Everyday concerns of the population rarely reach the negotiating table, in part because the economic and social problems in conflict-ridden societies are extremely complex, involve many actors and can only be resolved in the long term.
So what happens when people are driven to kill one another for food? It’s a critical question to ask as the world faces a sudden and unexpected food price crisis that is threatening to plunge millions back into poverty.
The sharp spike in food prices this year has already generated violence. Food riots in parts of Africa and the Caribbean have created social and political instability. In rice-growing countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand, hoarding has begun with export bans already in place, creating inter-state friction.
Burma’s rice-growing capacity has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, which will add to price pressures in the coming months.
This is largely a crisis born of inflation and other market factors rather than fundamental shortages. Prices for the benchmark Thai variety of rice, a food staple across much of Asia, have increased threefold in a year, reports the Asian Development Bank. Meat prices have risen by 60% in Bangladesh in the year ending in March, and by 45% in Cambodia and 30% in the Philippines.
With this sharp increase in the price of basic staples, people are already hoarding, stealing and fighting over scarce supplies. The World Food Programme calls it a “silent tsunami.”
The threat of conflict is real, both within societies where the numbers impoverished by higher grain prices is already high, and also between states as the trend towards commercial liberalisation and conglomeration is suddenly reversed and replaced by subsidies, price-fixing cartels and export curbs.
In Indonesia, retired general recently warned: “If students demonstrate it’s not a worry, but if hungry people take to the streets, now that’s dangerous.”
Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to kill their neighbours over scarce resources. The peasant wars of the late 20th century in Central and South America and the wars that sprung from famine in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, are grim reminders of man’s most basic instinct, which is to fight to survive.
The trouble is that in terms of resolving conflict, we have come to rely less on material remedies and more on political artifice. Many of the internal conflicts that have been peacefully resolved in recent years only superficially addressed the material seeds of conflict. Peace agreements have been elite affairs where leaders of armed groups and governments reached an understanding on how to share power within a common state.
This approach is a sensible first step toward conflict resolution: by convincing the people inciting violence to lay down their arms, it becomes possible to start designing a wider range of policies addressing socio-economic issues.
However, typically, the socio-economic changes and the economic reconstruction and development the public was expecting trickled down slowly, if at all. Aceh remains one of the poorest parts of Indonesia, as does Mindanao in the southern Philippines - two areas of Southeast Asia where peace has been negotiated.
When hunger drives people into conflict, we might presume that peace-making will simply be a question of providing food. We would be mistaken. In fact, the experience of humanitarian aid agencies in the 1970s and ’80s in Africa was that food aid tends to fuel conflict, as the combatants seek to harness the supply of nutrition to the goals of war.
Experts tell us that farmers will eventually adjust the supply of food to cope with higher demand so that prices stabilise. More encouragingly, there are signs that decades of improving cooperation between states is stimulating a collective urge to resolve the crisis. The sharing of technology is key, says Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. He believes that farmers in Africa could double food output in five to 10 years if rich countries partner them in a “Green Revolution” for a long-term solution to the continent’s food crisis.
But realistically, trade agreements and technological advances are slow-moving transformations.
In the meantime, officials in India warn that the food price crisis could plunge millions of people into poverty in a country that is already battling an internal Marxist insurgency that draws support from impoverished and landless peasants.
In Bangladesh, where the soaring cost price of staples has forced the marginally poor to give up meat and rice, there is a significantly increased risk of conflict in an already fractured polity.
The immediate challenge, therefore, is to prevent and resolve conflict arising from the food crisis. This places a significant burden on the international community to swiftly respond to outbreaks of violence.
But if people driven to war by hunger are less inclined to compromise, this makes the task of peace-making rather more challenging.
For one thing, conflict fuelled by hunger will be more widespread, exerting strain on international agencies involved in peace-keeping and humanitarian work. Food security is already fragile in many African countries and a protracted conflict tends to drift across borders, as we have seen in Sudan and Congo.
Peace-makers need to be more aware of, and recognise, the socio-economic roots of conflict. They should incorporate in peace agreements remedies for the population’s grievances and to enlist the international community’s support behind their implementation.
Such remedies should include pledges by leaders to address in a meaningful manner contentious issues such as land distribution, job creation, and racial and ethnic discrimination leading to socio-economic inequality.
The ethnic and religious wars of the last half of the 20th century have perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security.
We have grown accustomed to resolving conflict by forging political accommodation and compromise in situations where protagonists had much to lose materially if they kept on fighting.
But in a world where environmental and market pressures can treble the price of staple commodities in a matter of a few months, it is harder to find the grounds for compromise.
This calls for more effective negotiating skills, both domestically and internationally, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, to resolve these crises.
Markets must be kept open to assist with the flow of goods to crisis situations, and in affected countries solutions must be found that address both elite and popular grievances.
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