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NEW YORK —Extreme weather conditions are often blamed for climate change. Scientists point the finger at warming, not war, when it comes down to the new wave in Africa’s famine.
Some African nations have experienced dramatic changes since 2014, despite years of progress in eliminating hunger. Currently, some 700 million people — nearly nine percent of the world’s population — go to bed hungry, according to the United Nations (UN). Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most affected regions.
Many people quickly assume that the region’s brutal droughts are stoked by climate change. The latest study shows that the current crisis is not due to climate change but long-standing wars. The findings Studies show that droughts are often a cause of severe droughts. Food insecurityTheir contribution to Africa’s hunger crisis has remained constant or even declined in recent years.
Instead, millions have been displaced by long-term, widespread violence. The crisis has resulted in an increase of food prices and blocked external food aid, leading to the reversal.
“Colloquially, people would say it’s climate-induced droughts and floods, because that’s what people tend to say, but academics have not compared the importance of drought to violence in triggering food crises in a holistic way,” says study leader Dr. Weston Anderson, of Columbia University, in a Statement.
The research team used 2009-2018 figures from Famine Early Warning System to reach their conclusions. This network provides information for governments and aid agencies about looming or ongoing food crisis in dozens of countries. The system shows that there has been an increase in the number of people who need emergency food aid in monitored nations, from 48 million in 2015, to 113 million in 2020.
The system is not designed to quantify the different factors behind the emergencies, but Dr Anderson and his colleagues were able to tease these out for 14 of Africa’s most food-insecure countries. The nations extend from Mali, Mauritania, and Nigeria in west to Sudan, Chad, and other nations to Ethiopia and Kenya in east. The study also included Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and other countries further south.
The researchers discovered that droughts are a frequent and well-documented cause of food crises in large areas. The overall effects of drought did decrease during the study period, and they even decreased in some areas. When drought hit, Farmers oftenWithin a year, the plants bounced back. Animal herders required twice the time to recover because of the extreme conditions in their area. People took longer to rebuild their livestock herds.
Among the usual ups, downs RainfallAccording to the findings, violence is responsible for the rise in hunger. Long-term conflicts can be anything from repeated terrorist attacks to combat between armies have caused shortages lasting year after year, – with no end in sight, say the researchers.
North East Nigeria has been one of the hardest hit areas. The Boko Haram guerrilla arm has waged a constant hit-and run campaign against the government, as well as a large portion of the population, for the past ten years. A multi-sided civil war has been raging in South Sudan since 2013.
Both Somalia and Sudan have seen an increase in hunger due to war, but droughts have been more predominant in those countries. The majority of cases, pastoralists are the most affected. Most victims of violenceThey are more likely than others to live in violent areas, just like they are with drought.
Now, Ethiopia is seeing hunger increases again, mainly due to below-average rainfall, but the civil war that erupted in the country’s Tigray region in 2022 has greatly added to the misery. Although the study didn’t examine this new conflict in Ethiopia, a UN report recently stated that more than five millions people in the region desperately need food aid. Many are already suffering from famine.
Researchers also looked into another possible cause of hunger Locusts. These pests may affect food security over a period of time by causing damage to forage and crops. However, they are not large enough to account the increase in hunger in the study period.
The team looked into whether droughts could cause violence flare-ups and more hunger. Co-author Richard Seager, a climatologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, connected the dots in this regard in a widely cited 2015 studyArguments that the main spark in the ongoing civil war in Syria was a multi-year drought which drove many people from their land into cities.
“We found no systematic relation between drought and either frequency of conflict or deaths related to conflict. Conflict may be affected Environmental stress in some cases, but the relationship across Africa in recent decades is complex and context-specific,” adds Seager.
“The overall message is that if we’re going to predict and handle food crises, we need to be paying attention to conflicts, which can be really complicated – not just the more easily identified things like drought. Droughts can have a clear starting and ending. But there are other factors. All kinds of violence. And a lot of the time, there is no clear start or end to it,” says Dr. Anderson.
These findings are published in The Journal Nature Food.
Stephen Beech, South West News Service writer, contributed to this report.
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