How conflict drives hunger: Six channels through the food system

Much has been said and written of late about the linkages between conflict and hunger. There is good reason for this: 65% of the world’s acutely food-insecure people live in conflict-affected countries. Typically, two claims are made about the conflict-hunger linkage. First, that conflict breeds hunger. This claim is supported by so much evidence that in 2018 the United Nations adopted Resolution 2417 recognizing the direct impacts of armed conflict on food insecurity and strongly condemning the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of warfare in conflict situations. The second claim is that hunger contributes to conflict. Support for this claim is either anecdotal or vague; clear causation has yet to be established. Studies identify relationships between drivers of deprivation such as food price shocks, low per capita income, economic stagnation and decline, high-income inequality, and slow growth in per capita food production, on one hand, and violent civil strife, on the other. It is important to explore this linkage further, but hunger does plenty of damage even without an established contributory connection to conflict.