WUNRN
FOOD AS A WEAPON OF WAR &
CONFLICT - STARVATION & HUNGER OF WOMEN & CHILDREN VICTIMS - SYRIA +
A full week
has now passed without UNRWA food assistance to Yarmouk's 20,000 trapped civilians in
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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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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