Food insecurity risks nuclear conflict

Humans have fought over food and the means of producing it for 20,000 years, as rock art in Australia shows. Food, water and land scarcity are primary drivers in two thirds of modern conflicts today. Indeed, many people seem to have forgotten that the primary German war aim in World War II was to take farmland from the Soviets and put German farmers on it. It is very likely that controlling the Ukraine’s bountiful and reliable food bowl is among Putin’s main aims also. In the short run this is imposing hunger and even starvation on hundreds of millions of people far beyond Europe.

Spreading hunger in turn snowballs into government failures, civil wars and refugee tsunamis around the world – as it did in 2008 when a shortfall in Ukrainian grain exports led to revolutions in three Arab countries. Already, a third of a billion people – equal to the entire population of Europe – leave their homes each year, either as refugees or economic migrants, to seek better lives in countries which seem more stable and food secure. War will add to the flood.

Thus, in developing a new food system for the world of the 21st Century, we also have to find a way to curb the human appetite for war.

In Food or War, I trace the links between food and conflict through human history, explore the role of food in recent conflicts and examine nine regions of the world which are at high risk of food failure and conflict in the foreseeable future – conflicts ranging from riots and government failure to nuclear war. My aim is to show that the link between food and war is inexorable – but that it can be broken. And that having enough good food is the most under-rated, under-recognised and precious ‘weapon of peace’ in the world today.