The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines food security as “all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. However, due to a complex range of interconnected issues from climate change to misguided economic policies, political failure and social marginalisation, over 2 billion people across the world live in constant food Insecurity. It is important to take a sustainable security approach to look at the importance of “physical and economic access to basic food” by exploring the links between food insecurity and violence.

A recent article published by the journal Conflict, Security & Development examines food riots as representations of insecurity and looks at the relationship between contentious politics and human security.

Thomas O’Brien, author of the article, argues “the upheaval caused by a food riot can lead to lasting instability and violence as social and political structures are challenged”. Global rises in basic food prices triggered demonstrations and often violent protests in “over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in 2007-08”. The article puts recent food riots and the current global food crisis in historical perspective. Food riots are about more than “just access to food”.  They represent dissatisfaction with political structures and perceived injustices.

It is important to note that “the extreme nature of the rise in food price in the absence of much evidence of food shortages, left a sense of something unnatural about the way food markets were working”. Although poverty, weak states, ineffective civil society and lack of political freedom all contribute to food insecurity and the possibility of violent food riots, we cannot ignore to challenge underlying transnational and global power structures: “146 protests in 39 countries over the 1976-92 period were linked to the imposition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies.” Food security is fundamental to human security and needs to be approached by addressing underlying causes and drivers. A sustainable response to food insecurity would take global cooperation, justice and equity as key requirements.

An often mentioned driver of food insecurity is climate change. Climate change already has a great impact on global security concerns and the physical, social and economic effects will undoubtedly only be exacerbated in the near future. Increasingly high temperatures and little or inconsistent rainfall have devastating effects on crop yields in places such as India, Africa’s Sahel region and the mid-western United States.

The catastrophic food crisis in Niger in 2005 for example was largely attributed to the effects of climate change and competition over limited resources. Years of too little and too inconsistent rainfall have meant devastating droughts and diminishing harvests in this Sahel country of west Africa which has the highest birth rate in the world. Increasingly advanced desertification due to climate change means competition and potentially violent conflict, over limited resources such as water and arable land, intensifies.

In the 2005 food crisis however, although thousands of children died of malnourishment, Niger had produced enough food to feed its population. The real issue was a food shortage in neighbouring Nigeria. Nigeria has an economy based primarily on oil exports with a significantly weakened agricultural sector. Instead of Niger feeding its own population, much of the harvest was sold to wealthier Nigeria at prices much higher than anyone in Niger could have afforded. This is a good example of why free market economy and trade liberalisation do not necessarily benefit all parties involved. Writing about the great famines of the last century, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted “a drought is natural but famine is man-made”. What this tells us is that although the challenges we face by climate change are serious threats, there is much that can be done to ensure more food security through political and economic policies.

Farmers in Niger are struggling. But so are farmers in Jamaica. In contrast to Niger, Jamaica has a wealth of fruit, vegetables, fish and an abundance of fertile land. About one fifth of this island’s population is employed in the agricultural sector. Still, farmers are struggling to survive because they cannot compete with the much lower prices of subsidised agricultural imports from the USA. As cheap foreign products flood the market, Jamaican prices are driven down which makes local food production by and large unprofitable. As they rely more on foreign food imports, Jamaicans will be increasingly vulnerable to price volatility on the global marketplace. With the average Jamaican spending about half of household income on food, such vulnerability to price changes is a real danger to food security.

Importing less foreign food products is a difficult matter for Jamaica because of the strict trade liberalisation policies imposed on the country through its debt relief agreements. One could also argue that if it is cheaper for Jamaica to import food than to produce its own, why should it still encourage its local agricultural sector? When a country is dependent on food imports, it cannot assure food security for its population.

So far US imports have been much cheaper than local Jamaican produce. 2012 however has seen the “worst US drought in 50 years” according to last month’s Aljazeera article entitled Food riots predicted over US crop failure. “Grain prices have skyrocketed and concerns abound the resulting higher food prices will hit the world’s poor the hardest- sparking violent demonstration” says the newspaper. Corn is a primary staple in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and prices have already gone up 60 per cent since June because “the United States accounts for 39 per cent of global trade in corn and stockpiles are now down 48 per cent” due to the drought.

Price fluctuations on the global food market do not affect all people in the same way as “people in wealthy industrialised countries spend between 10 to 20 per cent of their income on food. Those in the developing world pay up to 80 per cent. According to Oxfam, a one per cent jump in the price of food results in 16 million more people crashing into poverty.”

A sustainable approach to food security would address underlying forces such as climate change, economic and political policies and social marginalisation.

