Growing unrest : Links between farmed and fished resources and the risk of conflict

For the conflict-affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, these losses amounted to 75 per cent of official development assistance for the period.13 Section 4. Rethinking the problem: Non-traditional conflict resources The four case studies presented in this paper seek to highlight some of the ways in which agricultural or marine resources can contribute to the onset and continuation of conflict. [...] The UN Monitoring Group reports that this has generated “millions of dollars over the last decade” (1993-2003) for the warlords, and that “much of the money is used to pay militias and procure arms and ammunition” for private militias.26 Box 3: Cashew nuts and conflict in Senegal27 The Senegalese province of Casamance, wedged between the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau in the south of the country, is one [...] Over time civilians were driven from resource-rich areas with terror tactics, violence and the use of landmines, abandoning land to the benefit of the rebel groups; combatants engaged in the harvest and processing of cashews; and the rebel groups traded the nuts to dealers via intermediaries for cash, food and arms. [...] This was made possible—in part—by the obstructability of the crop, by the presence of reliable markets and by the complicity of multinational corporations involved in Somalia’s banana trade, who by paying export levies and taxes contributed to funding the conflict in the 1990s.84 The Somali banana trade Banana production in Somalia is concentrated in the Lower Shabelle region in the south of the c [...] However the contribution of the banana sector to the perpetuation of the conflict in Somalia differed from the resource-based conflicts in some other African countries in the 1990s.