Food abundance and violent conflict
March 20, 2018 5:40 AM   Subscribe

By correlating crop yields and conflict in Africa over the years 1998-2008 using 55km x 55km grid, Ore Koren found that, contrary to previous expectations, conflict is driven by higher yields, on average, and not by scarcity. African Farming talks to Koren, who quotes one of history's deadliest warlords: "Armies march on their stomachs." "I think the key thing to take from this paper is that the root cause of violence over food is not necessarily low or high agricultural production, but rather limited access to food and the lack of social safety nets for those who are at the risk of being food insecure. Limited political and economic development means that many armed groups can or must rely on their own strength to enjoy agricultural resources."
posted by clawsoon (3 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Two thoughts.

1) The instrument is weak (correlation between crop yield and droughts aren't strong enough). F-statistics are the standard for measuring weak instruments (for better or worse), and the main models fall below the standard cutoff of 10. Weak instrument problems are death to an instrumental variable design. There's also about 70,000 observations. Recent research on this front shows that its better to trust the OLS estimates than the 2SLS estimates.

2) The theory is strange--most studies about resource scarcity refer to conflict onset, but this is entirely concerned with conflict intensity (as measured by number of events). The evidence is entirely consistent with a story about how resource scarcity makes conflict more like to start, but in areas where there are abundant resources, conflict occurs. My guess is that (conditional on me believing the results) when there are higher crop yields, both sides compete over the resource, and hence more conflict events.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:13 AM on March 20, 2018


The evidence is entirely consistent with a story about how resource scarcity makes conflict more like to start, but in areas where there are abundant resources, conflict occurs.

This was my thought, too. The authors seem to start out by suggesting that the common thesis (as they state it: "The Malthusian notion that food scarcities increase the likelihood of conflict") somehow runs counter with their own (again, in their words: "areas with more food resources are more valued by different actors, and as a result attract more conflict.") but they seem like two halves of the same food insecurity whole to me.
posted by solotoro at 6:30 AM on March 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


That said, the interview with Koren (at least the pull quote, I haven't gotten that far yet) reads like that was the intent, so maybe I'm just misinterpreting their initial framing.
posted by solotoro at 6:32 AM on March 20, 2018


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