Hunger and conflict

Conflicts(2) do not necessarily have to be violent, or negative: they are often normal elements within social relations and they help to maintain, develop or change entities which are at the very heart of our society(3). Yet we shall be specifically focusing on armed conflicts, i.e. those in which the community is unable to manage and confront their conflicting interests in a creative manner, whereby the situation degenerates into a cycle of physical violence(4). The dynamics of conflict may therefore mean that a disagreement between various parties turns into a war, which may be a low-intensity war, as the majority tend to be, but which may take on greater dimensions and become a high-intensity conflict whenever it involves more than 1000 victims per year.On a different note, hunger is the most extreme and radical manifestation of poverty. Reducing by half the number of hungry people in the world has been earmarked as a priority within the UN�s Millennium Goals (MDGs). Widespread hunger is marginalised from government agendas when compared to the media attention that famines tend to receive. Yet the overall impact, both economically and in terms of lives, is far greater in the case of widespread hunger than that of famines. Studies and research centred on the links between war and hunger have been conducted on the premise that hunger is a consequence of conflict. Through this paper, we aim to provide a more in-depth analysis in order to identify hunger as also being both a cause and instrument of conflict