Warfare, not climate, is driving resurgent hunger in Africa, says study
After years of progress on food security, some nations see sharp
reversals

Date:
August 12, 2021
Source:
Earth Institute at Columbia University
Summary:
A new study finds that while droughts routinely cause food
insecurity in Africa, their contribution to hunger has remained
steady or even shrunk in recent years. Instead, rising widespread,
long-term violence has displaced people, raised food prices and
blocked outside food aid, resulting in the reversal of years of
progress on food security.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
For years, it seemed the world was making progress eliminating
hunger. Then, starting in 2014, the trend slid back slowly and reversed
in many nations; now, some 700 million people -- nearly 9 percent of
the world's population -- go to bed hungry, according to the UN.


==========================================================================
One of the hardest-hit regions is sub-Saharan Africa. Here, many people reflexively blame droughts stoked by climate change. However, a new
study looking at the question in granular detail says that is not the
case: long- running wars, not the weather, are to blame. The study,
just published in the journal Nature Food, finds that while droughts
routinely cause food insecurity in Africa, their contribution to hunger
has remained steady or even shrunk in recent years. Instead, rising
widespread, long-term violence has displaced people, raised food prices
and blocked outside food aid, resulting in the reversal.

"Colloquially, people would say it's climate-induced droughts and floods, because that's what people tend to say," said Weston Anderson, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. "But academics have not
compared the importance of drought to violence in triggering food crises
in a holistic way." To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed 2009-2018 data from the Famine Early Warning System, a USAID-funded
network that provides information to governments and aid organizations
about looming or ongoing food crises in dozens of countries. The system
shows that the number of people requiring emergency food aid in monitored countries surged from 48 million in 2015 to 113 million in 2020. The
system is not designed to quantify the different factors behind the emergencies. But Anderson and his colleagues were able to tease these
out for 14 of Africa's most food-insecure countries. The nations reach
in a band from Mauritania, Mali and Nigeria in the west, through Sudan,
Chad and other nations, to Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia in the east. The
study also took in several nations further south, including Mozambique
and Zimbabwe.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that periodic, well-documented
droughts have been behind food crises across large areas. However, the
overall effects of drought did not increase during the study period; of anything, they went down in some areas. When drought did hit, farmers
usually bounced back in the next planting season, within a year or
so. Animal herders took twice as long to recover, because the areas
where they live saw with more extreme conditions, and it took people
time to rebuild their hard-hit livestock herds.

Amid the usual ups and downs of rainfall, violence has been responsible
for the progressive increase in hunger, the study found. Long-term
conflicts ranging from repeated terrorist attacks to pitched combat
between armies have caused shortages lasting year after year, with no
end in sight, the authors say.



==========================================================================
This has been especially the case in northeast Nigeria, where the Boko
Haram guerrilla army has waged a relentless hit-and-run campaign against
the government and much of the populace for the past decade. Also in South Sudan, where a messy, multi-sided civil war that started in 2013 continues
to sputter along. Sudan and Somalia also have seen warfare-induced
increases in hunger, but in those nations, droughts have been the more
dominant factors, the study found. In most cases, pastoralists are again
the most affected by violence as they are with drought, because they
are more likely to live in the most violence-prone areas.

The latest casualty is Ethiopia, where hunger has arced upward across
the country in recent years, mainly due to below-average rainfall. But
civil war erupted in the country's Tigray region last year, greatly
adding to the misery.

The study did not examine this new conflict, but a recent UN report said
that more than 5 million people in the region urgently need food aid, and
many are already seeing out and out famine. "This severe crisis results
from the cascading effects of conflict, including population displacement, movement restrictions, limited humanitarian access, loss of harvest and livelihood assets, and dysfunctional or nonexistent markets," a top UN
official said. On top of that, the drought in Ethiopia is projected to
continue through this year.

The researchers looked into a third possible cause of hunger:
locusts. Again, not surprisingly, locusts affect food security in some
years by damaging forage and crops -- but not on a scale large enough to account for the increase in hunger during the study period. (The study
did not look at the unusually large waves of locusts that swept much
of East Africa in 2019-2020; these may have had more drastic results.)
One further factor the researchers looked at: whether the onset of
drought contributed to flareups of violence, and thus more hunger. One
of the report's coauthors, climatologist Richard Seager of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, connected the dots in this regard in
a widely cited 2015 study arguing that one spark for the ongoing Syrian
civil war was a multi-year drought that drove many people off their
land, into cities. This does not seem to be the case for the African
countries, he said. The authors write, "We found no systematic relation
between drought and either frequency of conflict or deaths related
to conflict. Conflict may be affected by environmental stress in some
cases but the relationship across Africa in recent decades is complex
and context-specific." While warfare has been the predominant driver
of hunger in some countries, that does not mean others have completely
escaped the violence that can disrupt food supplies. For instance, over
the last decade, much of Mali has been subject to on and off attacks
by separatist and Islamist insurgents who at times have taken entire
cities. Since 2015, the once largely peaceful nation of Burkina Faso
has seen hundreds of attacks by rebels and jihadists, including a raid
on a village in early June this year that killed more than 100 people.

"The overall message is that if we're going to predict and handle food
crises, we need to be paying attention to conflicts, which can be really complicated - - not just the more easily identified things like drought,"
said Anderson.

"Droughts have a clear start and a clear end. But there are all kinds
of violence. And a lot of the time, there is no clear start or end to
it." That said, warfare is certainly behind surging hunger in other parts
of the world that the team did not examine, he said, most obviously amid
the civil war raging in Yemen.

The other authors of the study are Elisabeth Ilboudo-Ne'bie, Wolfram
Schlenker, Fabien Cottier, Alex De Sherbinin, Dara Mendeloff and Kelsey
Markey, all of Columbia University; and Sonali McDermid and Kelsey Markey
of New York University.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Earth_Institute_at_Columbia_University. Original written by Kevin
Krajick. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Weston Anderson, Charles Taylor, Sonali McDermid, Elisabeth Ilboudo-
Ne'bie', Richard Seager, Wolfram Schlenker, Fabien Cottier,
Alex de Sherbinin, Dara Mendeloff, Kelsey Markey. Violent
conflict exacerbated drought-related food insecurity between
2009 and 2019 in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature Food, 2021; DOI:
10.1038/s43016-021-00327-4 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210812123050.htm

--- up 13 weeks, 6 days, 22 hours, 45 minutes
* Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1:317/3)