5^th Global Food Security Food Safety and Sustainability

Biography

Biography: Shahriar Kibriya

Abstract

This study establishes the direct linkage between household level food sufficiency and food sharing benevolence with the reduction of micro level low intensity interpersonal conflict using novel data from 1763 households of North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. We investigate two specific questions: i) are food secure households less likely to engage in individual and community level conflict? And ii) is benevolence through food sharing with community members the major channel that food secure households reduce such interpersonal conflict? We argue that showing benevolence through food sharing is the major channel through interpersonal and communal level conflict is avoided by food sufficient families. Using propensity score matching, we find that household food sufficiency decreases conflict with other households by up to 10 percentage points and conflict within the community by 4 percentage points. Furthermore, households that help others with food experience a further reduction of up to 12.4 percentage points in conflict with individual households and 5.3 percentage points in conflict with groups. The findings indicate that benevolence towards others the channel through which food sufficiency reduces household and community level low intensity conflict. Our results hold through a rigorous set of robustness checks including doubly robust estimator, placebo regression, matching quality tests and Rosenbaum bounds for hidden bias. Our attempt addresses several cross cutting themes of the global food security conference including: food security and policy; governance, institutions and trade; and food security and sustainable development goals: synergies, tensions and trade-offs. Additionally, this is one of the first attempts to investigate the relationship between food sufficiency and low intensity interpersonal conflict from an active conflict zone. Furthermore, our quasi-experimental research approach focuses on the policy question of if and how food sufficiency and inter community food benevolence can reduce micro-level conflict.