breaking the link between climate change and …...3 figure 1. possible causal pathway from climate...
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Breaking the Link between Climate Change and Conflict: Best Practices for Peacefully Managing Future Natural Resource Shocks in
the Western Hemisphere
Nathan Black ([email protected])
Harvard University Center for the Environment / Harvard Government Department
Harvard-Yale-MIT Conference on Political Violence
April 27, 2013
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Climate change is happening. While prevention efforts continue, we have passed the
window in which wholesale prevention was possible and are now entering what the Center for a
New American Security dramatically titled “the age of consequences.”1 In recent years both
scholars and policymakers have taken an interest in the potential security consequences of
climate change in particular. The purported future effects of global warming on international
security are numerous, including displacement of peoples from Pacific island states that may
soon be underwater, war between states bordering the Arctic Ocean over new shipping lanes that
will open as a result of melting icecaps, and war between states over shrinking rivers. Probably
the most talked-about potential security consequence of climate change, however, is the potential
for higher temperatures and altered rainfall patterns to ignite intrastate conflicts in the
developing world. As shown in Figure 1, the fear is that environmental changes brought on by
global warming will result in negative shocks to supplies of natural resources such as arable land
and fresh water, leading to societal disruptions that eventually mushroom into large-scale violent
conflict.
To be sure, scholars do not agree on the magnitude or the nature of any future link
between climate change and civil war. Some well-known statistical studies have identified past
associations between temperature or precipitation change and violent civil conflict,2 while others
find no such links,3 and still others find a link between the increased abundance of natural
1 Kurt Campbell et al., The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global
Climate Change (Washington: Center for a New American Security, 2007). 2 Solomon H. Hsiang, Kyle C. Meng, and Mark A. Cane, “Civil Conflicts are Associated with the Global Climate,”
Nature, No. 476 (2011): 438-441; Marshall B. Burke et al., “Warming Increases the Risk of Conflict in Africa,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 49 (2009): 20670-20674; Solomon M. Hsiang,
Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel, “Quantifying the Climatic Influence of Human Conflict, Violence, and
Political Instability,” Science, forthcoming. 3 Halvard Buhaug, “Climate Not to Blame for African Civil Wars,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, Vol. 107, No. 38 (2010): 16477-16482; Tor A. Benjaminsen et al., “Does Climate Change Drive Land-Use
Conflicts in the Sahel?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2012): 97-111; Ole Magnus Theisen, “Climate
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Figure 1. Possible causal pathway from climate change to violent civil conflict.4
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resources and conflict.5 Synthesizing this diverse literature is difficult, but a fair summary,
consistent with my own prior research,6 is that climate change will contribute to a higher risk of
violent civil conflict in some states, but not in all. In the states where climate change contributes
to conflict, several causal mechanisms could be at work: the migration of privation-afflicted
peoples into a different region of a state, which upsets a delicate social balance;7 “temporal
relative deprivation,” whereby ordinary people realize they are worse off than they were before
and have increased incentives to join up with rebel movements;8 the collapse of a state in the
wake of an extreme shock;9 and the deliberate incitement to violence by state elites themselves.10
If climate change will contribute to violent civil conflict in some states but not others,
what will explain this variation? Surely many factors will play a role, but one factor that is often
Clashes? Weather Variability, Land Pressure, and Organized Violence in Kenya, 1989-2004,” Journal of Peace
Research, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2012): 81-96; Ole Magnus Theisen, Helge Holtermann, and Halvard Buhaug, “Climate
Wars? Assessing the Claim that Drought Breeds Conflict,” International Security, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2011): 79-106. 4 Adapted from Nathan Black, “Change We Can Fight Over: The Relationship Between Arable Land Supply and
Substate Conflict,” Strategic Insights, Vol. 9, No.1 (2010): 30-64. 5 Wario R. Adano et al., “Climate Change, Violent Conflict, and Local Institutions in Kenya’s Drylands,” Journal of
Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2012): 65-80; Cullen S. Hendrix, “Climate Change, Rainfall, and Social Conflict in
Africa,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2012): 35-50; Patrick Meier, Doug Bond, and Joe Bond,
“Environmental Influences on Pastoral Conflict in the Horn of Africa,” Political Geography, Vol. 26, No. 6 (2007):
716-735. 6 Black, “Change We Can Fight Over.” 7 Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 8 Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Black, “Change We Can Fight
Over”; for an example, see Robert H. Bates, “The Agrarian Origins of Mau Mau: A Structural Account,”
Agricultural History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (1987): 1-28, pp. 2, 8. 9 Colin Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006). 10 Ibid.
