Givers of Great Dinners Know Few Enemies: The Impact of Food Sufficiency and Food Sharing on Low-intensity Household Conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

Our study establishes a linkage between household food sufficiency and food sharing behaviour with the reduction of low-intensity, micro level conflict using primary data from 1763 households of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. We develop a theoretical explanation of such behaviour using the seminal theories of dissatisfaction originating from food insecurity and the reciprocity of gifts in economic anthropology. We first examine if food sufficient households are less likely to engage in low-intensity conflict. Following, we investigate possible heterogeneous effects of food sufficiency, conditional on food sharing behaviour. Using propensity score matching, we find that food sufficiency reduces household conflict risk by an average of around 10 percentage points. Upon conditioning on food sharing behaviour, we find that conflict risk in the subpopulation of food sufficient households is 13.8 percentage points lower for households that share their food while the effects disappear for households that do not share their food. Our results hold through a rigorous set of robustness checks including doubly robust estimator, placebo regression, matching quality tests and Rosenbaum bounds for hidden bias. We conclude that food sufficiency reduces low-intensity conflict for households only in the presence of food sharing behaviour and offer explanations and policy prescriptions.