Breaking the conflict-hunger nexus and the role of resilience

Hunger can be ended in the next 15 years but unless we tackle the root causes of conflict, people across the world will continue to go without food. 

That’s the message that emerged from the 2015 Global Hunger Index, a report published annually by a coalition of European organisations including Concern Worldwide and ACTED, which measures hunger levels across the world. 

And it resonates strongly for BRACED projects operating in areas where conflict interacts with a changing climate to entrench hunger for millions.

The picture presented in this year’s GHI is compelling. Angola, Rwanda and Ethiopia represent three of the success stories; countries which have emerged from the large scale civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s and seen hunger levels fall substantially.

By contrast, among  the worst-scoring countries in this year’s GHI, Central African Republic has been plagued by conflict and upheaval in recent years, while Chad has also experienced some level of instability, due in part to conflict and refugees spilling over from neighbouring countries.

Meanwhile, though conflict-affected countries including DRC, Sudan and South Sudan were not included in the report due to challenges in collecting data, all three are subject to severe levels of hunger and malnutrition. In South Sudan, for example, an IPC alert in October identified a concrete risk of famine if urgent humanitarian access and assistance is not provided in the worst affected areas. More case studies are available online.

The GHI’s analysis of the connections between hunger and conflict presents important challenges for BRACED programmes aiming to build climate resilience in areas of instability.

A key question, discussed by participants at the GHI’s London launch in London, was how to build the resilience of food systems to conflict. 

Professor Lawrence Haddad, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that this requires moving away from systems that aim to maximize productivity and profit in favour of systems that minimize potential losses.

For agriculture, this means privileging crops that can withstand the interruption of cultivation, as well as growing over a wide region, so farmers are more likely to have access to their crops during conflict.  

Connell Foley, Concern Worldwide’s head of Strategy, advocacy and Learning  argued that recapitalisation is crucial to building the resilience of hunger-prone people in conflict areas.

Conflict often deprives people of the assets they require to live and it is therefore crucial for agencies not only to respond to immediate needs, but also to replace assets needed for the long-term. This may mean significant investment in assets such as livestock.

The resilience agenda was discussed as an approach which enables communities to address the range of threats that they face - whether disease, price rises, drought, flood, conflict or others – as well as the connections between them.

In this respect, resilience building programmes, whether explicitly targeting conflict or just operating in conflict prone areas, may point the way forward to a more effective way of addressing the conflict - hunger nexus.

However, it was noted that in terms of international policy debate, conflict remains an area that the resilience community continues to find problematic. Conflict was conspicuous by its absence, for example, in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

This could be an important area in which the learning generated from BRACED programmes in conflict areas can help to set the international agenda.