2.8.2: Background - Responses to Food Crises

 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the development of international organizations focused on the provision and distribution of food worldwide
• Explain the relationship of food to human rights in the post-Second World War era
• Explain the ways "food power" represents a barrier to reducing global malnutrition and food insecurity

New Focus on an Old Problem

In 1943, 44 nations gathered in Hot Springs, Virginia to discuss how to respond to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Europe. The meeting included ten countries that were under Nazi occupation at the time that the meeting was convened. Occupied countries were subject not only to brutal violence, but also to extractive food policies implemented by the Nazi party (Lyon, 1943). Nazi policy ensured that the German armed forces and civilians were well-provisioned by importing food from the occupied territories, particularly from the occupied areas of the Soviet Union, even when there was not sufficient food left to feed the people in that region. This “hunger plan” likely killed 30 million people and was one of the great war crimes that was committed by the Nazi regime, shaping how the world understood the genocide (De Waal, 2017). It needed to be a priority to ensure food would be available to transport into Europe as soon as the war ended. All countries present agreed to increase production as much as possible and began to plan for transport into the effected regions. This conference cemented the role of the global food markets in feeding people worldwide and gave birth to the idea of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.  

The conference declaration included the following bold claim: “There has never been enough food for the health of all people” (Lyon, 1943). This is indeed the way that we tend to understand the relationship between human beings and hunger, as a fundamental feature of the human condition. However, this idea can also mask the ways in which the causes and consequences of widespread hunger change over time.  

Figure 8.2.1: "Lester Bowles Pearson presiding at a plenary session of the founding conference of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization" by National Film Board of Canada is in the Public Domain

Scholars who study the history of hunger will point to a pivotal moment in the Nineteenth Century when the nature of food crises seemed to change significantly. At the heart of this moment was a significant food crisis that impacted communities throughout the Northern hemisphere in 1816. In the year before there had been an especially violent eruption of Mount Tambora, which is located in modern Indonesia. A plume of volcanic ash contributed to a drop in global temperatures, leading to crop failures and significant numbers of famine deaths (De Waal, 2017). This became known as “the year without a summer”, and the event was memorialized in American President James Madison’s 1816 address to Congress, which began with the following statement: “In reviewing the present state of our country, our attention cannot be withheld from the effect produced by peculiar seasons which have very generally impaired the annual gifts of the earth and threatened scarcity in particular districts.”  In hindsight, this is often described as the last food crisis for which the primary causes were natural (Mokyr, 1980).  

Conquest, Conflict, and Famine

More modern food crises have largely been caused by human action (or in some cases inaction). Although chronic hunger and malnutrition may have been traditionally understood as the natural outcome of inclement weather or failed crops, during the Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-first Centuries food crises are much more closely associated with conflict, colonialism, and authoritarian governments. These man-made famines are often described as new famines which are associated with a lack of access to food, rather than a lack of food itself (De Waal, 2017).

One example of a new famine was the Irish Potato Famine. Occurring between 1845 and 1852, the Irish Potato Famine was initially attributed to a blight that impacted one of Ireland’s primary food crops: the potato. An estimated one million people died of hunger and disease during the famine, while another two million left the country seeking a more secure life elsewhere. As a result, the population of Ireland declined dramatically during this period. However, reports at the time indicate that there was plentiful food in many markets and grain exports from the island nation continued. For this reason, it is necessary to take a closer look at the initial cause for the famine. In the centuries before the crisis, Ireland had experienced waves of brutal colonization by their British neighbors. This colonial process included reallocation of the most fertile lands from the indigenous Irish to British subjects, resulting in the forcible movement of many Irish communities to less productive land and increasing dependence on the limited crops that could be grown there, most notably the potato (Mokyr, 1980). The government of the United Kingdom was slow to respond to the growing crisis, finally doing so through a combination of workhouses that would pay for labor in food, but provided dismal and sometimes deadly labor conditions, and a law that made landlords responsible for providing relief for legal tenants, which resulted in a large number of evictions during the crisis (ÓGráda, 1996). As you can see, the failure of the potato crop might have been attributed to a fungal infection, but the starvation of the population was a result of colonial violence and poor policy choices. 

Figure 8.2.2: "An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store" by Daniel MacDonald is in the Public Domain

Another example of a new famine occurred in Nigeria beginning in 1968. Nigeria is a profoundly diverse country, the boundaries for which had been drawn by European colonists seeking to extract natural resources from the region. In 1968, shortly after British colonialism was successfully ended in Nigeria, a civil conflict began. Biafra, a southeastern province and home to many members of the Igbo community, declared its independence and faced opposition from the Nigerian government. The declaration of the Republic of Biafra’s independence had been preceded by several years of ethnic tension and violence directed towards the Igbo people and the conduct of the war similarly targeted the civilian population through the creation of a blockade of the region by the Nigerian navy (Nafziger, 1972; Achebe 1968). The result was a significant decline in the amount of available food and starvation followed. More than a million people died as a result of the Biafra blockade, despite international assistance. This was the first major food crisis since the creation of the World Food Programme and a significant amount of international attention was paid to the suffering of the people of Biafra.

