The complexities of food systems and of conflict and peace-building environments present many difficulties. It is hard for individual organizations and institutions working in the fields of food security and peace building to take full account of the diversity of actors, the multiplicity of levels and processes, and the effects of feedback loops. The scale of the task, however, does not constitute a reason not to try. At a modest level of ambition, the challenge is to ensure that food assistance is delivered in a way that is sensitive to the risk of conflict. More ambitiously, in working to achieve the linked goals of sustainable food security and sustainable peace, the challenge is not simply to avoid doing harm but to do good. This work calls for integrating a peace-building lens into the effort to create resilient food systems and a food security lens into peace building. To move along that road, we see four priorities.
Priority 1: Adopt a flexible and agile approach
Understanding local context is crucial. How peace is understood can vary dramatically along ethnic, sectarian, regional, or political lines, where perceptions of risks and grievances may differ (Kanbur, Rajaram, and Varshney 2010; McKeown, Cavdar, and Taylor 2019). Using a definition of peace from one group can create grievances with another. Challenges in building peace also evolve over time, and new concerns are identified.
Concurrently, new challenges to the community arise—an extreme weather event, an economic downturn, violent conflict in a neighboring area, a pandemic—and responses to them may be decisive for sustaining or undermining the prospects for peace. Likewise, food systems are highly contextual, face evolving challenges in achieving security, and must thus be supported with flexibility and responsiveness.
Lastly, both food systems and peace are generated by the intersection of different processes and dynamics and are challenged by a cluster of different risk factors. Thus, action to support peace building as part of food security interventions must be flexible, agile, and able to adapt to changing circumstances and concerns.
Priority 2: Work through partnerships
Although understanding the local context is crucial, it is not enough. It is also important to know what has worked in other contexts, what has not worked, and what has caused problems. This is where partnerships come in. The insights of the people, groups, and organizations who truly know the locality must be brought together with the knowledge generated through research and action in a range of different contexts. National governments and international organizations, whether NGOs or UN agencies, cannot be successful without local partners, and local partners are likewise unlikely to be successful on their own. No single person or organization can know or do it all—the answer is to work together.
It matters, though, how partnerships are designed. All too often, national governments and international agencies conduct their own strategic planning and bring in local groups only as implementing partners. To be more effective, partnerships must involve local partners at the idea stage of strategies and projects, as well as during implementation and monitoring.
Priority 3: Pursue integrative ways of working
If peace is a precondition for food security, while food security is a precondition for peace, and resilience in the face of climate change strengthens both, it makes sense to find ways to work on all three issues at once. Working in partnership makes this easier. One way to do this in a conflict-affected country is to institutionalize cooperation in the form of food-and-peace hubs. This proposal for hubs, which emerged in the buildup to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, would draw in those organizations—from communities, from provincial and national governments, and from international actors - that are working to tackle food insecurity and build peace. The aim is to convene them all, enable access to resources, and encourage and incentivize cooperation. This approach would connect not only different actors but also different issues and problems in fruitful ways.
Many issues remain to be worked out to make this concept viable. Connecting the different actors and stakeholders—a key part of the concept—will work only if there is enough mutual respect and commonality of purpose. Forward movement on peace and food security will depend on what the World Bank’s seminal 2011 report Conflict, Security, and Development referred to as “inclusive-enough coalitions” (World Bank 2011).
However, it is not easy to assess whether coalitions and partnerships are inclusive enough in the abstract. It takes the test of experience: we will know they are adequately constituted if they work. Bringing actors together in food-and-peace hubs does not guarantee the consolidation of peace and sustainable food security. The hubs are only a mechanism for achieving what is fundamental— partnerships of equals involving everyone who needs to be involved.
Priority 4: Break down funding siloes
This essay’s emphasis on intersecting risks is increasingly widely accepted. No international conference on these issues is complete without several ministers and senior officials saying that we must all break out of—or break down—the siloes in our thinking and in our actions between different but evidently related issues. The fact that this exhortation is a cliché does not make it untrue or uninteresting. Such statements are obvious but generate no action. Why not? A large part of the answer is because financing is still siloed. Governments, aid agencies, and donors that claim to want an integrative approach must reexamine how they allocate funding and try new, more integrated funding models that direct funding precisely toward the points of intersection. To do so, they need a mechanism that is able also to act on those points of intersection—such as the food-and-peace hubs.