2011 – Empty Stomachs and Loaded Rifles

This year’s annual Munk School of Global Affairs Graduate Student Conference is titled Empty Stomachs and Loaded Rifles: Food Scarcity and Global Security. The conference will be held at the University of Toronto from March 24th-25th 2011, with a keynote reception on the evening of March 24th. The conference will draw on multidisciplinary scholars, World Bank experts and professionals in both government and NGO development sectors.

Empty Stomachs and Loaded Rifles: Food Scarcity and Global Security will explore the links between food shortage and conflict. We believe that issues of food scarcity and global security are increasingly inseparable. It is no longer feasible to discuss these problems in isolation and hope to arrive at a solution. The conference will focus on three themes under this topic: food scarcity as a catalyst for political unrest, food as a weapon of war, and control and equity of food supply.

The conference ran on March 24 and 25, opening with a keynote by Mr. Peter Gill, a well known British journalist. Over the next day and a half, we heard from many different people representing a variety of viewpoints on the issue, including the Canadian Forces leadership, academia, aid practitioners, journalists, diplomats and civil servants. The complexity of the conversation that emerged testified to our good fortune in bringing together leaders in several different fields to discuss a very important issue.

Keynote Address

During his keynote address, Peter Gill drew upon his observations in the field and throughout his career.  He implored leaders, students and civil society to become more aware of the crisis of food scarcity, particularly in Africa but also with respect to other regions including India, where a Maoist rebellion is fuelled in part by food distribution issues.  With reference to a variety of resource conflicts including the on-going tragedy in Darfur, Mr. Gill illustrated the relationship between food scarcity and a regional violence that can easily spill onto the global stage. The West bears some responsibility for the creation of a fertile environment in which these sorts of problems can thrive.

Speakers

Dr. Harriet Friedmann
Dr. Harriet Friedmann is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. She lectures and publishes widely in U.S., European and Canadian journals on issues related to food and agriculture. Professor Friedmann¹s research includes international regulation of food and agriculture, family and corporate enterprises in the agro-food sector of the world economy, patterns of international trade and farm structures, persistence and change in diets and cuisines, and agroecology. Professor Friedmann received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977. Professor Friedmann was co-investigator in “Strengthening Canada¹s Environmental Community through International Regime Reform” (the EnviReform project) at the University of Toronto.

Mr. Peter Gill
Journalist and author Peter Gill was one of the first journalists to report on the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. His television reportage carried the images and stories of the famine to the rest of the world and the international response to this tragedy changed the face of foreign aid. Mr. Gill has since returned to Ethiopia on numerous visits to speak with officials and regular Ethiopians to ask the question: Is hunger becoming history? His recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid is the story of Ethiopia in the 25 years following Live Aid.

Dr. Stephan Haggard
Dr. Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He has been a consultant to USAID, the World Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the OECD and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and coauthor ofWitness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011). His recent work with Marcus Noland examines the political economy of North Korea

Dr. Jean-Yves Haine
Dr. Jean-Yves Haine is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He holds a law degree from the University of Louvain (Belgium), a Master’s degree in International Relation from the Sorbonne (France) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences-Po (France). Before joining the University of Toronto., he was Research Fellow at the Department of Government, Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris and European Security Research Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and Senior Researcher for Transatlantic and Global Security at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Lt. General Andrew Leslie
Lt. General Leslie presently serves as Chief of Transformation of the Canadian Forces. He previously served as the Chief of Land Staff, Commander Task Force in Kabul and Deputy Commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2003. He has previously held commands in Germany, Cyprus, Canada and the former Yugoslavia. He holds several degrees and has studied in Ottawa, London, Toronto, Kingston and at the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Ellen Messer
Dr. Ellen Messer is an anthropologist specializing in human rights and food security. She is the former director of the World Hunger Program at Brown University, and has also taught at Tufts University’s School of Nutrition Science & Policy. She currently teaches in the Sustainable International Development program at the Heller School of Social Policy & Management at Brandeis University. Dr. Messer received her Ph.D. in ecological anthropology from the University of Michigan, after carrying out ethnobotanical fieldwork in Mexico focusing on food systems. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the topic of food policy.

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs
Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs is an international leading advisor on the economics of development with a focus on environmental sustainability and poverty alleviation. Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He was formerly Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

Dr. John R. Schram
Dr. Schram is currently a Senior Fellow with the Queen’s Centre for International Relations in Kingston and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa. He was Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana and Sierra Leone from 1994 to 1998, Ambassador to Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan from 1998 through 2002, and High Commissioner, then ambassador to Zimbabwe and Angola from 2002 to 2005. He was Minister-Counsellor at the then Canadian Embassy in South Africa during the last two years of the struggle against apartheid and the first two years of democracy.

Dr. Sabrina Schulz
Dr. Sabrina Schulz is a Policy Adviser with the British High Commission in Ottawa working on climate change and energy security. Previously, she was Director of Policy at the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC) in London. Before that she worked as a Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., where she conducted post-doctoral research on U.S. military transformation. Dr Schulz has also worked for MPs in the German Bundestag and for a Member of the European Parliament in Brussels. She is a graduate of the University of Potsdam, Germany (M.A. in Public Policy and Management), and she holds an M.A. in International Politics as well as a PhD from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Brian Stewart
Former foreign affairs reporter and senior correspondent for CBC TV News, Brian Stewart is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Mr. Stewart received a Gemini Award as “Best Overall Broadcast Journalist” in 1996 and for “Best Information Segment” in 1994 for Rwanda: Autopsy of a Genocide. His documentary The Somalia Affairwon top prize for investigative reporting at the Canadian Association of Journalists awards in 1993. He is the 2009 Ross Munro Media Award Recipient; awarded by the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA), in concert with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, the Ross Munro Award recognizes Canadian journalists who have made a significant and extraordinary contribution to increasing public understanding of Canadian defence and security issues.

Mr. Alexandre Trudeau
Alexandre Trudeau is a filmmaker and journalist. He is the founding president, chief producer and resident director of Juju Films. He has produced numerous documentaries includingEmbedded in Baghdad; Refuge, a film about Darfur; and Our Third Choice. Trudeau is also a print journalist and has reported for Canadian media from China, Iraq, Liberia, Haiti, Israel, Palestine and Russia. He is active on the boards of several non-profit organizations, and is the author of a forthcoming book that is a portrait of present-day China.