WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

FOOD AS A WEAPON OF WAR & CONFLICT - STARVATION & HUNGER OF WOMEN & CHILDREN VICTIMS - SYRIA +

UN Wire + http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/21/thousands-starving-in-outskirts-of-damascus-situation-unprecedented-in-living-memory-un-says/

UN Agency Fears for 18,000 as Syria Blocks Food Area Shipments

A full week has now passed without UNRWA food assistance to Yarmouk's 20,000 trapped civilians in Syria.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency - UNRWA - workers fear that 18,000 people in Yarmouk, an isolated district in Damascus, face starvation as the Syrian government continues to prevent food shipments. "It is unprecedented in living memory for a UNRWA-assisted population to be subject to abject desperation in this way and the sheer humanitarian facts cry out for a response," says Chris Gunness, an agency spokesman.

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http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/fall2000/messer3.htm

ARMED CONFLICT & HUNGER - HOW CONFLICT CAUSES HUNGER

Food Shortages: The most obvious way armed conflict affects hunger is through the deliberate use of hunger as a weapon. Food shortages and famine deaths occur where adversaries starve opponents into submission. Acts of siege warfare include seizing or destroying food stocks, livestock, and other assets in food-producing regions; cutting off marketed supplies of food in these and other regions; and diverting food relief from intended beneficiaries to the military and their supporters. Farming populations are also reduced by direct attacks, terror, enslavement, or forced recruitment and by malnutrition, illness, and death. As farming populations flee, decline, or stop farming out of fear, production falls, spreading food deficits over wider areas. Land-mining and poisoning of wells are additional hostile acts that turn temporary acute food shortages into longer-term insufficiencies; these acts force people to leave and not return, thus interrupting food production and economic activities permanently. Conflict-linked food shortages set the stage for years of food emergencies, even after fighting has officially ceased.

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HARVESTING PEACE: FOOD SECURITY, CONFLICT, & COOPERATION

Direct Link to Full 53-Page 2013 Report: http://wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/HarvestingPeace.pdf

International humanitarian organizations are only too aware that, since food is a valuable commodity in a resource-constrained environment, supplies of food readily become targets.......

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