Figure 8.2.3: "Food Aid Nigeria" by Dr. Lyle Conrad/ CDC is in the Public Domain

In 100 plus years between the Irish Potato Famine and the Biafra Famine, there had been several significant developments that created the opportunity for a global humanitarian response in 1968. In 1945, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was formally established as a permanent agency that could help to coordinate food markets and track access to nutrition. In his final address to the United Nations, American President Dwight Eisenhower asked that the international community do more to alleviate hunger throughout the world. The United States was, and continues to be, a major food exporter, and had implemented several direct aid food programs primarily in Central and Eastern Europe prior to the Second World War, often in the service of an anti-Bolshevik foreign policy agenda. President Eisenhower stated, “Beyond this, we must never forget that there are hundreds of millions of people, particularly in the less developed parts of the world, suffering from hunger and malnutrition, even though a number of countries, my own included, are producing food in surplus. This paradox should not be allowed to continue.”

The United Nations heeded this call by creating the World Food Programme (WFP) in 1961. The World Food Programme, which is funded exclusively through government and individual donations, has become a significant global force fighting hunger, with fourteen billion dollars of donations in 2022 alone. It uses a fleet of trucks, planes, and ships to help move food where it is needed. In recent years, in recognition of the fact that importing large food stores can be harmful to the local and regional agri-food systems, imperil small-holding farmers, and be difficult in some regions, the World Food Programme has begun to implement a larger system of cash transfers. People can use the cash to purchase food that is fresh, local, and culturally affirming.  

Food Power

However, the Twentieth Century was not a period of consistent improvement on a quest to eliminate undernutrition and food insecurity. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was increasing discussion of “food power” as nation states sometimes used the donation or withholding of food as leverage to secure foreign policy goals. Most notoriously, American Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz declared in 1974 that, “Food is a weapon” (Sanderson, 1983). This statement, made in the context of the oil embargo declared by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in retaliation for American financial support of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, hinted at an approach to global affairs that could significantly increase both the number of people vulnerable to hunger and the amount of food waste. Food embargoes were employed by the United States during the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to gain an advantage in negotiations concerning the wars in Vietnam, Angola, and in the Middle East (Sanderson, 1983). The United States also imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union in 1980, but its impact was limited. 

Although the immorality and inefficiency of using food as a weapon have been widely acknowledged, the use of embargoes and blockades continues.  A particularly dire food crisis has unfolded in recent years in Yemen. In 2014, Shi'a Houthi militias attacked the capital city of Sana’a demanding a change of government. The Houthi, who are supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, dissolved parliament and established a Revolutionary Council to govern the country, but the internationally recognized government fought back with the assistance of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign at the request of the overthrown President, Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, and a proxy war between the two most powerful countries in the region began. In 2015, Saudi Arabia attempted to prevent Iran from providing supplies to the Houthi militias by imposing a blockade on Yemen. This disrupted local economies and supply chains, leaving many without food (Kurdi et. al, 2023). As a result, undernourishment is prevalent in the country, particularly among Yemeni children. To date more than 100,000 people have died of hunger and disease. Attempts to end the fighting have been complicated by U.S. and Saudi anti-terror actions against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and by ongoing regional competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Figure 8.2.4: "Houthis protest against airstrikes" by Henry Ridgwell (VOA) is in the Public Domain

The ongoing crisis in Yemen has been exacerbated by another conflict in which food is being leveraged as a weapon. The war has disrupted local agriculture, leaving the Yemeni people increasingly dependent on grain imports from food exporting countries, most notably Russia, the United States, Australia, and Ukraine (Kurdi, 2023). When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, the entire world food market was destabilized. As discussed in Chapter 7, Ukraine is a major wheat producer and their ability to grow and safely transport grain abroad was a cause for widespread global concern. When the conflict began, the United Nations issued a warning that the conflict could create an “unprecedented wave” of hunger around the globe by reducing the the supply of food, leading to increased prices. The United Nations worked closely with Turkey, which like Ukraine and Russia is located on the Black Sea, to negotiate a July 2022 deal that allowed Ukraine to resume exports (United Nations, 2022). Unfortunately Russia withdrew from the deal in July 2023 following an attack on their Black Sea naval fleet. The impact of this conflict between neighbors on progress towards the goal of ending malnutrition and food insecurity by 2030 has been significant. In its 2023 report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, the FAO described the impact that the conflict has has on progress toward SDG #2, estimating that 23 million more people would be chronically undernourished as a result of the Ukraine conflict alone (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2023). Staying in the region, in 2024, there has been widespread global concern that food insecurity is being leveraged by the Israeli Defense Forces against the residents of the Gaza territory. At the request of South Africa, the International Court of Justice considered the conduct of the Hamas war by Israel's government, and while it declined to identify wrongdoing, it advised the Israeli government of its obligation to ensure "access to adequate food and water" (ICJ, January 26,2024).  

Eighty years after the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which was established with the mission of “enough food for the health of all people”, there continue to be world leaders who would use starvation as a weapon. There remains a conflict between those who would use withholding food as a means to power and those who believe in a “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…” as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Due to these politics, there remains hunger and periodic famine.