How Can Agriculture Contribute to Peace?

Agricultural development and food security play a key role in strengthening peace in fragile societies. According to Ambassador George Moose, Acting President and CEO of United States Institute for Peace, “Agriculture has been… the bedrock upon which American democracy and American prosperity have been built.” Additionally, “ the American people have been generous in sharing that bounty with people all around the world,” as the United States’ government’s efforts to tie food security to societal resilience, embodied in the 1954 Food for Peace Act, through which the U.S. has historically provided food assistance across the world.

Moose said that the war in Ukraine’s effect on food prices worldwide demonstrated that global hunger and war are interconnected, and also warned that long-term weather trends are disrupting food availability. He expressed hope that agricultural development would offer solutions, saying that “the development of agriculture has proven to be one of the most powerful tools in building resilience, peace, and prosperity in vulnerable communities across the world.”

Kenneth Quinn, a former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia and former President of the World Food Prize Foundation, discussed efforts to remove mines, upgrade infrastructure, and develop agriculture in Cambodia. Quinn said these efforts played a key role in stabilizing Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge government was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in 1970. “We had eradicated the worst, genocidal, mass murdering terrorist organization of the second half of the 20th century, using the formula of demining, upgrading new roads, new seeds. Peace through agriculture,” he said.

During their rule over Cambodia, attempts by the Khmer Rouge to transform the country into an agrarian socialist republic inspired by Maoist ideals led to a genocide that killed almost a quarter fo Cambodia’s population.

Gloria Steele, Former Acting Administrator for USAID, explained the ties between food security, climate, and conflict. “We’ve seen in places such as Sri Lanka in 2022, when food supply became so scarce that prices went up and there were food riots,” Steele said. “We know today that 40 percent of global land has been degraded, making arable land more scarce and bringing about land conflicts, and this accounts for the long-term civil war in Nigeria, for example, and in many other places.”

Michael Franken, the Co-Lead of the Defense Science Board Study on Climate Change and Global Security, said that if conflict is fire, climate change is fuel, and food security is the spark that can set it ablaze. He said that this had forced the U.S. military to take climate change more seriously. “The military is intent on creating a single entity to talk about climate and weather,” he said. He added that more effort should be made to focus support in regions predicted to suffer extreme weather disasters.

Laura Pavlovic, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator for USAID Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, agreed, saying that climate change is an accelerant to conflict in already fragile countries. “This, overtime, has really degraded the resilience of countries in which USAID is operating,” she said. She added that these mutually compounding challenges were also exacerbating inequality, with women disproportionately bearing the brunt of climate change and economic shocks.

“Climate change had traditionally been seen as a tomorrow problem. Unfortunately… the impacts are becoming increasingly severe and too immediate to ignore.” Pavlociv pointed to the example of South Sudan, where she said that one can “actually see on a map, flooding and the immediate aftermath of natural resource-related conflict, food insecurity, etcetera.”

USAID, Pavlovic said, is working to overlay conflict mapping with climate maps to better understand food insecurity. “Fundamentally, the challenge that food security presents is that it undermines the political stability of countries,” she said, adding that successive cycles of conflict and malnutrition have a pervasive negative impact on development in countries, and that violent extremist organizations leverage climate-induced instability and scarcity as a recruitment opportunity. She also said that displacement caused by climate shocks can destabilize migrants’ regions of origin and host communities.

Steele said that the best way for the U.S. to support local leadership in addressing the nexus of food insecurity, climate change, and conflict is to focus on education and training local emerging leaders to support good governance and oppose corruption. All the experts agreed that the three main requirements for an effective U.S. approach to this complex problem were local ownership, a focus on prevention before the onset of climate disasters, and an all-of-government approach that brings together policymakers from the State Department, the Department of Defense, and USAID.

The experts discussed how agriculture can contribute directly to peace, and how different humanitarian organizations are helping build communities resilient to climate shocks. Matthew Nims, the Director of the Washington Office of the World Food Programme, said that “conflict has become the main driver of food insecurity, in many forms,” with conflicts also lasting longer, becoming more intractable, and peaceful solutions more difficult to find.

Katy Crosby, Senior Director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy at Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian NGO, said that the group increasingly sees food insecurity as driven by systemic factors and compounded by climate change, and that complex problems necessarily require cross-sector solutions. She argued for a combination of pro-poor market policies to increase access to nutritious food and  effective governance of natural resources to make agriculture more sustainable. She also said that empowering women to purchase nutritious food has a multiplier effect, expanding food security to their entire families.

Ann Vaughan, Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security, highlighted the importance of maintaining trust and market access in crisis situations. She said that it was necessary to produce trust within communities to ensure that critical products like food and fertilizers are traded and go where they are needed. 

On a similar note, she spoke to the importance of keeping borders open to trade during food crises, and pointed to significant diplomatic successes in this area. She said that during price spikes caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zambia kept grain flowing into Kenya and helped stabilize the latter country’s grain prices. In turn, Ugandan and Tanzanian maize exports relieved stress caused in Zambia by a particularly intense El Niño. She said that preserving market stability and supporting farmers during food crisis was essential: “Don’t give up on them even during conflict, because just starting from scratch again is very difficult.”

The experts also spoke about innovative measures that different organizations had taken to help communities adapt in the face of environmental disruption. Crosby said that in Latin America, where remittances are a critical source of funding, she had worked with a company providing remittance financial services, sharing climate information so that senders of remittances knew to send money early in anticipation of climate shocks.

Nims said that providing accurate early warning information about weather events is critical, and that technological innovation that produced translation software for local West African dialects helped WFP with aid delivery, and also allowed them to provide farmers with relevant information about upcoming weather conditions.

Integrating social cohesion and psychosocial support in aid programming also helps heal communities in the aftermath of conflict, said Crosby. Using the example of tensions caused by returnees in Iraq who had either joined armed groups like ISIS or been kidnapped by them, she said that intercommunal conversations needed to go hand in hand with discussions of economic needs. Crosby called for “not minimizing the very real trauma that underlies the very real violence that has gone on, and ensuring that we are not burying those with economic support,” and said that economic support and social cohesion work should be balanced.

The diverse roster of development and humanitarian experts spoke at an event hosted by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in early December, titled “Peace Through Agriculture: How Food Security Can Help Post-Conflict Recovery.”

The event ended with a fireside chat between Ambassador Moose and Heidi Kühn, the founder of Roots of peace, a humanitarian organization that works with local communities to remove landmines and turn former minefields into sustainable farmland. Speaking about how Roots of Peace had been able to keep working in Afghanistan even after the Taliban takeover in 2021, she echoed Moose’s initial remarks, saying: “We have to go back to the altruistic spirit of America and think about the children of the Earth that deserve to be fed.”

Kühn closed the conference with an emotional address where she quoted the Book of Isaiah.

“May they beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Keywords: agriculture, peace, conflict, conflict resolution, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, farming, infrastructure, mining