Richard Behar
Fast Company

Citation
In "China Storms Africa," investigative reporter Richard Behar reveals China's aggressive quest for natural resources in sub-Sahara Africa. "This commercial invasion," Behar writes, "is without question the most important development in the sub-Sahara since the end of the Cold War." It is, he reports, "one of the most bare-knuckled resource grabs the world has ever seen." To report the story for Fast Company, Behar traveled throughout Africa to gather the evidence of China's ambitions, which threaten to wipe out a decade's worth of efforts to improve African human rights and government transparency. But in the end, Behar writes, it's not just about China and Africa. "We buy China's junk, they buy our bonds, our real estate, even our corporations; they expand into Africa with our money, enabling them to grow and sell us more junk. It's a spiderweb, a matrix-and how it spins out is as scary as it is unclear."

Excerpt
China Storms Africa
June 1, 2008

The No. 2 killer in Africa by parasite, after malaria, is an organism called Entamoeba histolytica -- or "Eh" for short. It was discovered in 1873, the year it took the life of missionary-explorer David Livingstone, that great champion of British imperialism on what his countrymen called the Dark Continent. I know this because, when I returned home from reporting in the sub-Sahara, the same pathogen was drilling through the walls of my gut. It would colonize there for months, unbeknownst to me, absorbing my nutrients and spewing its toxins, as I grew weak and emaciated.

A skillful intruder, Eh can produce a population explosion in a very short time. While its plan of attack is complex and still not entirely understood, it seems to trick human defense mechanisms into thinking all is well in the homeland. (It achieves that by killing local immune cells, then hiding the evidence by eating the cells' corpses.) Unfortunately, the more virulent the strain, the more the parasite risks killing the host -- sometimes by invading the brain -- rendering everyone homeless. Nonetheless, the more I've learned about Eh, the more I admire its resourcefulness, its work ethic (talk about intestinal fortitude!), and its resolve to survive and propagate. It's a shame we couldn't just get along, that my ecosystem couldn't sustain us both.

I likely picked up my dose of Eh in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an epicenter of virulent disease, from flies that transported it from infected human feces to food. "If you were a malnourished kid in a refugee camp in Congo," remarked my doctor, a tropical-disease expert who has labored in dozens of such camps, "you would probably die from this infection." As it happened, I had just made it to age 47, the statistical end of the line for the 770 million people who live in sub-Saharan Africa. By their standards, I was already an old man.

An unfathomably vast terrain comprising 49 nations, the sub-Sahara represents nearly one-fifth of the earth's landmass. Yet its total economy is tinier than Florida's. Here, 300 million people get by on less than $1 a day. Until they don't: It is the planet's biggest tomb, where compared to the 1960s, twice as many children under the age of 5 are now dying each day from disease; a bottomless badland where $500 billion of Western aid since World War II (more than four Marshall Plans) has barely made a dent in the poverty; a region whose market share of world trade is shrinking by the hour as it gets left behind, perhaps permanently, in the dust of globalization; a place so desperate for everything -- cash, trade, investment, infrastructure -- and so powerless to negotiate strategically, that it's pretty much up for sale to the highest bidder.

Biography
Business reporter Richard Behar has garnered more than 20 journalism awards over a career spanning 25 years. He was called "one of the most dogged of our watchdogs" by the late Jack Anderson - a founding father of modern investigative reporting. From 1982-2004, Behar worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. He has also done assignments for BBC, CNN, Fast Company, FoxNews.com and PBS. In 2005, Behar launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov and to furthering the investigative work that Paul began. In December of 2008, Behar was commissioned by Random House to write a book about the Bernard Madoff scandal. Major awards include the Daniel Pearl, Loeb, Polk, National Magazine, Overseas Press Club and Worth Bingham, among others - on subjects ranging from counterfeiting in Beijing to terror financing in Karachi; from organized crime in Siberia to corporate wrongdoing on Wall Street. Behar was included among the 100 top business journalists of the 20th century by The Journalist and Financial Reporter, and was named Business Journalist of the Year in London in 2001. He also received the rarely-bestowed Conscience-in-Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, for a Time cover story on the Church of Scientology. A graduate of New York University, Behar today serves on the advisory committee of the school's business journalism masters program.