Food Security as a New Frontier of War: A Geo-Historical Perspective of Food Security and Armed Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

As with many studies on the link between natural resources and conflict, food is not given centrality in analysis. This is in part due to the general belief that food security is a by-product of conflict rather than a source of it. By analysing the geo-histories of some contemporary conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper contends that food security is in fact, both a source and a result of the conflict. With regard to the former, it demonstrates how the cocoa pod was at the centre of the civil war in the Ivory Coast at the turn of the twenty-first century and how hunger in the Sahel region has triggered violent conflict and instability. The chapter traces the growing and increasingly violent anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa to rising levels of urban hunger. Ethiopia, providing evidence of food insecurity as a result of conflict, is also analysed. Alleviation of hunger is thus crucial to the mitigation and resolution of conflict in the sub-Saharan region of Africa.