Action Against Hunger UK today launched its Conflict Café in conjunction with The Cinnamon Club in Westminster. A range of guests including Jimi Famurewa, London Evening Standard’s restaurant critic; Antony Amordoux from Great British Bake Off; and a range of MPs and FCDO staff joined for breakfast with a difference to support Action Against Hunger’s campaign to break the cycle between conflict and hunger.
Upon arrival, guests were greeted by a room full of empty plates, with cutlery made of bullets from countries where conflict is the biggest driver of hunger. According to Action Against Hunger’s new report ‘No Matter Who’s Fighting, Hunger Always Wins’ which has been released today, conflict and violence threaten food security for 85% of 258 million people in 58 countries. This coincides with the fifth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2417, which recognises the deadly link between conflict and hunger. Despite this, conflict-related hunger is still on the rise.
The range of dishes that were “off menu” included a fantastic summer salad; although the ingredients for this were unable to make the journey to The Cinnamon Club due to suppliers not being able to access their fields and make deliveries as local militia groups had seized fields and planted mines there.
Similarly, the ingredients for homemade lentil soup and okra were impacted by a market bombing. The result: low supplies and prices shooting up.
The cracked wheat taboulleh also failed to make it from farm to plate due to skyrocketing prices caused by port blockades.
Finally, locally made sorbets were planned for dessert, but water towers had been destroyed by shelling, preventing their production.
These are the realities that communities are facing around the world, including in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen – all countries facing protracted conflict or insecurity, with 376,400 people experiencing famine-like conditions in these parts of the globe in 2022.
“Conflict remains the leading cause of acute hunger worldwide and continues to rise,” said Kate Munro, Head of Advocacy for Action Against Hunger UK. “In many conflicts, siege tactics are increasingly depriving people of the basic means of survival including humanitarian support, and civilians are becoming the targets of violent attacks, including the deliberate burning of crops, bombing of markets and water infrastructure, and mining of agricultural land.”
The report details the ways acts of violence drive hunger and offers recommendations for how parties to conflict and UN member states can reduce conflict-driven hunger and invest in peacebuilding to prevent food insecurity.
“If we hope to break the cycle of conflict and hunger, world leaders must commit to Resolution 2417 to tackle conflict-driven hunger; this condemns using starvation as a weapon of war and unlawfully denying humanitarian access to civilians in need of assistance,” said Munro. “Our fight against hunger is also a fight for peace. Of the 45 million people globally who are on the brink of famine, around 70% of them have been driven there by conflict. We cannot achieve a sustainable peace when millions face the injustice of starvation.”
Tomorrow, on May 25, Action Against Hunger and its partners are convening a high-level side event at UN Headquarters in New York to take stock of the impact and implementation of Security Council Resolution 2417 Representatives from local civil society organizations, communities, and humanitarian agencies will share how conflict-driven hunger impacts civilians in the contexts where they live and work. The event will be livestreamed at UN Web TV.