Armed Conflict and Hunger--Impacts of Conflict: Deliberate, Inevitable, and Incidental

Siege is a war tactic used deliberately to destroy food supplies and productive capacities and to bring besieged populations to submission. Recent siege tactics include prevention or diversion of food aid, economic sanctions, and donor policies that selectively withhold food aid and ban commerce. In this last case the goal is the removal of a leader or regime, not the submission of an opposing population.

Asset stripping that enriches and empowers aggressors over victims is another deliberate tactic with long-term and devastating consequences (Keen, 1994). The seizure of Dinka resources by government-supported militias in south-central Sudan systematically put Dinka land, livestock, and newly discovered oil in the hands of northern Sudanese government interests. It reduced the Dinka to penury and removed them as a political threat.

Deliberate destruction of health and education services, community leadership, and social structures are intended to deprive younger folk of customary socialization, access to food and medicine, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational nurturance. These tactics were used in conflicts in Liberia, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone. In Mozambique, Renamo insurgents deliberately targeted health infrastructure in acts of violence that afflicted communities as well as government (Green, 1994). They isolated youth from their communities to disrupt intergenerational trust and transfer youths' loyalties to them. Like other insurgents, Renamo also disrupted customary culture and civility by perpetrating violence against women, who would ordinarily have been protected by intact kinship structures. Such acts destroy human dignity and social capacity, as well as materials and infrastructure, creating immediate food shortages that also set the stage for chronic food insecurity for some time to come.

Other losses are the inevitable or incidental outcomes of the ways wars are waged. Rural cropping patterns and units of food production inevitably change as national markets become inaccessible. Rural food insecurity usually increases because local food production cannot rise to a level sufficient to replace market food sources and feed populations swollen by refugees from urban and other rural areas who also need to live off the land. More people are usually hungry, although aggregate statistics do not reveal the extent or distribution of shortfalls.

Rural pastoralists tend to be at higher risk because their mobility is circumscribed, traditional pasturage ranges can become inaccessible, and remaining pasturage zones are undermined by overgrazing. Even where their assets have not been deliberately stripped or their livestock commandeered by the military, pastoralists suffer income losses when fighting or refugee movements distort livestock markets. For mixed pastoralists-agriculturalists, depletion of herds and precipitous drops in the price of livestock remove household buffers against shortfalls and eliminate assets available to invest in their future food supply. The elimination of animals incurs additional costs for agriculturalists, who lose manure for their crops as well as animal traction, without which crop yields deteriorate and food supplies fall. Without being able to "bank" on livestock, herding-farming households must assume additional risk-averse behaviors. Households that in more stable times held crops as well as livestock as insurance against seasonal shortage, instead sell them immediately to gain mobile assets that are less easily seized or destroyed. Removing such buffers sets the stage for acute food shortage in years of crop failure, as shown during civil wars in Angola and elsewhere (Sogge, 1994).

The food insecurity that accompanies market disruptions also may be an incidental rather than a deliberate outcome of hostilities. For example, the diversion of trucks to the military in the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s incidentally wreaked havoc on markets and trade (Mabogunje, 1995). Livelihoods inevitably suffer where migratory labor unrelated to a particular conflict is cut off from reaching sources of employment and income. Because of the Sudanese civil war, workers from southern Kordofan in Sudan could no longer migrate to their jobs in other regions. Bangladeshi and Filipino guest workers removed from Iraq were unintended victims of the Persian Gulf War, as were households dependent on their remittances.

Photo: Martin Lueders

Women watering crops at displaced persons camp; Bomi County, Liberia. Growing food in a refugee camp can provide an important addition to food supplied by international relief agencies, which consists of grains and oils, with much-needed vegetables (for human health) absent. As the photo might indicate, these food growing efforts face very significant constraints, including little land, insufficient natural water or other important inputs, and land that has only been cleared and thus without advantages that can arise from continued cultivation.

Crops inevitably suffer in war zones. Annual crops may not be sown, tended, or harvested, and longer-term agricultural investments may be lost, particularly where perennial crops are destroyed. But wage and trade losses usually far exceed those of agriculture as rural households are cut off from urban markets and networks that ordinarily provide them with diversified livelihoods and buffers against scarcity. Poorer households also suffer because conflict encourages a kind of predator merchant class that benefits from the suffering of most others. As often stated, not everyone in situations of conflict or famine is food short, and some always profit. Profiteers deliberately take advantage of others, but the contexts allowing their prosperity are an inevitable part of the ways wars are waged.

Malnutrition and sickness also appear to be inevitable consequences of conflict, although much ill health is incidental, rather than deliberately caused. Where hunger is used as a weapon, women and children in particular are at risk for malnutrition because they have higher requirements for micronutrients and nutritionally dense foods, which are often unavailable. Displacement, migration, and concentration of refugees in "safe" areas increase their contacts with and vulnerability to infectious respiratory and diarrheal diseases, which are chief killers in refugee situations (DeWaal, 1989a). Population movements inadvertently carry diseases such as malaria across whole regions or introduce new killer diseases when refugees return home. Such nondeliberate health disturbances inevitably reduce food and nutritional security and jeopardize recovery from conflict stress. Also, 5 million children were displaced by wars in the 1980s (UNICEF, 1993), leaving a generation of individuals who are socially, economically, psychologically, and physically disadvantaged.