Research says war, not climate, is pushing the hungry population in Africa to rise again

Research says war, not climate, is pushing the hungry population in Africa to rise again

After years of progress in food security, some countries have experienced a sharp reversal

Over the years, the world seemed Make progress in eradicating hungerThen, starting in 2014, this trend has slowly fallen and reversed in many countries; now, there are approximately 700 million people-nearly 9% of the world’s population-According to the United Nations, sleep hungry.

One of the worst-hit areas is sub-Saharan Africa. Here, many people reflexively attribute the drought caused by climate change. However, a new study examining this issue in detail shows that this is not the case: the prolonged war should be blamed, not the weather. Just published research In the magazine Natural foodStudies have found that although drought often leads to food insecurity in Africa, the contribution of drought to hunger has remained stable or even declined in recent years. On the contrary, increasingly widespread and prolonged violence has displaced people, raised food prices and prevented external food aid, leading to a reversal.

“In layman’s terms, people would say it was drought and floods caused by the climate, because people tend to say that,” said Weston Anderson, He led the research as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University International Institute of Climate and Society“But the academic community has not compared the importance of drought and violence in triggering food crises as a whole.”

To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed data from 2009 to 2018 Famine Warning System, A network funded by the United States Agency for International Development, provides governments and aid organizations with information about impending or ongoing food crises in dozens of countries. The system shows that the number of people in need of emergency food assistance in monitored countries has surged from 48 million in 2015 to 113 million in 2020. The system is not designed to quantify the different factors behind emergencies. But Anderson and his colleagues were able to sort out these problems for the 14 most food-insecure countries in Africa. These countries travel from Mauritania, Mali, and Nigeria in the west, through Sudan, Chad and other countries, to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia in the east. The study also involved several countries further south, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

The frequency of violent conflicts from 2009 to 2018 in 14 African countries was studied. (Adapted from Anderson et al., Nature Food 2021)

Not surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the widespread food crisis is behind periodic, well-documented droughts. However, the overall impact of drought did not increase during the study period; most importantly, they declined in certain areas. When a drought really hits, farmers usually recover in the next planting season around a year. It takes twice as long for herders to recover because the conditions in the area where they live are more extreme, and people need time to rebuild their herds that have been hit hard by the disaster.

Studies have found that violence is the cause of the gradual increase in hunger when rainfall is usually fluctuating. According to this group of authors, from repeated terrorist attacks to fierce fighting between the armed forces, long-term conflicts have led to shortages year after year, and there is no end in sight.

This is especially true in northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram guerrillas have launched a ruthless hit-and-run campaign against the government and most of the people in the past decade. Also in South Sudan, a chaotic, multilateral civil war that began in 2013 is still continuing. Studies have found that Sudan and Somalia have also seen increased hunger caused by war, but in these countries, drought is the most important factor. In most cases, herders are again the most affected by violence because they are in a period of drought and because they are more likely to live in areas most prone to violence.

The latest casualty is Ethiopia, and the number of hungry people across the country has been on the rise in recent years, mainly due to below-average rainfall. But last year the civil war broke out in the Tigray region of the country, which greatly exacerbated the suffering.The study did not examine this new conflict, but A recent UN report says More than 5 million people in the region urgently need food aid, and many have already seen famine. “This serious crisis stems from the knock-on effects of the conflict, including population displacement, movement restrictions, restricted humanitarian access, loss of harvests and livelihood assets, and dysfunctional or non-existent markets,” A senior UN official saidMost importantly, the drought in Ethiopia is expected to Continue until this year.

Droughts periodically cause widespread food insecurity in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and may exacerbate the effects of war. Here, farmers in Diouna village in southern Mali listen to the weather forecast. (Francesco Fiondella/International Institute for Climate and Society)

Researchers investigated the third possible cause of hunger: locusts. Likewise, it’s no surprise that locusts affected food security by destroying fodder and crops in some years—but they were not large enough to explain the increase in hunger during the study. (The study did not consider the unusually large wave of locusts that swept most of East Africa in 2019-2020; these may have produced more dramatic results.)

Another factor the researchers studied is whether the onset of a drought will lead to an outbreak of violence, leading to more hunger.One of the co-authors of the report, a climatologist Richard Seag Colombian Lamont-Dougherty Earth ObservatoryTo connect the dots in this area A widely cited study in 2015 Think that one of the sparks of the ongoing Syrian civil war is Years of drought This drives many people to leave their land and enter the city. He said that this does not seem to be the case in African countries. The author writes: “We found no systematic relationship between drought and conflict frequency or conflict-related deaths. In some cases, conflict may be affected by environmental pressures, but the relationship across Africa has been complex in recent decades. And it varies from environment to environment.”

Although war has always been the main driver of hunger in some countries, this does not mean that other countries are completely free from violence that can destroy food supplies.For example, in the past ten years, most of Mali Under intermittent attacks Separatists and Islamic insurgents sometimes occupy entire cities.Since 2015, the once largely peaceful country of Burkina Faso has seen hundreds of attacks by insurgents and jihadists, including A village was raided in early June of this year More than 100 people died.

“The overall message is that if we are to predict and deal with food crises, we need to focus on conflicts, which can be very complicated-not just things that are easier to identify like droughts,” Anderson said. “Drought has a definite beginning and a definite end. But there are all kinds of violence. Many times, it has no definite beginning or end.” Having said that, he said that with the Yemen civil war raging, the war must be a team. The reasons for the surge in hunger in other parts of the world have not been examined.

The other authors of the study are Elisabeth Ilboudo-Nébie, Wolfram Schlenker, Fabien Cottier, Alex De Sherbinin, Dara Mendeloff, and Kelsey Markey of Columbia University; and Sonali McDermid and Kelsey Markey of New York University.