Il Sahel it is one of the least livable regions in the world, the combination of high political instability and increasingly unfavorable environmental conditions make the lives of local populations extremely precarious.
In recent years, West-Central Africa has become the global epicenter of jihadist terrorism. Weak and powerless states have created fertile ground for violent uprisings in Chad, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The latter three countries have recently been victims of coups and are currently governed by juntas of their respective national armies. These new authoritarian regimes found the support of the Wagner PMC, Moscow’s armed wing in the region, while the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) countries raised the possibility of a war to bring back the government civilian in office in Niamey, capital of Niger, with the regimes of Bamako and Ouagadougou having already declared their military support for Niger’s “sister” junta.
Against the backdrop of the possibility of a broader international conflict and various human rights violations by armed groups, authoritarian regimes and Russian mercenaries, a harsh food crisis has been harassing local populations for almost a decade and contributing to exacerbating the current political context.
The spiral of violence in the Sahel
According to data from the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, approximately 12.7 million people suffer from food insecurity, 600 thousand are severely malnourished and almost 18 million people need assistance humanitarian, of which 2.5 million are displaced by armed conflicts (Plan International).
25% of Burkinabè people need humanitarian assistance, as do around 9 million Malians and 4.2 million Nigerians. Burkina Faso is the state most affected by the humanitarian crisis, there are approximately 1.8 million internally displaced people compared to a population of 22 million and armed groups in the north of the country are blocking access to food for 1.3 million people.
Hunger is now used as a real weapon of war by the insurgents, who frequently target civilians, destroying homes, plundering crops, stealing livestock and work tools from farmers and breeders, who constitute the majority of the population.
These acts of violence mean that the overall availability of food is increasingly scarce and it is no longer possible to produce it in sufficient quantities to feed the population. Thus the local communities that then welcome the displaced are forced to share their already scarce resources with a greater number of people and relying on fewer production capacities.
The effects of the food crisis are particularly serious on women and children. For the latter, food scarcity causes rickets and increases infant mortality, furthermore many children are forced to leave school to find a job and contribute to the support of their family. Young men are easy prey for recruitment by armed groups in areas where the economic situation is most desperate and where the central government is unable to provide the necessary assistance.
Girls are at a higher risk of dropping out of school than boys, sometimes their families, rather than making them work, organize arranged marriages to have one less mouth to feed. Women of all ages, especially if they do not have a school education, are highly exposed to the risk of sexual exploitation practices and domestic violence, sadly common situations due to the very harsh living conditions. Furthermore, women and girls are often forced to sacrifice their food rations in favor of other family members, ending up being the last to feed themselves and with less food.
Global warming and desertification
It is therefore clear that violence is a concomitant and sometimes even causal element of the food crisis, both phenomena feed each other. But there is another element that accelerates the worsening of the situation in the central Sahel: global warming. Although the global average temperature is gradually increasing in every region of the planet, compared to the global average temperatures are increasing 1.5 times faster in the Sahel, where the effects would already be the most catastrophic even with an increase in line with the rest of the world. The Sahel region borders to the north with the largest desert in the world, the Sahara, which is continuously expanding due to climate change. This process of desertification decreases the extension of arable land and even the latter is increasingly difficult to make fruitful due to the lack of rain. However, catastrophic floods that contribute to the destruction of crops remain common in the Sahel.
Events of this type push populations to migrate to less affected areas, creating competition between local farmers and breeders and those fleeing natural disasters; competition that often leads to real violence, given the inestimable value that increasingly scarce fertile lands have for groups of people practically dependent on subsistence agriculture.
So in addition to being closely related to the food crisis, global warming is also partially the cause of conflicts in the Sahel. Given the catastrophic situation, the price of food resources such as wheat is particularly prohibitive and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation in vulnerable countries has only worsened. African countries are in fact extremely dependent on Ukrainian and Russian wheat. According to the WFP: 30% of the wheat consumed in Africa comes from Ukraine and Russia, Mali for example depends on Moscow for more than 50% of its internal needs. Rising transport costs and bottlenecks in supply chains due to the European conflict are another external element that only reinforces the vicious cycle between violence and food insecurity in the central Sahel.
The tragic combination of these factors paints a very dark picture for the Burkinabe, Malian and Nigerian populations. To lift the region from the abyss, a titanic effort will be necessary on the part of governments, international organizations and NGOs.
This article, edited by Iacopo Andreoni, was written in collaboration with Orizzonti Politici e Affari Internazionali, the IAI magazine, as part of the project on humanitarian crises in the world.
Photo at copertina EPA/Daniel Irungu