It is out of question that populations in conflict situations bear the brunt of food insecurity vulnerabilities, as their resilience is tremendously weakened. Protracted emergencies particularly render vulnerable populations hopeless, deplete their asset base and, at the lower end, often force them to resort to extreme coping mechanisms. Populations in distressful and protracted emergencies are plunged into extreme poverty and chronic food insecurity, as their resilience gets severely corroded. Instead of involving in developmental and life promoting activities such as investment, entrepreneurship and innovation, they are bogged down to fare for subsistence and survival from their physical insecurity.
The 36th Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) describes protracted crisis as situations in which crises are prolonged and recurrent and that their manifestations, among others, “include disruption of livelihoods and food systems; increasing rates in morbidity and mortality; and increased displacements” [1]. In these situations, large numbers of people or entire communities are displaced and affected by food and malnutrition, thus often require enormous amount of resources and relief interventions.
It is on these grounds that the CFS recently produced the “Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises” (CFS-FFA). The Framework outlines and describes ten principles for informing and guiding policy on food security and nutrition mitigation in settings mired by protracted crises. Of particular relevance to this paper is CFS-FFA Principle 1 headed “Meet humanitarian and development needs and build resilient livelihoods”. It recommends seven policy and interventional areas, among which is the need to “align humanitarian and development approaches using the existing capacities and strategies of households and communities as entry points for policy and actions, particularly in situations of weak governance and state fragility” [1].
Often times populations living or forced to live in protracted food emergency settings can inadvertently become a cause for conflict and the vicious cycle continues. CFS-FFA Principle 8 states: “Address food security and nutrition in a conflict-sensitive manner … to ensure that food security and nutrition related interventions do not inadvertently cause or exacerbate tensions or conflict” [1]. Severe food insecurity causes anxiety, which in turn causes desperation, which in turn causes households to resort to extreme or even unthinkable forms of survival or coping strategies. In situations where firearms are rampant, extreme coping strategies might be in the form of banditry, armed robbery and rustling of cattle—a practice existing amongst pastoralist communities of South Sudan.
The need to shift from concentrating measurement of food insecurity and malnutrition to measuring resilience of populations in situations of distress is fast becoming relevant and urgent, as experience over the last three decades has shown that food insecurity and what causes it keeps escalating. Otherwise, it is like concentration on measuring the magnitude of ill health, while neglecting the factors that make people become resistant to diseases and ill health and, thereby, informing authorities to allocate more resources to the areas that improve those positive influencing factors. Against the dim light of economic, man-made and natural shocks or strains gaining momentum, it is utterly critical to concentrate efforts on measuring resilience, given its intrinsic value of cushioning against future vulnerability. In general, resilience enhancement is more a developmental strategy than the traditional humanitarian relief and rehabilitation. For more arguments along this line, see Barret and Maxwell [2], Barrett and Heisey [3] and Maxwell [4].
However, food aid organisations seem to shy away from determining resilience assessments and enhancement interventions, apparently on three grounds. First, resilience building requires a multi-dimensional and multi-sector approach. Improving resilience is mostly a function of long-term developmental strategies, rather than short-term actions, in order to bear impact. It is, therefore, seen to fall within the domain of long-term state development plans. Secondly, resilience enhancement measures and activities are seen to fall outside the fundamental mandate of humanitarian aid organisations. Third, humanitarian aid organisations are more concerned with addressing and arresting the severe cases of food emergency such as famine, severe malnourishment and deaths (The Johns Hopkins and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2004). This then makes measurement and monitoring of vulnerability more appealing than measuring resilience. Yet, according to Mousseau [5], “food aid undermines local agricultural production”, among several other effects.
As the continent’s population is predominantly dependent on agriculture, it only makes a lot of sense that the sector is enabled to boost social protection and vice versa. For this reason, partners in food security and nutrition, led by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), saw the need to conceptualise how the two sectors, agriculture and social development can be conjoined to benefit each other. The process started with multi-stakeholder consultations from 2013 and still ongoing. One of the outcomes of these stakeholder consultations led to commissioning of a team of researchers comprised of Slater et al. [6], which produced an analytical framework on cohesion between agriculture and social protection. This work builds on an earlier work titled, “Strengthening Coherence in FAO’s Initiatives to Fight Hunger” [7]. The paper states that efforts to address long-term solutions to fight hunger more aggressively are often thwarted by lack of political will, as resources are not made available. The paper proceeds by recommending multi-faceted responses for helping people, majority of whom are in rural settings, break out of hunger and prevent them from being caught in hunger traps. It further recommends support to safety net programmes and a two-tract approach that combines promoting rural and agricultural growth as a measure to protect those who cannot produce food themselves.
Furthermore, within the context of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme [8], the Framework for Africa’s Food Security under its objective “Increased economic opportunities for the vulnerable”, recommends a set of medium and long-term options for improving resilience of the vulnerable. Such durable resilience enhancing developmental options augment and improve on the framework’s other objectives of improved risk management, increased supply of affordable commodities and increased quality of diets among target groups [9]. Indeed, the focus on durable and forward-looking options to build resilience of the vulnerable seems to feature prominently more than ever before in contemporary food security and nutrition frameworks.
As the recommendations and plans for integrating socioeconomic and rural development objectives with humanitarian efforts to mitigate vulnerability and strengthen resilience of vulnerable population are gaining momentum, the need for producing evidence for monitoring the state of resilience of populations in distressful food insecurity situations, equality becomes of interest. Current measures based on periodically conducted household surveys are still centred on determining vulnerability for the purpose of relief and rehabilitation, rather than for boosting resilience and prevent future vulnerabilities and the devastating after-shock effects. In other words, there is need to establish measures for determining the probability of future risk, which resilience-based measures offer.
The purpose of the study is, therefore, to find statistically robust and efficient measures that identify the set of factors that determine and predict the risk to food insecurity. Resilience-based measures seem to provide the answer to this question.
In food security parlance, vulnerability is exposure to risk, shocks and stress. It is characterised by several dimensions of deprivation such as physical weakness, isolation and poverty [10]. For rural populations, vulnerability can come as a result of depletion of such livelihood assets, capitals and/or endowments as harvest failure, death of livestock due to disease or drought and, in the case of fishing and forest dependent communities, displacement. The South Sudan Food Security Monitoring Survey reports sporadic displacement and conflict-related instability caused depletion of harvests, lack of planting selling off of assets and livestock in exchange for food [11].