Both are weapons of war, nothing more than means to an end for men whose only passion is power and control. It has been a hard-learned lesson in the relief industry that resources accrue to the powerful. While Westerners see bags of food as weapons in a war against hunger, belligerents in Africa see the food as a resource for fighting their own wars. Their motives for allowing relief food into a battle zone are rarely humanitarian. Their only concerns are strategic.
Food goes into the bellies of the militias and is sold to purchase weapons and ammunition.
When relief food lands in a war, it is the soldiers who are fed first. So the primary beneficiaries of charity are the people who caused the problem to begin with. They are thus energized to continue fighting and marauding and creating new scenes of starvation that will show up in newspapers and magazines and in ads for relief agencies trying to raise more money to send more food into the battle. It's now an old story in Africa. In the refugee camps that sprouted up in Zaire after the Rwanda genocide, masses of relief food were commandeered by the very same leaders who planned the massacres of some 800,000 people.