve encountered when I ask people their concerns about bird flu amounts to “Well, I hope that doesn’t happen; I don’t have it in me to go through a pandemic again.” The Covid-19 pandemic was awful for people — not just for the millions who died and the many more who it hospitalized and lastingly affected, but also for the billions whose daily life it damaged, from lockdowns and school closures to dramatic new restrictions on movement and travel. You might expect that precisely because Covid-19 was so awful, the general public would be raring to make sure it can never happen again, by insisting our leaders do whatever it takes to be prepared for the next pandemic. But that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead, with trust in our public health institutions badly damaged and many people suffering from pandemic fatigue, we now lack the attention span for the kind of serious policy response that could feasibly prevent the next pandemic. Repeated efforts to get a serious pandemic prevention program through Congress have fizzled. Despite the desperation of Americans to not go through this again — or possibly because of the desperation of Americans to not go through this again — we’ve basically decided to handle pandemic preparedness by hoping really sincerely it doesn’t happen again. But it will. If not with this virus, another one. Crossing our fingers isn’t a policy response H5N1 has never, as far as we know, had sustained human-to-human transmission. It may never mutate to be capable of that — many viruses don’t. The CDC says “the current public health risk is low,” and while that gives me flashbacks to Covid, it’s accurate at this moment; unless you spend a lot of time with cows or poultry, or drink raw milk, you’re unlikely to be exposed unless the virus evolves new capabilities. H5N1 has been dancing along the line of human spillover for more than 25 years without making the full leap. Hoping really hard that it goes away might work out fine. But if we are truly desperate to prevent the next pandemic — if we feel very viscerally that we can’t do this again, that our normalcy and our unmasked gatherings are among the most precious things we have these days — then that’s reason to prioritize preparedness more highly, not less so. We need an actual, serious policy response aimed at looking closely at the possible origins of pandemics, at how to reduce human-wildlife interfaces. We should be closely monitoring research with pandemic potential, and work to improve our infrastructure for spotting pandemics early, developing vaccines and countermeasures. If we want to stop pandemics, then stop pandemics It’s very understandable that the general public doesn’t want to have to become an expert in the different varieties of pandemic-potential virus out there. They don’t want to check the CDC website for case numbers, don’t want to see another round of school closures, don’t want to let pandemics consume their life again. But if there’s limited public pressure to prevent the next pandemic — the issue doesn’t rank among the most important ones for the 2024 elections — policymakers will evidently just not do it. So I think we have to, somehow, process the wreckage wrought by Covid, and turn our sense that we can’t live through this again into a determination to do better so we never have to. Pandemics aren’t like earthquakes. They happen for predictable reasons, and we know how to stop them. It would be an enormous tragedy if we fail to get that work done because Covid-19 was so painful and so exhausting that we can’t even think clearly about the possibility it might happen again. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!