Best international business news reporting in any medium
Award Year: 2024
Award Name: The Malcolm Forbes and Morton Frank Award 2024
Recipient: Staff
Affiliation: Reuters
Honored Work: “Fentanyl Express”
This ambitious exploration of the global supply chain for fentanyl exposes the vulnerabilities of U.S. efforts to police imports of Chinese chemicals used by Mexican cartels to make the drug. Spending only $3,600, the Reuters team created dummy corporations to buy Chinese goods on the internet, and was able to import the precursors and the equipment needed to manufacture what could have been $3 million worth of drugs. Surprisingly, the reporting showed that the U.S. mail system is so exploitable that the chemicals often flow from China to the U.S. in small packages before being forwarded to Mexico for final production as pills. The Reuters team even discovered a new variation of fentanyl that had not been previous identified by law enforcement.
Link to the Winning Work:
Citations for Excellence:
Ian Urbina, Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan and Staff
The Outlaw Ocean Project
“The North Koreans Behind Global Seafood”
Bruce Einhorn, Loni Prinsloo, Marissa Newman and Simon Marks
Bloomberg News
“Starlink’s Global Rise”