Reason & Concern

By Ronquillo C. Tolentino

On Food Wars

Reading a regional newspaper June 3, 2008 editorial titled “Food problem and national security “ made my mind raced back to “food wars”. There is verity to the political observation that poverty-related limitations in their access to food and acute food shortages inclusive of disruptions to food systems and economies can result into civil disorders, nay, armed conflicts. Important would be the consideration that conflicts can arise in view of the hunger vulnerability of particular communities, households and individuals. Indeed, I totally agree to that editorial observation that “ the government should resume the peace talks in Mindanao , to work for peace in areas where the planting of rice has been impeded by conflict. The vicious cycle of hunger and conflict must be stopped.”
Tracing food shortage related to conflict, Messer, in an article titled “Conflict As A Cause Of Hunger” said: “The most obvious way in which armed conflict causes hunger is deliberate use of food as a weapon. Adversaries starve opponents into submission by seizing or destroying food stocks, livestock, or other assets in rural areas and by cutting off sources of food or livelihood, including destruction of markets in urban and rural areas. Land and water resources are mined or contaminated, to force people to leave and to discourage their return.”
“The deliberate use of hunger as a weapon is most evident in siege warfare and “scorched earth” tactics, but it is also evident where combatants commandeer and divert relief food from intended beneficiaries and keep emergency rations from affected civilian and displaced populations. Military interests appropriate both local and externally donated provisions for their own tactical advantage. A prolonged case in point is Sudan, where the government in 1990 had sold grain reserves to fuel their military, but refused to declare a food emergency or allow relief into starving opposition areas. Both government and opposition forces created famine as a tool to control territories and populations, and restricted access to food aid (often by attacking relief convoys) as an instrument of ethnic and religious oppression (Keen 1994).”
“Food shortage ripples into the larger economy and extends over multiple years when farmers, herders, and others flee attacks, terror, and destruction or suffer reductions in their capacities to produce food because of forced labour recruitment (including conscription) and war-related depletion of assets. Ancillary attacks of disease, linked to destruction of health facilities, and hardship and hunger also reduce the human capacity for food production.”
“These factors set the stage for multiple years of food shortage, especially where conflicts interact with natural disasters such as multi-year droughts. Combined political-environmental disasters over several years produce the “complex emergencies” that now confront the international relief community. The World Food Programme, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, other bilateral and multilateral relief agencies, and NGOs increasingly are called to respond to these emergency relief situations at the expense of peaceful development assistance aimed at increasing food production and livelihood in these same or other war zones (Maxwell and Buchanan Smith 1994).” /MP