Explain the non-traditional security threats in the context of food and environmental crises. (2025, 10 Marks)
Non-traditional security threats are dangers to survival and wellbeing that are not military in origin, cross borders freely and cannot be defeated by force. The UNDP Human Development Report 1994 listed food and environmental security among the seven components of human security. Their security character lies less in scarcity itself than in the mechanisms that turn scarcity into instability.
Food crises as a security mechanism
- Access, not supply. Amartya Sen‘s entitlement approach (Poverty and Famines, 1981) showed that the Bengal famine of 1943 struck amid adequate food: people starve when they lose the means to command food.
- The transmission chain. A climate or energy shock lifts grain prices; exporters impose bans; import-dependent states face price and supply shocks together; protest and riots follow. The 2007–08 and 2022 spikes ran this sequence, and bread prices fed the 2010–11 Arab uprisings.
- Food as a weapon. Russia’s exit from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (July 2023) and the famine confirmed in Gaza in August 2025 show hunger used as an instrument of war.
- Scale. The SOFI 2026 report puts the hungry at about 645 million in 2025 (7.8% of humanity), with conflict driving famine in parts of Sudan.
Environmental crises as a threat multiplier
- Warming, degraded soils, scarce water and polluted air now sit at the centre of government agendas because they strain agriculture, water and infrastructure together and shrink nature’s capacity to sustain people.
- Forest fires, pest outbreaks and disease spread as ecosystems are stressed.
- Thomas Homer-Dixon (Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, 1999) linked resource stress mainly to internal, diffuse violence, such as farmer–herder clashes in the Sahel, rather than interstate “water wars”.
- Displacement pushes people into host regions and cities, straining services and social cohesion; for small island states, sea-level rise threatens territory itself.
The food–environment nexus
The threats form a chain: warming cuts yields, prices rise, people move, politics destabilises and state capacity to absorb the next shock falls. India shows both sides: the 2022 heatwave hit the wheat crop and prompted export curbs, while the National Food Security Act makes subsidised grain a legal entitlement for some 81 crore people. Whether such threats belong on the security agenda is itself contested: a 2021 Security Council draft on climate and security failed after a Russian veto, with India voting against.
Conclusion
Food and environmental crises are security threats because they multiply existing fragility, not because armies can answer them. A holistic, cooperative response (adaptation finance, open grain trade, shared basins), as in COP30’s Belém call to triple adaptation finance, works better than securitising them into border closures and hoarding.