Despite shocking images and increasing death tolls, famine in Africa is a remote subject to many in the West, difficult to understand and harder to relate to. So, to write about a place chronically ravaged by famine, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Paul Salopek decided to see it from the ground: specifically, on foot. As Salopek writes in Foreign Policy, "It was a way to look at hunger beyond the carefully framed shots of television cameras, and an occasion to ask: When will Africa's vast hunger pangs finally end?"

What follows are images from this walk captured by photographer Mike Hettwer, who documented both the people they encountered and the decimated scenes of a "a landscape of chronic hunger."

Above, armed  Daasanach herders move their animals illegally through Sibiloi National Park in Kenya. Human population growth and a number of rainless years has put pressure on landscapes across the Horn of Africa, including conservation areas.

Mike Hettwer

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