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left out of the broader climate change and conflict literature is a state government’s response to
natural resource shocks. Just as changes to natural resource endowments and their impacts on
states are not uniform, the reactions of states to these changes are not uniform either. Some state
actions decrease the likelihood of violent civil conflict in the wake of natural resource shocks,
and other state actions actually make conflict more likely. Knowing the difference will be a key
challenge for developing world governments and the broader international community in the
coming decades.
Accordingly, in this project I will identify a set of best (and worst) practices for states
facing negative natural resource shocks. My goal is to determine which state responses to these
shocks mitigate the risk of violent civil conflict, and which state responses exacerbate the risk of
conflict. Thus, although this project will not be able to close the broader debate over the nature
of the relationship between climate change and conflict, it will hopefully contribute some
practical advice to actual policymakers in states likely to be adversely affected by global
warming.
The remainder of this project prospectus proceeds as follows. First, I discuss how my
approach to the question of responses to natural resource shocks is unique. Next, I outline four
hypotheses that I have developed from an initial pass through well-known past cases of states
facing natural resource shocks. Then, I discuss my methodology and case selection. Finally, I
close the prospectus with a research plan that should yield a drafted book manuscript by August
2014.
Differentiating My Approach
My approach to this research question — What responses to natural resource shocks have
mitigated and exacerbated the risk of violent civil conflict? — is unique in three respects. First, I
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confine my focus to state government responses. A venerable research tradition in comparative
politics and development economics has examined how societies respond to sudden changes to
their natural resource endowments. This literature rightly characterizes individual peasants and
local institutions such as village governments as ingenious and adaptive, managing risks as
adeptly as any insurance company in Manhattan. Local people under increased environmental
pressure figure out ways to store crops, to transition to more drought-resistant crops, to share
resources so that the worst affected do not fall through the cracks, and so forth. In this
conception of micro-level ingenuity, the state government is absent at best and the perpetuator of
the increased scarcities at worst; meanwhile, the specific responses of local communities look
similar in character, if not in scale, to what states themselves try.11 But this literature also
acknowledges that natural resource shocks of a certain size or permanence can overwhelm the
ability of local peoples and institutions to respond — and that violent conflict is at least
sometimes the result.12 Given the potential magnitude and longevity of global climate change, I
believe state- and international-level policymakers must prepare to live in such a world.13
Therefore, I seek to understand what sovereign state governments, with their comparatively
11 Robert H. Bates, “Capital, Kinship, and Conflict: The Structuring Influence of Capital in Kinship Societies,”
Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1990): 151-164, especially pp. 157-159; Robert H. Bates,
Rural Responses to Industrialization: A Study of Village Zambia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976),
especially p. 198; Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and
Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), especially pp. 2-3, 28. For a review of the
controversies in development studies over the role of the peasantry and the desirability of industrialization, see
Robert H. Bates, “Agrarian Politics,” in Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Understanding Political
Development (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1987). 12 Bates, “The Agrarian Origins of Mau Mau,” pp. 7-8; Scott, “The Moral Economy of the Peasant,” pp. 7-8, 90;
Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. xv, 279-282; on a
nascent but failed rebellion related to famine in Ireland, see Allen H. Barton, Communities in Disaster: A
Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1969), pp. 18-19. 13 On the potential for changes resulting from global warming to overwhelm present “infrastructure” in the next
decade, see Michael McElroy and D. James Baker, Climate Extremes: Recent Trends with Implications for National
Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2012), p. 5.
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greater financial and logistical resources and direct access to international aid, can do to respond
to increased natural resource scarcity when local-level responses fail.
