Food insecurity causes terrorism

The international affairs and development policy circles have recently identified the nexus between food insecurity, conflict, and terrorism as an important issue area in achieving global peace (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO 2017). More specifically, whether or not the inability of certain governments to meet their citizens’ basic food needs can lead to international security spillovers, which threaten the safety of people beyond their borders, is a major question in international food security investments. For example, in speaking about US government investments in food security abroad, former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, is quoted as saying “Investments made to ward-off food insecurity and prevent its recurrence can prevent the vicious cycles of rising extremism, armed conflict and state failure that can require far larger commitments of resources down the road.”7 7 However, empirically, the relationships between food insecurity and both domestic and transnational terrorism has not been sufficiently studied. In the current study, we leverage the information available on the different dimensions of food insecurity to explore its various roles in both domestic and transnational terrorism. Our findings show promise in terms of the ability to unbundle the various components of food insecurity and examine their effects on various aspects of terrorism.

The definition of food security (insecurity) continues to evolve. Efforts to measure its hypothesized components and better understand its causes and consequences continue to improve (Swinnen 2010; Gundersen and Ziliak 2018). Some previous studies have attempted to study the effects of specific components on conflict. In our study, we go further by attempting to evaluate the roles of these components, the interplays between them, and their effects on various measures of terrorism outcomes. Our results suggest a number of interesting things. First, we find the lack of access to food sources to be a critical link factor between food insecurity and terrorism. More specifically, the lack of food access is found to increase the incidence of domestic terrorism. Our results contradict the findings of Koren and Bagozzi (2016) and Butler and Gates (2012), who showed that greater access to food is associated with increased incidence of conflict. These differences may be explained based on the differences in types of conflict and geographical units of analysis (grid, sub-national, or national level) employed in the research. For example, pastoral conflicts are expected to be mostly associated with the control and capture of resources and, hence, may be absent from areas of low food availability and access. Regarding the geographical unit of analysis, a grid-level analysis of terrorism incidents may be more indicative of the attack choices of the terrorist group, whereas a country-level analysis may also capture the underlying grievances that lead to the origin and spread of the group.

In this study, we also found that both domestic and transnational terrorism increase (not decrease) with increased food availability. This is consistent with the findings of studies on the role of food insecurity in conflict (Bellemare 2015; Koren 2018), but we now confirm this role in the case of terrorism. The irrelevance of both the utilization (UT) and stability (ST) proxies in the presence of controls in both the models with and without instruments suggests that these dimensions do not explain either domestic or transnational terrorism. Utilization is difficult to measure at the national level and the regional, within-country variations are probably more relevant in the context of unrest. Similarly, a country which experiences extended periods of food insecurity may not necessarily be unstable with respect to its food insecurity measures. Our study reveals that the food access and availability measures are the most relevant to terrorism, at least given the specific measures we chose to evaluate food insecurity.

The direct relationships of terrorism to the unemployment rate, to rurality, to population, and to our polity variable are noteworthy. The suggestion that nations that are highly populated, but with large rural populations, are likely to be more challenged by the problem of terrorism sheds some light on where some of the future flashpoints might be. There appears to be a difference in the susceptibility of places to domestic vs. transnational attacks. The role of food insecurity in transnational attacks is not as clear as domestic attacks.

In conclusion, does food insecurity explain terrorism? The answer is a qualified yes, at least in the case of one food access indicator, the food price index. However, this study's approach is essentially focused on intercountry associations. Further advancements can be made in exploring the causal relationship between elements of food insecurity and terrorism using subnational, micro-level data.