The paramount importance of the right to food has been long recognised, being enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), but also in theories of just war dating back to the first Islamic Caliph (7^th century).[1] In recent years, the topic has gained increasing traction on the back of the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger), increasing attention to climate driven food insecurity,[2] but especially following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Concepts such as the following excerpt from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Committee on Democracy and Security are framing the Western policy and media debate: ‘The world is currently in the grip of an unprecedented food security crisis.… [C]onflict continues to act as the main driver of food insecurity, despite the recognition and protection that the right to food enjoys under international law. Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine has fuelled an alarming and rapid worsening of the already dire global food insecurity situation. The Kremlin’s reckless and brutal actions have contributed to pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.’[3] From an African perspective, the obvious question arises as to why global food production is strongly centralised, rather than being diversified to mitigate supply risks.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is credited with pushing global food prices to unprecedented highs by constraining Ukrainian exports on international wheat markets.[4] With food (and fertiliser) import costs rising an estimated 9 billion USD for countries already facing food insecurity,[5] the human cost is vast. Hunger in the world is at historically high levels, with an estimated 345 million people facing high levels of food insecurity in 2023. Conflict is cited as the main driver, as some 70 percent of the world’s hungry live in areas affected by violent conflict.[6] Low income countries, especially those located in Africa, appear to be most affected.[7] Recognising the impact of climate change, conflict and Covid and spurned on by the salience of the war in Ukraine, numerous governments have renewed their food security programming and increased contributions to crisis responses. Most visibly, this has led to substantial efforts to reopen wheat export routes from Ukraine under the recently collapsed Black Sea Grain Initiative.[8] Yet, food insecurity is expected to remain high.[9]

The focus on the impact of the war in Ukraine, however, risks obscuring the fact that the high prices of food staples and the rising food insecurity depend on broader political economy dynamics that are more complex than supply shortages or rising demand. As observers have noted, the sudden price spikes following the beginning of the war are not in line with market fundamentals.[10] Prices are significantly exceeding those expected from a market analysis taking into account reduced supply. Rather than an immediate hunger crisis following an unpredictable sudden rise in food prices, a longer term perspective shows the end of decades of low and stable food prices, giving way to substantially increasing price volatility.[11] Similarly, existing research on famine reminds us that although a range of structural factors can contribute to rising hunger,[12] rising mortality due to hunger is a longer term process reflecting the affected group’s structural marginalisation.[13] In many cases, while the reduced availability of food may occur incidentally, the lack of action to redress the situation is a factor of political decision making, while vulnerability is often a preexisting condition.[14] This relates both to global food markets and to domestic production and distribution.

1.1 Research objective and approach

This report seeks to grapple with the changing political economy of food security in fragile settings. Rather than looking into technical approaches to increase food production in the face of climate change, it investigates political economy dynamics of both international and domestic food markets, showing how these dynamics affect food security in fragile settings. By focusing on fragility, the report seeks to go beyond the vast literature focusing on the interplay between food security and conflict. Rather, it explores the broader set of factors that influence food security outcomes (e.g., exclusionary governance, elite capture, socioeconomic inequalities, etc.), even in the absence of active conflict. In doing so, the report largely focuses on wheat value chains. This commodity was selected due to its substantial presence in diets across the globe and its significance to food security, which is also derived from its ease of storage and mobility to cover shortages. Besides its importance to consumers, wheat also has a high political salience and a long history of trade politics through well-developed international markets. In other words, the current dynamics allocating wheat across the globe can hardly be considered a consequence of happenstance, given the extensive political and economic capital employed to influence these dynamics.

This report concludes that food security focused interventions should move beyond technical objectives and work politically. The significant efforts towards reducing food insecurity have catalysed into a concerted effort to improve the supply of food aid. Yet the commercial supply of wheats through international trade and domestic production likely outstrips the impact that can be achieved through food aid or development aid aimed at improving farm yields in many FCAS by a wide margin. As such, this report does not explore the successes and failures of aid markets, but instead explores the functioning of international food markets and their (historical) effects in FCAS (chapter 2) and discusses the political economy of domestic production in FCAS (chapter 3). The conceptual work thus set out is subsequently contextualised through a case study of Ethiopia (chapter 4).[16] This case has been selected as an exemplar of a country noted for its highly fertile land making domestic production viable, yet still being food insecure. Finally, the report concludes and presents recommendations for policy and programming (chapter 5), drawing from the analysis in the preceding chapters.