Second, I seek to identify meaningful, non-institutional independent variables. I want to
know what any state government can do to respond to natural resource shocks in a peace-
preserving way, without going through the lengthy and painful process of changing regime type
or constitutional characteristics. There is no doubt that political institutions affect how and how
well states respond to natural resource shocks, and some consensus that more democratic
institutions permit more effective responses.14 Nevertheless, recognizing that these institutions
change slowly if at all, I focus on more proximate state responses of the kind elaborated below.
Finally, I focus on a relatively unique set of empirics: cases of natural resource shocks
and conflict, and shocks and non-conflict, in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most climate
change and conflict scholarship has focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, where there are many
legitimate fears about civil conflicts tied to increased natural resource scarcity.15 Among the
developing states of the Western Hemisphere, meanwhile, there are also potential security
consequences of climate change. The most recent predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) foresee “salinization and desertification of agricultural lands”
throughout the drier parts of Latin America, including “central and northern Chile, the Peruvian
coast, northeast Brazil, dry Gran Chaco and Cuyo [including parts of Bolivia and Paraguay],
central, western, and northwest Argentina, and significant parts of [Mexico].” The IPCC also
14 Vally Koubi et al., “Climate Variability, Economic Growth, and Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol.
49, No. 1 (2012): 113-127; John O’Loughlin et al., “Climate Variability and Political Instability in Sub-Saharan
Africa,” Paper Presented at the Intenational Studies Assocation Annual Convention, San Francisco, April 3-6, 2013;
see also the project on Climate Change and African Political Stability at the University of Texas’ Robert S. Strauss
Center for International Security and Law (http://strausscenter.org/ccaps). 15 See, for example, Oli Brown et al., “Climate Change as the New Security Threat: Implications for Africa,”
International Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 6 (2007): 1141-1154; and Jerome Tubiana, “Darfur: A Conflict for Land?” in
Alex de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
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cites a prediction from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that “desertification and
salinization will affect 50% of agricultural lands in Latin America and the Caribbean zone.”16
Yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the security concerns that might arise
from this potential loss of Latin American and Caribbean agricultural land, or to how these
concerns might be alleviated.
Unlike Africa, the developing states of the Western Hemisphere lie in close proximity to
the United States. Any climate change-related civil conflicts that arise there will be felt here, and
probably much more intensely than those in Africa. Potential consequences for the U.S. include,
for instance, an increase in immigration flows through the border with Mexico, which are already
a contentious sociopolitical issue. Therefore, the U.S. has a clear national security interest in
better understanding how the social consequences of climate change in Latin America and the
Caribbean can be managed toward nonviolent outcomes.
Hypotheses
I reviewed the literatures in political science and development economics on state
government responses to natural resource shocks, including several case studies of actual states’
interventions. From these literatures I have drawn four initial hypotheses that I plan to test in the
manner described below.
Hypothesis 1: By reducing primary commodity exports and increasing primary commodity
imports, states can replace lost necessities and keep deprivation-induced grievances from boiling
over.
16 Graciela Magrin et al., “Latin America,” in M.L. Parry et al., eds., Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation,
and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 597. On expected droughts and
potential desertification in Mexico in the next decade, see McElroy and Baker, “Climate Extremes,” pp. 6, 77.
