Food Aid and the World Hunger Solution: Why the U.S. Should Use a Human Rights Approach

Breaking the Links Between Conflict and Hunger Redux

“…In view of this global political economy, conflict analysts (Homer-Dixon, 1999, vs. DeSoysa, 2002 argued over whether the true underlying causes of conflict were need (resource scarcities, livelihood-and food-insecurity), creed (hostile identity politics linked to a sense of unfair political-economic inequalities), or greed (competition for control over strategic resources, including highvalue agricultural commodities), whereas food-wars analysis showed all three were implicated in most cases (Messer, Cohen, & Marchione, 2001). Using international legal and political-advocacy terminology, food-wars analysts also showed that severe economic inequalities and human-rights violations underlie both hunger and conflict as root causes and argued that food-security and conflict policy must pay greater attention to PGER factors that crosscut vertical (economic strata) and horizontal (sociocultural group) inequalities (Marchione & Messer, 2010;Messer, 2009;Stewart, 2008). They also considered food wars as related to conflicts and food insecurity associated with spiking food prices (Messer, 2009), and environmental or global climate change (Messer, 2010), with implications for humanitarian assistance and economic development (Messer & Cohen, 2011).…”

THE DOUBLE THREAT Of HIV/AIDS AND DROUGHT ON RURAL HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY IN SOUTHEASTERN ZIMBABWE

“…Critics of traditional food aid approaches argue that U.S. political‐economic interests have guided emergency food relief leading to a mismanagement of aid resources and potential damage to long‐term food security. Approaches to addressing HIV/AIDS in southern Africa need to be responsive to local context and incorporate knowledge about the particular ways in which households utilize available human, natural, and economic resources to pursue a livelihood strategy for the purposes of securing food and meeting other needs (Marchione and Messer 2010).…”

Rising Food Prices, Social Mobilizations, and Violence: Conceptual Issues in Understanding and Responding to the Connections Linking Hunger and Conflict

“…In the early 1990s, food aid flowed more effectively to Botswana, which had a relatively stable government committed to food security, and functioning infrastructure to respond, than to neighboring nations, who were recovering from recent civil wars and distributed food aid only selectively, to reward political friends and deprive political opponents. The three most dramatic cases may be Ethiopia, where three regimes across three decades have shown selective use of food aid and withheld food as a weapon; Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe government has consistently denied emergency assistance and development aid to Matabeleland and the Ndebele political opposition (Marchione and Messer in press); and the Sudan. There, denial of access to development resources and asset‐stripping have been integral parts of the civil wars and erosions of livelihoods in the South, Nubia, and Darfur, but conflicts are blamed on either environmental scarcities and competition for economic resources or political–cultural–religious cleavages (Keen 1994; Young et al 2009; see also Messer et al 2001).…”

“…The way forward to a more peaceful and food‐secure world must be not only reliable funding for (emergency and nonemergency) food‐security programs but also consistent attention to the “conflict” factors in food‐security situations, and especially the PGER factors that skew participation in programs, from planning through implementation and monitoring (Marchione and Messer in press).…”

“…However, in the process of determining development strategies, aid agencies need to be sensitive to the ways in which past foodwars have stymied increases in agricultural production, marketing, and livelihood diversification (see Messer and Cohen 2008). They should also consider the political–geographic–ethnic–religion (PGER) divisions that characterize particular subnational and national food‐insecurity situations, histories, and outlooks (Marchione and Messer in press). These divisions can skew government distributions and access to food aid and assets along political lines, a process that may create additional conflict.…”