Breaking the Links Between Conflict and Hunger Redux

• Author: Ellen Messer,Marc J. Cohen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.147
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• Date: 01 September 2015

Breaking the Links Between Conf‌lict and Hunger Redux

Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen

This article revisits the authors’ 1998 study on this topic (Messer, Cohen, & D’Costa, 1998). It

employs a “food wars” framing to understand nutritional and political-conf‌lict status in countries

experiencing protracted conf‌lict-related food crises and recent civil-war situations that involve food

insecurity. This framing includes typologies of conf‌lict (pre-conf‌lict, active-conf‌lict, and post-

conf‌lict) and food insecurity (food shortage, food poverty, food deprivation). It also incorporates

related water-sanitation-and-health and land-grab issues that have multiplied since the early 2000s.

Despite growing evidence of two-way causal links between food insecurity and conf‌lict, policy

attention to these connections remains surprisingly modest. The article considers the implementa-

tion of recent major initiatives and programs aimed at addressing food insecurity–conf‌lict links. It

concludes by: (i) examining the implications for understanding and responding appropriately to

recent Middle Eastern and North African conf‌lict and hunger situations and (ii) offering

recommendations for promoting sustainable food security and building peace in conf‌lict countries.

KEY WORDS: conflict, hunger, food insecurity

Introduction

The year 2015 marks 7 years since the 2007–2008 crisis of global spikes in

food prices caused widespread deterioration in the food-security conditions in

low-income countries, and provoked public demonstrations, some of which

turned violent, in dozens of places (Messer, 2009). These threats to local, national,

and global political stability elicited high-level policy responses from United

Nations (U.N.) leaders (HLTF, 2008), U.N. food agencies (FAO, 2010), internation-

al f‌inancial institutions (IFIs) (World Bank, 2011), and international nongovern-

mental organizations (INGOs) (ActionAid/Environmental Working Group, 2011;

Von Grebmer et al., 2011). Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis, such

responses showed increasing concern with food security as a security issue, the

longer term causal connections linking conf‌lict and food insecurity in both

directions, and urgent inquiries on how to break cycles of food insecurity and

political instability. The idea that food security should and could be main-

streamed into the world’s peace-building agenda, although by no means new

(see, e.g., FAO, 2005), received fresh funding and support, as did the idea that

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peace-building and conf‌lict prevention must be integral to pursuit and meeting of

the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (FAO, 2005). Bold statements

by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon (HLTF, 2008), and World Bank President

Robert Zoellick (World Bank, 2011) intimated that high-level policymakers were

poised to make economic and political agendas more conf‌lict-sensitive, which

included closer analysis of context-specif‌ic conf‌lict histories and dynamics in

relationship to hunger in situations that were carefully classif‌ied as fragile or

conf‌lict-affected (e.g., Bell, 2008).

Political and food agencies and think tanks additionally probed ways to break

the links between food insecurity and conf‌lict by considering, in the aftermath of

the food-price crisis, politically destabilizing surges in agricultural direct foreign

investments through which food-importing countries or commercial agents

sought to control or stabilize food supplies, prices, or prof‌its, sometimes by

dispossessing small farmers in developing countries (e.g., Kugelman & Leven-

stein, 2012). Leading food economists analyzed these “land grabs,” along with

other factors, as threats to food security and political stability in selected

countries, as political stability became a dominant term of food-security policy

analysis (Barrett, 2013). Such land-acquisition and food-price volatilities also

energized well-organized political interests to assert these were violations of their

human right to food, a right explored and advanced in a series of legal notes and

discussion papers on land grabs, international trade, and high food prices issued

by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

(DeSchutter 2009, 2010a, 2010b). Reports in all these cases remarked or warned

that synergistic conf‌lict and food insecurity reduced life expectancies and quality

of life for survivors, especially the youngest, whose long-term human develop-

ment was especially threatened by malnutrition, illness, and psychosocial trauma

during the f‌irst thousand days of life, when exceptional care to protect their

special vulnerabilities would likely be needed but unavailable under hostile and

devastating circumstances. Again, these were not new, but renewed interests

(e.g., Hussain & Herens, 1997).

Below, we provide an overview of these conf‌lict and food-insecurity

literatures, as part of a consideration of where political-conf‌lict concepts and

contexts enter into agricultural and nutrition planning, where food-security

concerns enter into peace-building planning, and where there are gaps in these

assessments, who might f‌ill them. We take as our reference point the working

idea that conf‌lict and the legacy of conf‌lict, which we term “food wars,” are a

continuing source of food insecurity in the world today, but there are ways to

address these concerns, especially by putting food-security programming on a

human-rights basis. The opening section offers a brief critical review of the food-

wars, conf‌lict/peace-building, and food-security literatures, which def‌ines the

various terms used to analyze causation and consequences and indicates certain

gaps in theoretical, policy, and operational analysis. The second section considers

current situations of food insecurity, where conf‌lict enters into causation, and

how international agencies that report on situations of food insecurity or conf‌lict

might better account for the linkages. The third section ref‌lects on why conf‌lict

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