The food security conflict nexus in Zimbabwe: a historical analysis of everyday experiences, 1980 - 2008

Abstract

This article explores the implications of post-colonial Zimbabwe’s politically motivated conflicts on households’ everyday food security. Exploring the food security-conflict nexus through the lens of everyday experiences reveals ordinary peoples’ quotidian efforts for survival. It also shows, i argue, how people enmeshed in complex webs of unequal power relations experience subjection through the manipulation of food supplies by competing political forces. Entitlement to food becomes tied to perceived political orientation. This link between food security and conflict has mutated in various ways in Zimbabwe’s moments of politically motivated conflicts. Soon after the flare up of the Gukurahundi instabilities in the early 1980s the government imposed food embargoes in conflict zones in Matebeleland South province. In the highly polarised post-2000 political environment entitlement to food and other forms of aid such as seed, fertilizer and hunger mitigating equipment like ploughs and tractors also became closely linked to party affiliation.