Conflict and climate change lead to a rise in hunger
The United Nations has just released a report on the state of food security and nutrition in the world. It shows that last year, there were approximately 850 million hungry people on the planet (or about 11 per cent of the total population).
While this is a tragedy no matter how you look at it, this statistic is notable because it marks an increase of 38 million hungry people from one year earlier. What makes this rise especially significant is that it is the first increase in global hunger we have seen in more than a decade. Each year between 2005 and 2016, the number of hungry people dropped and development officials were cautiously optimistic that we were on our way to eradicating hunger (some 925 million people, or 14 per cent of the global population, were hungry in 2005).
The culprits behind this year’s rise are conflict and climate change.
According to the UN, food security worsened across major parts of subSaharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Western Asia. South Sudan is mired in conflict and experienced a major famine this year. The UN notes 20 million people are at risk of dying of hunger, not only in South Sudan but also Somalia, Yemen and the northeast tip of Nigeria.
All these areas are affected by conflicts that undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. If you overlay a map of the world’s conflicts with a map of the world’s worst food security problems, there is a very good fit.
Similarly, deteriorating environmental conditions have ravaged many of these areas. The UN notes that Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Yemen all experienced bad floods in 2016 while Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria all suffered bad droughts.
What we are probably witnessing, therefore, is an interaction between deteriorating environmental conditions that help exacerbate already-existing social tensions and undermine the livelihoods of millions. We’ve been here before: history shows us there are often links between conflict and bad weather.
For instance, there is a complex but well-established connection between droughts and the start of the Syrian civil war. It seems that faltering rainfall in the early 2000s upended Syria’s rural communities and brought people into cities, where they began protesting political corruption in the Assad government
Similarly, there is a link between droughts and the Rwandan genocide of the1990s. And if we look further back, it is well recognized by historians that the French Revolution began as protests over food prices after harvest failures sent waves of penniless refugees into the streets of Paris.
Luckily, there are solutions — even right here in Canada. For example, at the University of Guelph, we are breeding more drought tolerant varieties of our important crops. We can promote agricultural practices that build up the soil organic matter, which acts like a sponge by trapping rainfall and holding onto it for when it is needed. In addition, we can support local development projects, focusing in particular on female-headed households, to help small-scale farmers access markets and become more efficient.
For years, academics and activists have been trying to sound the alarm that population growth and climate change will make it increasingly hard to maintain food security over the next generation and that conflict is almost inevitable.
But until this year there didn’t seem to be much data (outside of historic antecedents) to confirm these worries. With hunger going down every year, what was the big deal? But the uptick in hunger shown in this most recent UN report should focus our attention.
In the future, will we remember 2017 as the year when we started to lose the battle to ensure the future is well fed? Or will we heed this warning and take the actions needed to help communities everywhere build more resilient food systems?