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Manipulating the trade balance is often one of the first responses that states try when they
realize that their stocks of land, water, food, or another natural resource will not meet the current
needs of the population. Such changes to trade are sometimes quite effective when fully
implemented; one study finds that policy interventions affecting the disparity between domestic
and international food prices, including “levying export taxes,” effectively eliminate the
statistical relationship between food price shocks and civil war.17 Likewise, the U.S. National
Intelligence Council sees “increased promotion of food imports” as a critical component of
mitigating future increased water scarcities in certain countries.18
However, full implementation of trade balance manipulation is difficult to achieve,
because status-quo export policies are often supported by powerful vested interests in the
domestic economy, and because exports are often distributed under the terms of long-term
contracts with other states that are difficult to nullify quickly. As a result, a number of states
have faced famine while exporting food, including Bangladesh and Ethiopia in the 1970s, Kenya
in the early 1980s, and China, India, and Ireland in earlier periods.19 Another drawback to the
intervention of trade policy is that increasing net primary commodity imports only solves the
problem of subsistence, not the problem of unemployment that is also often associated with
increased natural resource scarcity. The loss of livelihood for farmers and others who work the
land, even in the presence of sufficient food, may drive individuals into the arms of rebel groups,
17 Brett L. Carter and Robert H. Bates, “Public Policy, Price Shocks, and Civil War in Developing Countries,”
Working Paper, January 2012, available online:
http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/bcarter_publicpolicycivilwar.pdf, quote from p. 9. 18 United States National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington: Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, 2012), p. 30. 19 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981),
p. 161; Robert H. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in
Kenya, Second Edition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 108-110.
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or into urban slums where they are mobilized for violence (as we will see in Haiti, discussed
below).
Hypothesis 2: By redistributing land and other increasingly scarce resources to the parties most
likely to rebel, states can quell potential insurrection.
This is another fairly instinctual response of states facing shocks to natural resource
supplies. Developing state governments typically know which of their populations pose the most
significant internal security threats; by initiating “land reform” to keep those populations from
being disenfranchised, states aspire to minimize the risk of instability while passing the pain of
the shocks onto more docile groups. This was tried in both the Philippines in the Marcos era and
in Chiapas, Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s (the latter of which is discussed below).
Redistribution can also take the form of a government takeover of the food supply, if the state
chooses essentially to redistribute the relevant resources to itself.20 Unfortunately, my initial
survey of land reform efforts seems to suggest they almost never work. The owners of the land
being redistributed are typically powerful elites with little interest in giving up their holdings in
the name of internal security. In the Philippines, landlords dodged land reform legislation so
effectively that “by the time Marcos was ousted, only 11 percent of all rice and corn tenants had
been put on the road toward ownership as a result of land reform efforts.”21
Hypothesis 3: By implementing technological improvements, states can extract more value from
fewer resources and thereby staunch the deprivation that may contribute to rebellion.
So far, the technological solution to natural resource shocks appears to be the most
promising. By “technological improvements” I mean the introduction of new or improved crops
or materials, and also the widespread adoption of better agricultural techniques (for example, the
20 For example: Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics, and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hauge:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), especially p. xxviii. 21 Kahl, “States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife,” pp. 79-80.
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discouragement of slash-and-burn agriculture). Advances in technology have long worked to
mitigate increasing scarcity — they ensured Thomas Malthus’ dire predictions22 were ultimately
wrong — and in more recent years the so-called “Green Revolution” may have played a vital
role in the prevention of violent civil conflict as well. My prior research on the relationship
between arable land supply and violent civil conflict between 1965 and 1999 finds a strong
statistical association between increases in arable land supply and the lowered likelihood of
conflict. During these years the average three-year state-level change in arable land supply was
+2%,23 which was likely driven in large part by the dissemination of Green Revolution
technologies such as disease-resistant wheat and rice crops to the developing world.24
But technology is not a panacea for conflict risk in the wake of climate change. In Latin
America in particular, many Green Revolution technologies have already been disseminated —
much more so than in Africa, for instance25 — so the unrealized potential of current technology
is probably marginal. Future technology, particularly the introduction of genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) such as plants that can resist drought, holds great promise. But major
advances, such as “drought tolerance, salinity tolerance, increased nitrogen-use efficiency, and
high-temperature tolerance” — all relevant to climate change — are believed by scientists to be
10-20 years away,26 and there is certainly no guarantee that estimate is accurate. Furthermore,
22 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993/1798),
especially pp. 9-22. 23 Black, “Change We Can Fight Over,” p. 38. 24 H.C.J. Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People,” Science, No. 327 (2010): 812-
818, p. 815. The U.S. National Intelligence Council (“Global Trends 2030,” p. 34) points out that “crop yield
improvements due to better agricultural practices and technological improvements have accounted for nearly 78
percent of the increase in crop production between 1961 and 1999.” 25 Robert L. Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 2, 85. 26 Godfray et al., “Food Security,” p. 815, Table 1.
