Attachments
How Conflict Actions Contribute to Food Insecurity
This report forms part of a series exploring conflict events that directly undermine food security, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of the connections between conflict and hunger. It highlights how attacks on crops and lands, farmers and agricultural workers, food supply chains, markets, and key infrastructure, and threats affecting humanitarian agencies directly contribute to food insecurity. The presented data highlights the need for further discussion of how such conflict-event data can be used by the humanitarian community to support programming that prevents hunger. The report is based on the Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict (FIVC)-Syria dataset, a unique event dataset of conflict events that affect food insecurity in Syria that was compiled from open sources and partner contributions. It covers the period from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2022. The data is accessible on HDX.
Introduction
Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the number of civilians experiencing food insecurity in the country has grown substantially. Syria is among the six countries with the lowest levels of food security worldwide. At the end of 2022, 12 million people were food insecure and 2.5 million were severely food insecure. Individuals in these categories comprised more than half of the entire Syrian population. The present report highlights a range of violent-conflict-related events that have contributed to the rise in food insecurity in Syria since 2017.
The key drivers of food insecurity in Syria have been both human and climate change induced. Syria suffered a significant drought between 2006 and 2010, while in 2020 and 2021 unprecedented levels of drought and rainfall scarcity were reported. As a result, the percentage of irrigated land in the country has almost halved. The UN estimates that at least 50% of planted crops in Al-Hasakah governorate (Syria’s main wheat-producing region) could die as a result of the drought. Crop yields are further jeopardised by the declining flow of water through the Euphrates river, which supplies irrigated lands with water.
The high dependency on the import of a number of commodities, aggravated by poor agricultural harvest seasons in the country, have left Syria susceptible to high global food prices. The World Food Programme reported that between 2020 and 2022 food prices in the country increased by 532%. As a result, 90% of the Syrian population are currently estimated to live in poverty. The Syrian economy has been further affected by the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has contributed to further driving up food and fuel prices.
In addition to climate complexities, food prices, and the ongoing internal conflict, the various humanitarian crises in Syria worsened in February 2023 as a consequence of the earthquake in north-west Syria and southern-central Turkey. Hostilities in the region of the earthquake have hampered the delivery of aid, which led to accusations that life-threatening aid was being politicised due to the ongoing conflict. Even before the earthquake hit, as of June 2021 only 15% of aid requested by the United Nations (UN) for humanitarian assistance to Syria had been delivered, highlighting the assistance gap that could mitigate food insecurity.
The current report focuses on conflict events that have contributed to Syria’s food insecurity, a condition that exists when “physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food” to meet “dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” is absent.
The connections between conflict and food insecurity are complex. Moreover, detailed information is needed to support the effective implementation of the unanimously adopted UN Security Council Resolution 2417 (2018), which acknowledged the links between violent conflict and food insecurity. However, as two analysts note, there are “fundamental data gaps” in the documentation and disentanglement of these links. Closing these gaps is “essential for producing effective food security” policies. This is especially the case in contexts where multiple compounding crises are occurring simultaneously, as is the case of Syria.
This report aims to help fill these knowledge deficits. It is part of a series of analytical reports focused on conflict and hunger analyses with a specific focus on identifying conflict actions that contribute to food insecurity. Its analysis is based on a dataset of 1,732 individual conflict-related events reported in the period of the 1 January 2017 to the 31 December 2022.