The relationship between food insecurity and conflict is both empirically and statistically proven – war coming now

Economist Paul Collier once  that “war is development in reverse.” That conflict inevitably produces poverty and hunger is a theory that has been tested—and proven true—in every major clash across human history. , for example, that more people died of starvation and starvation-related disease than from combat during the Second World War.

But it is also true that hunger and food insecurity can lead to instability. There is a vicious feedback loop between conflict and hunger currently at play in dozens of countries around the world. War drives hunger and hunger drives war.

In 2017, the World Food Program USA (WFP USA) produced a report titled . It was a comprehensive review of the literature on “food-related instability”—or the ways that hunger drives conflict. At the time, U.S. lawmakers knew anecdotally that this relationship existed. Former Senate Agriculture Committee chair Pat Roberts (D-KS) said in a , “Show me a nation that cannot feed itself, and I’ll show you a nation in chaos.” Others, like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), frequently warned that providing humanitarian assistance in some of the world’s most complex emergencies was necessary to avoid more costly—in both blood and treasure—engagements.

Winning the Peace provided a snapshot of what the academic community knew about the relationship between food insecurity and conflict. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, the lingering economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a rise in extreme climate events around the world, 2022 was a year of unprecedented global hunger. Predictably, global instability rose in tandem. At least  occurred last year in countries facing rapid food and fuel price increases.

Academic literature on food-related instability has grown significantly in the last half decade. In fact, almost 50 percent of all the research to be published on food-related instability over the past 20 years has been produced in the last five years alone. A  by WFP USA, launched in April of 2023, aims to capture this latest thinking in a review of 60 peer-reviewed academic studies produced between 2017 and 2022. Dangerously Hungry is a study of studies. This commentary is a literature review of such studies and discusses specific drivers and motivators of food-related instability, and how to create an improved framework for understanding of the complex relationship between food insecurity and conflict.

Drivers of Food-Related Instability

This review finds that food-related instability has three main drivers: climate change, conflict over natural resources, and economic shocks. 

Almost half of all studies reviewed in Dangerously Hungry investigate food-related instability through the lens of climate change: precipitation change, drought, temperature spikes, desertification, and other adverse climate events. This trend reflects tremendous growth in climate security literature in recent years. Many of these studies focus on food systems, often the first sector to feel the impacts of climate change.  from Kyung Hee University in South Korea, for example, shows that high temperatures during corn growing seasons in sub-Saharan Africa reduced yields and led to a rise in civil conflict. The author suggests that with continued warming, civil conflict in the region is expected to increase by over 30 percent in the coming decade. Meanwhile,  Harvard University study finds that below-average rainfall can increase the likelihood of civil war in Africa by as much as 2.3 percent. In Somalia specifically, a country plagued by long-term droughts, decreases in annual precipitation across the country were associated with an increase in domestic terrorist attacks between 1991 and 2019. The impact of climate change on food systems is driving conflict around the world.

A second driver of food-related instability is competition over natural resources. Conflicts between pastoralists and farmers in the African Sahel are among the most studied examples of food-related instability in this space. Farmer-herder conflict or “pastoralist violence” has increased greatly in the last decade in West and Central Africa, particularly in Nigeria, central Mali and northern Burkina Faso. This includes cattle raids, communal or ethnic violence over land and water resources, and conflict driven by association with violent extremist movements. These trends are exacerbated by fast-spreading desertification and multi-year droughts across the African Sahel. According to the African Center for Strategic Studies, more than  have been killed in farmer-herder related conflicts in the last decade alone.

Dangerously Hungry also sheds new light on the ways that agricultural abundance has also been linked to violence. For example, in  the impacts of wheat and corn production across Africa, Ore Koren of Indiana University suggests that “contrary to previous expectations, conflict is driven by higher yields, on average, and not by scarcity.” In these situations of abundance, rebel groups are more likely to use violence to secure access to food resources. Indeed, he shows that the probability of rebel attacks increased significantly in areas with high agricultural potential. This is commonly referred to as “strategic conflict.” What the author is referring to in this case, however, is best considered “relative abundance”—conflict over pockets of agricultural productivity in otherwise scarce settings.

Finally, food-related instability is driven by economic shocks. The 2007–2008 global food price crisis led to social unrest in at least 40 low- and middle-income countries in what has been termed the “silent tsunami;” it was the subject of significant attention in the Winning the Peace report. The food price crisis of 2022 bears remarkable similarities to 2008. According to  from the International Food Policy Research Institute, food prices were on the rise due to “uneven recovery from the COVID-19 crisis from surges in global demand and supply disruptions from transport and logistics.” This confluence of stressors resulted in a global market that was unprepared for the wheat, maize, oilseed, fuel, and fertilizer supply disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the summer of 2022, more than 20 countries were facing protests and riots related, at least in part, to high food prices.

Peer-reviewed research on the 2022 global food price crisis is still forthcoming, but several authors have already estimated the downstream effects it has had, and will continue to have, on conflict. Tufts University economist Eoin McGuirk and deputy director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, Marshall Burke, for example, have  the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine on producer and consumer price indexes, and the effect of these indexes on violence in Africa. They estimate that “the weighted average effect of the Russian invasion to be an increase in intergroup conflict in Africa of 5.3%.” That is after considering the conflict-reducing effects of increased prices for farmers across the continent; the economic impacts in the agricultural sector are, after all, two-sided. It continues to be the case that, generally, increased food prices lead to reduced conflict in food-producing areas and increased conflict in food consuming areas.