Rigorous empirical studies confirm the impact.

What do these findings indicate about the variation in the risk of conflict and civil conflict? Firstly, all four models support the argument that a significant relationship exists between food insecurity and conflict. More specifically, these findings suggest that, for an average country, the baseline risk of conflict and civil conflict increases in regions that provide at least some access to food – supporting the expectation that global demands for food should generally direct conflict towards agricultural areas. At the same time, within agricultural areas, conflict is intuitively more likely to arise in regions where the levels of food per capita are low – that is, where food supplies are scarce. Secondly, and in line with previous research (Burke et al. 2009; O’Loughlin et al. 2012; Hsiang and Meng 2014; Hendrix and Salehyan 2012), warmer regions and areas with lower precipitation were significantly more likely to experience conflict. This supports the argument that food scarcity can serve, to some extent, as a mediating factor for the effects of climate variables, in addition to the independent impact of food insecurity related concerns on conflict. Thirdly, as extant studies (e.g., Hegre and Sambanis 2006) suggest, poorer regions are more likely to experience conflict, as are more ethnically diverse regions, although it appears that higher levels of democracy do not translate into more peace once cell level characteristics are taken into account.3 Perhaps unsurprisingly, regions with larger populations are more likely to experience conflict, as are more rural regions, as some scholars have argued (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Kalyvas 2006; Buhaug et al. 2009).

In sum, four models involving different explanatory variables have been utilized to examine two conceptualizations of conflict as an outcome of interest. The results strongly support extant arguments that access to and availability of food are each associated with an increased occurrence of armed conflict. This evidence does not negate previous explanations of conflict that emphasize the importance of political and economic development or climactic variation. However, by highlighting the strong association between food access and availability on one hand, and local political violence on the other, the above findings do show that these past expositions (e.g. Miguel et al. 2004; Burke et al. 2009; Hsiang and Meng 2014) in and of themselves are insufficient to fully explain the likelihood of local level conflict. Simply put, the present study confirms that there exists a systematic, and global, relationship between food insecurity on one hand, and the occurrence and persistence of social conflict on the other.

Discussion

What do these findings imply about the effect of food insecurity and conflict? Naturally, even the most detailed and elaborate models are simplistic, especially when containing as diverse a range of observations as those examined above. Nevertheless, in terms of conditional probabilities, all models show a statistically significant first difference change of approximately +92% in the probability of conflict when a high risk scenario is simulated for an average cell.4