page_title: Food power
section_title: Sudan
hierarchical_section_title: Food power / Employment / Africa / Sudan
context_page_description: In international politics, food power is the use of agriculture as a means of political control whereby one nation or group of nations offers or withholds commodities from another nation or group of nations in order to manipulate behavior. Its potential use as a weapon was recognised after OPEC’s earlier use of oil as a political weapon. Food has a major influence on political actions of a nation. In response to acts of food power, a nation usually acts in the interest of its citizens to provide food.
  Food power is an integral part of the politics of food. The idea of food power is used in embargoes, employment, and food politics. In order for a nation to utilize food power effectively, the nation must effectively apply and display scarcity, supply concentration, demand dispersion, and action independence. The four main nations that export enough agriculture to be able to exert food power are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. On the smaller scale, particularly in some African countries, food power has been used as a weapon by opposing sides in internal wars and conflicts against their own people.
context_section_description: Famine is shaped by generally two theories. The first is FAD, Food Availability Decline. This is the result of a drought, a war, or some other drastic change to the agricultural system. This is the natural cause for famine. The other theory deals primarily with the population’s ability to access or become entitled to food. In this case, food power makes itself known on a small scale, as opposing political forces in Sudan compete for the votes of the people by instigating or encouraging the famine.
  For example, Sudan’s famine in the 1980s was completely intentional, and was only a pawn for a varied collection of different elites to improve their political and economic statuses. These political parties weren’t the only beneficiaries, though. Merchants were also known to hoard grain and buy livestock at inappropriately low prices when the famines shifted the terms of trade. Western Sudanese merchants during the famine of 1987 were described as heartless because they refused to sell grain to needy villages in Darfur at reasonable prices. Ergo, the Sudanese Famine was another example of food power in which food was and used as a policy, and which completely ignored the needs of the people and fostered the political and power-hungry intentions of opposite warring forces in the country.
  The famine in Sudan in 1998 was a humanitarian disaster caused mainly by human rights abuses, as well as drought and the failure of the international community to react to the famine risk with adequate speed. The worst affected area was Bahr El Ghazal in southwestern Sudan.  In this region over 70,000 people died during the famine.
caption: Satellite image of Sudan
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