In 2018 de Volkskrant investigated the challenges of food security in Africa with our (EJC funded) project De Voedselzaak. Our harsh conclusion was that the continent would be able to feed itself if the West and multinational corporations would give it a fair chance.

This grant enables us to pick up where we left off and delve deeper into the complex and abstract systems that cause hunger, poverty and inequality. Decades of globalisation and free trade have not led to a fairer distribution of wealth in the world. On the contrary: multinationals and consumers in wealthy Western countries benefit most from trade agreements, cheap labor and low tax rates, while citizens in the least developed parts of the world are often left behind. With Track & Trace we will investigate what goes wrong, how things can be done differently and what the role of the consumer is.

Most of our stories will be about abstract topics, yet we want to put people that are struggling with these issues in their everyday lives upfront. We do this with on the ground reporting and beautiful photography and/or videos. To paint a bigger picture and provide (international) context we'll also be working with our data journalists and infographics team. We'll try as much as we can to report about specific products – such as the battery in a smartphone or a t-shirt. This way our articles will be easy to relate to for our readers.

Apart from the stories that are funded directly from the grant, we will mobilise the whole newsroom to write on the subject of world trade and inequality. This way the Track & Trace-website will be updated weekly and hopefully grow to be the leading Dutch platform on world trade – like De Voedselzaak was on the subject of food.

Stories marked with a * are not funded through the grant, but by De Volkskrant directly.