For more than two centuries, proponents and critics of an open global economy have debated whether free flows of goods, services, and capital make the world more or less peaceful. One view is that as nations increase their commercial, financial, communication, and cultural ties, they are less likely to go to war. The opposing view holds that world economic liberalization worsens inequality within and between nations, with strife and violence the inevitable result.
Globalization has replaced the Cold War as the central organizing principle of international relations. Whether it is likely to make the world more or less peaceful, therefore, has enormous implications for food security. Globalization is not just the intensified integration of global markets and information exchange, but also the expansion of international norms and institutions that can dampen or heighten conflict-hunger dynamics.
In late 2000, armed conflicts worldwide left 24 million people in 28 developing and transition countries and territories in need of food and other humanitarian assistance (see box). Nearly 80 percent of these people were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, globally, women and children make up 70–80 percent of the refugees and internally displaced people uprooted by violence.
War’s impact on food security is profound. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 1990–97, conflict-induced losses of agricultural output in Africa totaled US $22 billion, a sum equivalent to a third of the aid received by the conflict countries and far in excess of foreign direct investment flows (see our Food from Peace, 2020 Discussion Paper No. 24 and Brief No. 50 for more detail on the losses to food production attributable to conflict). Compounding the effects, in almost all the affected countries, the majority of the workforce depends on agriculture for its livelihood.
Analysts pointing to the pacifying effects of globalization note that both the number and intensity of conflicts between nation-states declined after the Cold War. But internal conflicts proliferated in the early 1990s, with the total number of conflicts in 1999 (37) well above the figure for 1965–70. The distinction between internal and interstate warfare has also blurred. Twenty-two years of civil war in Afghanistan have featured significant U.S., Pakistani, Soviet, Tajik, and Uzbek intervention. Internal conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) is “Africa’s World War,” with the intervention of Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
Clearly the integration of global markets, combined with developments in information and communication technologies and transportation, could potentially deter conflict. At a minimum, the capacity to monitor the early warning signs of famine and to move humanitarian aid quickly has greatly improved. Yet this development alone cannot ensure peace without the political will to prevent and resolve conflicts. Furthermore, globalization is not just about markets or flows of labor and capital. Global institutions that uphold consensual humanitarian norms, such as the convention banning land mines, the new International Criminal Court, and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights framework on the right to food play an active but as yet insufficient role in reducing the destructive forces that produce food insecurity.
Since 1991, military-humanitarian interventions authorized by the United Nations in Iraqi Kurdistan, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia have demonstrated the international community’s willingness to intervene to uphold the right to food and emergency aid, even over the objections of a sovereign government when that government is implicated in creating the crisis. However, such intervention remains ad hoc. The international community has stood aside in other food wars in Rwanda, the Congo, and East Timor.
Some aspects of globalization clearly facilitate conflict. The integration of global markets includes a $40 billion arms market, which makes it easier for Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan to sell petroleum, minerals, or gum Arabic to finance weapon purchases and intensify civil wars. The toll in the Congo alone includes three million deaths in three years, 6.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and over a million displaced people. In 1995–99, legal arms suppliers sold Africa $2.5 billion worth of weapons, with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – providing 60 percent. In Colombia, Myanmar, and Afghanistan, narcotics production for the world market, armed violence, and food insecurity are tightly linked.
Information and communication technologies work in both Mexico’s Zapatista Liberation Front garnered worldwide attention and aid for the plight of the country’s indigenous people via the Internet, while Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front coordinates military operations, diamond sales, and arms purchases via satellite phone from bases in the country’s hinterland.
Consensus continues to elude scholars and policy analysts as to whether economic ties foster peace. One school of thought asserts that as a web of economic relationships entangles nations, the costs of going to war become prohibitive. Some empirical studies support this proposition. Also, there are well-known cases where weak economic ties prevail between countries experiencing hostilities. India and Pakistan, for example, share one of the world’s tensest borders but engage in very little trade with one another.
Other analysts insist that the peace-through-trade notion must be seriously qualified. They argue that trade reduces conflict incentives only when partners enjoy relatively symmetric economic and military relations. For example, although Taiwan and China have extensive trade links, and Taiwan has invested tens of billions of dollars in China, the threat of cross-Strait violence remains considerable. The economic relationship is unmistakably dominated by Taiwan, whereas China is pressing to establish military superiority.
Research to date has focused on globalization’s effects in mitigating interstate conflict. Few studies examine the relationship between globalization and civil war, which is much more salient for today’s policymakers. One well-known study, funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, found a strong relationship between openness to the global economy and reduced risk of civil war. This report concluded that trade promotion policies could help prevent conflicts.
Other research qualifies this conclusion, pointing out that trade’s effects in reducing the likelihood of civil war depend on internal distribution, as well as the nature of the relationship between trade and investment partner nations. High levels of inequality associated with conflict. And trade may exacerbate existing inequalitydepending on how it is carried out. A World Bank study found that low per capita income, negative economic growth, and high dependence on primary commodity exports are a recipe for civil war.
Analyses of the causes of the 1994 Rwandan genocide provide evidence on this point. The country relied heavily on coffee exports for hard currency and government revenues. The collapse of world prices in the early 1990s led to high unemployment, reduced farm incomes, reduced social spending, and a citizenry receptive to government incitement of ethnic and political violence.
Violence in developing countries stems from a constellation of factors. Ethnic rivalries and environmental scarcities are among them, as are structural factors in which globalization may be implicated. Groups may compete, for example, over resources such as development aid and commodities in demand on world markets. Often pressed into service by national leaders seeking control over natural and human resources, individual combatants still fight to maintain human dignity and a decent standard of living. Policies aimed at reducing conflict should encourage cooperation among rival groups and reduce real and perceived scarcities. The ways aid is delivered in conflict-prone areas are also crucial. Development assistance, including agricultural investment, can deter conflict where it is integrated in the construction of social contexts that promote equity.
Global investors, whether private or public (aid donors), need to emphasize conflict prevention as part of the development agenda if they are to expect positive returns. Developing countries need peace to achieve more food-secure outlooks and to reap potential benefits of globalization.
A number of recent developments may advance globalization’s peaceful potential:
- debt relief, which will free resources for investment in human security,
- efforts through the U.N. system to improve data collection on food insecurity among vulnerable groups, in order to facilitate improved international response to famine and chronic undernutrition, and
- emergence of broad civil society coalitions that seek, inter alia, to refocus globalization in ways that promote peace and equity.
Further, donors must allocate humanitarian aid where it is needed most, which may mean more aid to Africa and less to the former Yugoslavia. Global trade and investment agreements must take into account their potential to fuel conflict. Improved codes of conduct and control regimes governing trade in conventional weapons are essential, as are equitable international frameworks to reduce the flows of diamonds, drugs, and fossil fuels that generate resources for war.
More research is needed to bolster policies that foster peace. In particular, work should focus on the relationship between food insecurity and conflict and on the circumstances under which globalization contributes to peace.
Future connections among globalization, food insecurity, and conflict are likely to play out at multiple social and political. Foresight and planning, based in part on hindsight and lessons from history, can help to make the world more peaceful and secure. Careful monitoring is needed of the likely and actual local food security impacts of international trade and aid, both within and beyond the food economy.
Ellen Messer (Ellen.Messer@Tufts.edu) is at the Famine Center at Tufts University, and Marc J. Cohen (m.cohen@cgiar.org) is special assistant to the director general at IFPRI.