Rewind and Reconnoiter: Elevating Hunger as a National Security Priority with Kelly McFarland

Welcome to Rewind & Reconnoiter. Each week, we’ll ask one of our authors to look back at an article they’ve written for War on the Rocks in light of a current news event. Did their argument hold up? Read more below to find out.

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In 2021, Kelly McFarland co-authored “To Tackle Instability and Conflict, It’s Time to Elevate Hunger as a National Security Priority,” in which he argued that, “conflict and food are intricately related” and that, “[t]he Biden administration and future U.S. administrations will have to deal with food security and hunger as a national security issue whether they want to or not.” Three years on, with questions of food security central to the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, we asked him to look back on his article and recommendations.

Read more below.

Photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust

In your article “To Tackle Instability and Conflict, It’s Time to Elevate Hunger as a National Security Priority,” written in 2021, you argued that the United States should greater emphasis on food supply chain resilience and treat food security as a national security issue. Over the past three years, how has the international food security situation changed, and how has the United States adapted policy to tackle food security challenges? 

Unfortunately, the food security situation has deteriorated since late 2021. In particular, ongoing and more recent conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and wars in Sudan and Gaza, have increased food insecurity for those in the conflict zones, as well as those farther afield. Global hunger remains well above pre-pandemic levels, and with each passing year, the goal of eliminating hunger by 2030 slips further out of reach. In concentrated hotspots, especially central and west Africa, food insecurity is correlated with recent attempted and successful coups including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Niger, all of which are experiencing acute food stress. Bad governance, civil conflict, and food insecurity are likely to form a mutually reinforcing cycle as military regimes solidify across the region.

In some ways, the U.S. government under the Biden administration has made strides toward broader global food security. Unlike its predecessors, the 2022 National Security Strategy had an entire section dedicated to food security, which is a major step in the right direction. The U.S. Agency for International Development has also since published its Global Food Security Strategy for 2022–2026, which integrates food security with conflict mitigation and climate goals. It remains to be seen whether this will make a large dent in the problem at this early stage. But the administration is — at least — prioritizing the issue.

How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent threats toward ships carrying grain out of the Black Sea negatively impacted international food security? 

It is impossible to overstate Ukraine’s importance to global food security. The sixth largest grain exporter in the world — mostly to lower and middle-income countries — Ukraine’s status as a breadbasket for Africa, in particular, has been hit hard by the war; Ukrainian grain exports to Africa fell by around two-thirds in the season following the war’s start. Grain exports were hit again when Russia pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative last July, with commercial ships wary of entering the Black Sea even as Russia fails to demonstrate command of the waters. This has massively increased the cost of Ukrainian grain — land routes out of Ukraine are more costly for exports — and created a dependency on Russian grain in Africa. This benefits Russian-friendly regimes in Africa, which contributes to bad governance, which in turn will damage Africa’s development toward self-sustaining agriculture. We only analyzed grain exports here — Ukraine exports vast quantities of various staple foods. The situation is dire.

What needs to change to better provide food security in areas facing high-intensity conflict or extreme instability, such as Gaza and Haiti? 

We argued, in part, that countries, regional bodies, and the international community need to diversify their food supply chains. Another key tool to help ensure food security would be to diversify the types and varieties of foods we eat, with a focus on local production of locally indigenous foods.

That being said, conflict makes food security all the more difficult, especially in areas like Gaza and Haiti that either produce almost nothing on their own and are completely dependent upon outside donors and open borders, or produce some food but have experienced a complete breakdown in infrastructure due to violence, making it more difficult to get food where it needs to go. And if donors do not have faith in a state’s ability to use aid as intended — instead of funneling it to military purposes, for example — difficulties multiply further. Only outside pressure on these actors can ameliorate the situation faced by Haitians and Palestinians. Pressure on Egypt and Israel, too, will be needed to abate the desperate situation in Gaza.

Reports from intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations regularly highlight the negative impact of climate change on food security. Over the past three years, how has climate change affected food security, and has climate change been a driver for any food security–related conflict? 

The frequency and intensity of drought conditions have continued to increase, with this year’s El Niño weather pattern being particularly deadly. The two greatest regions of concern — Latin America and southern Africa — have seen staple crop yields fall far below their expected outputs. South African maize yield was 17 percent below expected levels, and Uruguay saw a 60 percent reduction in aggregate agricultural output, to name two examples. It might be easy to write this off as a one-year problem, but any food shortages that push countries over the brink — into coups or civil wars or that cause farmers to abandon their land and emigrate — create effects that last indefinitely. We cannot say for sure that food shortages caused any recent African coups, for example, but it is safe to say that food scarcity exacerbates civil conflict, especially when shortages cross into famine, as they have in Sudan.

What do you think the future holds for international food security and for U.S. food security policy? 

Unfortunately, I think our downward trend continues for at least the near term. As the two and a half years since we published our article have shown, climate change and conflict are not abating. Food security has received more attention and is being understood more through the prism of national security, but we have a long way to go to develop a new global food system, secure supply chains, and create a world where policymakers view food security as a tool for peace.

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Kelly M. McFarland, Ph.D., is the director of programs and research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Prior to Georgetown, he served in the U.S. Department of State as an intelligence analyst. Follow him on Twitter @mcfarlandkellym.

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