Paul Rogers, expert on global conflict and consultant to the Oxford Research Group on global security, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth. When asked whether free markets can help feed us, he replied:

“It will contribute in some way, but I think it is fairly minimal. There are far more important things to consider. Look at it this way: Back in the world food crisis in the early 1970s, which was the worst for about 80 years, there were about 450 million people malnourished.  Now the figure is closer to 800 million. Now, that malnourishment and lack of food is not generally because there isn’t enough food to go around. Even at the height of that crisis there was still half the normal reserve. It is because people cannot afford to get the food or to buy the food. […]  If you are looking at the situation of poor people across the majority world, there has to be some way in which we can actually improve the production of food in and around those areas to provide greater resilience in the face of what is coming because beyond all of this is the whole issue of climate change. I think we will have a wakeup call this year in terms of what might come.” 

This article focuses on the complex role that oil has played in many conflicts on the African continent. It begins by highlighting oil’s influential role within war at a wider international level and provides a brief theoretical base from which to explore oil’s role in the African continent. Then, the article provides evidence of petroleum’s impact on violent conflicts in three African countries, namely Angola, Sudan and Nigeria, in order to highlight oil’s multi-faceted role on war in Africa.

The full article can be accessed here.

Image source: Maks Karochkin

Following the vote at the UN Security Council, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States have embarked on military action against Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. They have been careful to include a few Arab states in this new coalition of the willing. But these three countries are the driving force behind the imposition of a no-fly zone and the attacks on the government’s military positions and forces. Yet among the permanent and non-permanent member of the Council who were asked to authorize “all necessary measures” to protect civilians rebelling against the regime, the BRIC powers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China were conspicuously absent. The implications of this Security Council vote will be far greater than just what happens to the Gaddafi regime for it also tells us something about the role of the new candidates for global leadership.

Brazil, Russia, India, and China are all represented on the Council at the moment — Brazil and India currently hold non-permanent seats — and collectively have become the face of what has been presented as the irreversible shift in global power toward a multipolar world. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has breathlessly ascribed to these four countries the ability to dramatically alter the global economic landscape over the next 50 years. If such projections are accurate, the key question is whether these new powers will seek to overturn the existing US-led order or simply join it as more equal partners. This question extends to China’s “peaceful rise,” the way that India and Brazil climb their way to the top-tier of global politics, and Russia’s re-emergence on the back of sustained high energy prices.

China and Russia are not surprisingly reluctant to engage in Western-led military action under the principle of the “responsibility to protect.” Both countries have significant internal turmoil and both prefer to hold on to the option of responding with brute force to domestic opposition if push comes to shove. For India and Brazil the story is not quite so straight forward. Although neither country has been particularly enthusiastic about the concept of a responsibility to protect, both have spent considerable political capital to appear like responsible stakeholders and serious players on the world stage. Both would dearly love a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with its power of veto and prestige of higher social status. Both look to the United States to facilitate such a move and assist with dampening the protests of their respective regional rivals, Pakistan and Argentina. So far India has been very successful in winning U.S. and UK support, and Brazil is hoping that a visit by President Obama this past weekend will spur the United States to join France in publicly supporting a Brazilian seat.

In the short term, however, the Brazilian and Indian abstentions on the Libya vote will not likely have helped to advance their plans for permanent membership of the Security Council. President Obama’s strategy for dealing with America’s relative decline and the rise of these new centers of power has been to try and co-opt potential challengers wherever possible into existing structures rather than set up showdowns for the decades to come. Yet this strategy is not fool-proof and leaves plenty of room for new powers to resist the liberal foundations of the U.S.-led order painstakingly constructed since 1945.

The uprisings across the Arab world have thrown up a number of problems for Western powers. Their time-honored position of attempting to ignore the deep marginalization of large swathes of the “majority world” and to contain or manage corrupt regimes for the sake of assured energy supplies and intelligence cooperation has come apart at the seams. The brutality of the Gaddafi regime and the belated and chaotic response of rightly incensed countries such as Britain, France, and the United States have forced the hands of these reluctant interveners at the 11th hour.

The Western response to the Libyan crisis has not addressed how this fundamental tension between a responsibility to protect vulnerable people and a global order based on the principle of national sovereignty can be resolved with the full participation of the emerging BRIC powers as well as the established trans-Atlantic ones. The people of Libya may be glad that such a large and difficult question has not been allowed to prevent outside assistance as they face down Gaddafi’s forces. But the United States and its allies will not be able to ignore this problem for long if a peaceful transition to a new global order is to be achieved in the years to come.

Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Ben Zala manages the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group. He works on issues of global security and great power politics and is also a member of the editorial team of the academic journal Civil Wars (published by Routledge).

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.