Tue 13 Sep 2011
Food security and conflict done badly . . .
Posted by Ed under Africa, Food Security, policy, research, sustainable development
[3] Comments
Over at the Guardian, Damian Carrington has a blog post arguing that “Food is the ultimate security need.” He bases this argument on a map produced by risk analysts Maplecroft, which sounds quite rigorous:
The Maplecroft index [represented on the map], reviewed last year by the World Food Programme, uses 12 types of data to derive a measure of food risk that is based on the UN FAO’s concept. That covers the availability, access and stability of food supplies, as well as the nutritional and health status of populations.
I’m going to leave aside the question of whether we can or should be linking food security to conflict – Marc Bellemare is covering this issue in his research and has a nice short post up that you should be reading. He also has a link to a longer technical paper where he interrogates this relationship…I am still wading through it, as it involves a somewhat frightening amount of math, but if you are statistically inclined, check it out.
Instead, I would like to quickly raise some questions about this index and the map that results. First, the construction of the index itself is opaque (I assume because it is seen as a proprietary product), so I have no idea what is actually in there. Given the character of the map, though, it looks like it was constructed from national-level data. If it was, it is not particularly useful – food insecurity is not only about the amount of food, but access to that food and entitlement to get access to the food, and these are things that tend to be determined locally. You cannot aggregate entitlement at the national level and get a meaningful understanding of food insecurity – and certainly not actionable information.
Further, you can’t aggregate food markets or prices at the national level and get anything meaningful with regard to food security – let’s compare Maplecroft’s map with FEWS-NETs maps for the immediate future (August-September 2011):
First Maplecroft:
Now FEWS-NET:
While FEWS-NET does not have global coverage, compare their maps to those of Maplecroft and you see two things: One, FEWS is clearly working at a much finer geographic scale, because they have on-the-ground information about actual markets and access, as well as a deep understanding of climate and livelihoods through which to contextualize their grounded data. This is what it takes to represent variable vulnerability within a country. The variability you see on their map illustrates my point about the problems of national-level statistics – clearly food insecurity is a regional-to-local problem in every country, even Somalia. Two, FEWS is not projecting major risk in the same places as Maplecroft, whose map has painted most of equatorial and dryland Africa as problematic at best. Now, FEWS-NET’s medium-term projections (October-December 2011):
Again, no real resemblance to the Maplecroft map.
Now, you can argue that the Maplecroft map is aimed at a different goal than the FEWS-NET maps, as Maplecroft is trying to create a risk-assessment picture of food security in the region. However, Maplecroft’s timescale is unclear (does it cover the next 6 months? 1 year? 5 years?), and its data is so over-aggregated as to be non-actionable. You can’t build policy or programs from this, and I would argue that you can’t really assess the risk of food insecurity from the map or the underlying index either. FEWS-NET’s maps are what actionable information looks like . . .
I appreciate the point Carrington is trying to make on his blog – food security is a really important issue. But if we are to address the challenges of hunger and conflict, we need to build our understanding of the connection between them from meaningful data . . . and probably work from the outstanding material already available via FEWS-NET and others.
3 Responses to “ Food security and conflict done badly . . . ”
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[...] Food security and conflict done badly . . . [...]
Here’s a specific example to illustrate the fallacy of making generalizations at the national scale. As a food security and livelihoods program manager on the eastern shores of Lake Kivu in eastern DRC for nine months in 2010-11, I became well versed in the contributing factors to recurring food insecurity there. In his article, Carrington states that the Congo (which, incidentally, is the size of America east of the Mississippi River, with an incredibly varied geography) is at as much risk for food crisis as is Somalia. According to Carrington, the two share a number of risk factors, listed here, with my reactions:
Carrington: “War begets poverty, leaving food unaffordable.”
ES: Certainly, war has contributed to poverty in eastern Congo, but local markets are intact, and average people rely on them as both sources on income and sources of food.
Carrington: Devastated infrastructure destroys both food production and the ability to truck in emergency food.”
ES: Damaged and simply inadequate infrastructure are definitely problems in Congo. But I never saw anything to make me think that most people of eastern Congo ever had access to infrastructure that would increase agricultural production significantly. My sense is that such infrastructure (terraces, irrigation systems, etc.) only ever existed on foreign-owned plantations. In addition, despite the poor roads, distributions of emergency food are quite common throughout eastern Congo; I often witnessed them when I was out in the field, and as a program manager I organized seven of them, often in quite remote locations.
Carrington: “The collapse of society means the effects of extreme weather such as drought cannot be dealt with.”
ES: The people of the Kivu provinces have certainly suffered, but to say that their societies have collapsed is a gross exaggeration. I saw numerous examples of small communities that independently responded to an outside threat (such as an agricultural disease) quite effectively. In addition, extreme weather is rarely an issue in eastern Congo, where nine months of fairly reliable rain allow for two growing seasons.
Carrington: “And the fear of violence turns people into refugees, leaving their livelihoods and social networks behind…”
ES: This has certainly happened, but the peak of the refugee crisis in eastern Congo has passed. Most people are either back home or well established with family members elsewhere.
In short, food insecurity is certainly an issue in eastern Congo, but I would certainly hope that any outside intervention to help improve the situation there would be based on a more nuanced understanding of local factors.
Emily:
Fantastic response – while I cannot claim expertise in the DRC, I certainly could offer similar comments about parts of Ghana and Malawi (well, minus the conflict bits). It is frustrating, but I know it is very difficult for journalists to write stories that both embrace the complexity of food security and can clear editorial review . . . I think our job is to continue pushing the complexity narrative and holding people to account. Thanks for this – I’m going to point people to it . . .
Ed