Analysis | How do we end the hunger-instability nexus?
Ambassador (ret.) Barbara Bodine
With the launch of ISD’s latest New Global Commons working group report on the nexus between food insecurity, instability, and conflict, ISD Director Ambassador Barbara Bodine lays out the challenges ahead.
Read the report:
Death rides a pale horse, but he does not ride alone. With him ride war, pestilence … and famine. Famine — now in the catch-all garb of “food insecurity” — has long followed in the wake of war and plague (under the guise of “conflict,” “instability,” and “pandemics”) … and still does.
Against this backdrop, the World Food Program’s receipt of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize was a well-earned triumph for humanitarianism. The award shone a spotlight on the UN agency’s efforts over decades to combat hunger and famine, and prevent the use of food as a weapon of war. As the coronavirus pandemic rages and new variants abound, and with nearly 800 million people food insecure, the WFP’s work has arguably never been so important.
Humanitarian intervention alone, while critical and necessary, is not sufficient. It reacts to and mitigates, but does not solve, the underlying causes of food insecurity, nor its relationship — as root and result — to conflict and instability. As I write, hunger has spurred waves of protests in Cuba and South Africa, continues to push desperate people, many of them children, northward from Central America, while fighters and governments callously weaponize food in Yemen and the Horn of Africa. In eighteen months, pandemic-driven political and economic disruptions, from the fractured governments to the collapse of supply chains, have added nearly 120 million people to the ranks of the world’s food insecure and malnourished in the Global North and South alike. This slide toward hunger reverses five decades of progress since the Malthusian nightmare of the 1960s. A confluence of environmental degradation, weather disruption, governance failures, and increasing conflict, to mention a few drivers, bode poorly for the future.
The tragic irony is that global production matches, if not exceeds, global need. The world grows enough to solve this problem, but food is maldistributed, commodified, weaponized, and securitized. Distribution systems falter, supply chains break, and 30 percent of food production goes to waste.
To move beyond the humanitarian response and look for solutions to systemic hunger in a world of plenty, ISD convened the latest iteration of its New Global Commons working group series. We brought together, via the wonder of Zoom, policymakers and thinkers from government, international organizations, and research institutions based in the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to explore the overlapping drivers of food insecurity, political instability, and armed conflict.
Food insecurity, defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization as a lack of stable access to sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, reflects the deeply complex and interconnected nature of major, existential issues, to include climate change, demographics, gender equity, nativism, the tension between public good and private gain, and geopolitical competition to secure resources. The results of food insecurity are equally complex, and demand a multilayered commitment to action from the most local level through supranational, not unlike climate change itself.
The United Nations agrees. The Food Systems Summit, to convene in September 2021, will focus international attention on the need to build “safe, accessible, sustainable, and equitable food systems” and to implement the Sustainable Development Goals.
The working group’s recommendations centered on three broad categories: reframe, re-think, and reform food systems, from the local to global. First, and critically, is the need to reframe affordable access to nutritional food as a core human right, not a prerogative of the market place and the highest bidder. Alongside environmental justice — the right to clean air and clean water — must come food justice. From that flows a reassessment of the challenge in light of the pandemic and other drivers that rethinks how we view our food systems and leads to a comprehensive restructuring of the system at all levels.
No one said this would be easy, quick, or cheap. All working group participants agreed that systemic change was critical and unavoidable, if the children of the world are to grow to their potential, and if the scourge of famine, conflict, plague, and death can at least be held back.
We are grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their continued support of ISD’s working group series. We hope you will find thought-provoking the analyses, recommendations, and conclusions of the scholars and practitioners who generously gave of their time to engage in a frank assessment of the problem, and to offer some possible solutions.
Ambassador Barbara Bodine is distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy and concurrent director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
Read more from ISD on food insecurity:
