**2.5 Impacts of protracted crises and conflicts on food security in Africa**

According to the Fund for Peace, in 2017, the three most fragile states in the world were in Africa. Those states were the Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, and Somalia [18]. And each one of them has now become fragile because of the protracted crises that have kept it unstable since the 1960s. In the case of the Central African Republic, the years of the trouble started in the 1960s. In the case of Somalia, the disintegration of its *state apparatus* and the advent of its successive social, political, and economic challenges came after the fall of the regime of Siad Barre in 1991. In the case of South Sudan, the country has been in political turmoil, standoff, low-intensity warfare since it gained its independence from the Republic of the Sudan in 2011. However, it is worth noting that those three cited-above countries are not the only fragile countries in Africa. There are many other African countries that are also fragile and politically unstable because of the protracted conflicts and never-ending political crises. This is in addition to other crippling challenges such as *governance deficiencies*, *corruption*, *decades-long underperforming economies*, *weak institutions*, *flagrant human rights violations*, *and living resources scarcity* that have kept them from creating an inclusive and shared prosperity for millions of their citizens.<sup>4</sup> Indeed, food insecurity and nutritional deficits and the

<sup>4</sup> See *Good Governance and Human Rights: Keys to Building A Society That Works for All* by Muhammad Yunus in [19].

### *Understanding Africa's Food Security Challenges DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91773*

lack of quality health and education are the direct results of the said never-ending challenges that Africa as a whole confronts ever since it gained its *political independence* from the former colonial powers.

In effect, the persistent lack of peace and security in many sub-Saharan African countries today, coupled with the never-ending political instabilities and crises, is mainly the underlying reasons why African countries seem incapable of tackling and overcoming existential challenges and threats such as food shortages and insecurity and widespread malnutrition on their own. As a case in point, since 2010, a number of *civil wars and political crises* have broken out in several African countries from Algeria all the way to Kenya. In addition, newer political instabilities and short-lived c*ivil wars* have also occurred or unfolded in places like the Lake Chad Basin, Nigeria (Boko Haram), Libya (the bloody ousting of Muammar Kaddafi and the ensuing civil war), Egypt, Tunisia, the Central African Republic (CAR), Kenya, Cameroon, Mali, Burkina Faso, Burundi, South Sudan, Algeria, and Sudan as of late [20]. Moreover, countries such the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, and Somalia where decades-long conflicts have weakened and rendered their respective governments inept and unable to assume the administration of their territorial security and come up with sound national economic management policies, transnational threats such as *terrorism*, *mass migration*, *pandemics such as Ebola and HIV/AIDS*, *and maritime piracy* consume and divert their meager state resources away. Because of all that, their depleted resources are never sufficient to help them successfully fight institutional corruptions, rein into drug trafficking, curb hunger and other social woes, and effectively run their day-to-day administrative affairs. And as a result of the said overwhelming challenges, food insecurity and nutrition challenges currently affect and threaten the lives of millions of South Sudanese, Central Africans, Somali, Nigerians, and million more Africans today. For further illustration of how many African countries are afflicted and overwhelmed by conflicts and protracted crises, and why food security challenges have become existential threats not just to one or two countries in Africa, see *Cases of countries affected by food insecurity and acute malnutrition stemming from protracted conflicts*, *crises*, *and political unrests* and **Table 2**.