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widespread political resistance to GMOs in both the developed and the developing world will
continue to slow both the development and the implementation of any such technologies.27
In addition, even if new technologies are developed and disseminated, the nature of that
dissemination can dramatically temper the peace-preserving effects of this type of state
intervention. In Central America (including Chiapas, as discussed below), the Green Revolution
increased crop yields but actually increased unemployment and landlessness among poor
peasants as well. The benefits of capital-intensive technological innovation accrued mainly to
large landholders with sufficient capital available, who realized they could either do more
farming with less labor or transition to different crops entirely — resulting in the firing or
eviction of small farmers,28 not a set of actions we would expect to contribute to political
stability.
Hypothesis 4: By implementing insurance schemes, states can smooth out the problems of both
privation and unemployment, preventing conflict.
The idea of “crop insurance” is gaining widespread popularity among some economists
and international bureaucrats. The idea is that either states or an international governmental
organization such as the International Monetary Fund would collect regular premiums from at-
risk populations (states would collect from farmers, the IMF would collect from states). Then,
when a natural resource shock hits, the insurer would provide assistance to the vulnerable
population that would temporarily replace both subsistence needs and employment for those
affected. Botswana has had great success with a “Drought Relief Program” structured along
27 Paarlberg, “Starved for Science,” p. 1; Rajeev K. Varshney et al., “Agricultural Biotechnology for Crop
Improvement in a Variable Climate: Hope or Hype?” Trends in Plant Science, Vol. 16, No. 7 (2011): 363-371, p.
369; N.V. Fedoroff et al., “Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century,” Science, No. 327 (2010): 833-
834, p. 833; see the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
(2009) for a general exposition of concerns about GMOs. 28 Paarlberg, “Starved for Science,” p. 85.
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these lines, which has led to calls to implement insurance schemes more broadly and at the
international governmental level.29
Such insurance has its promise and its advocates, but it seems unsuited to many of the
challenges that climate change will bring. Insurance can effectively compensate farmers for
fluctuations in rainfall from year to year, which climate change is expected to cause. But climate
change will also cause secular decreases — and increases — in rainfall in various parts of the
world, and for these cases insurance is inappropriate. One cannot pay for a bad rain year with the
proceeds from a good rain year if there are no good rain years anymore.
Methodology and Case Selection
Each of the state government interventions identified in the four hypotheses above has
potential benefits and potential drawbacks — either factors that will prevent the effective
implementation of these measures, shortcomings of the interventions even if they are
implemented, or unintended negative consequences they carry. I seek to understand which of
these interventions are most likely to encourage and discourage civil peace as climate change
begins to increase natural resource scarcities in Latin American and the Caribbean (and
elsewhere in the developing world). To do so, my only credible guide is the past — what states
have done in prior decades to mitigate natural resource shocks, what has worked, and what has
not.
Therefore, I propose to study three cases in the Western Hemisphere of states that have
faced significant natural resource shocks related to changes in the environment — one case that
saw a civil war, one case that saw a low-intensity civil conflict, and one case that saw no civil
29 Edward Miguel, “Poverty and Violence: An Overview of Recent Research and Implications for Foreign Aid,” in
Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet, eds., Too Poor for Peace? Global Poverty, Conflict, and Security in the 21st
Century (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), pp. 57-58; The World Bank, Managing Agricultural
Production Risk: Innovations in Developing Countries (Washington: The World Bank, 2005); Burke et al.,
“Warming Increases the Risk of Conflict in Africa,” p. 20674.
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conflict at all. To be clear, in each case the increased natural resource scarcities were caused in
part by environmental changes, and in part by human activity. We expect this to be the case for
climate change-related resource shocks as well; the relevant question thus becomes how states
respond to natural resource deprivation, regardless of the cause. By comparing the interventions
each of these states made in response to increased scarcity across all three cases, I hope to
generalize about which interventions are the most fruitful for preventing conflict, and which hold
the least promise. Because these interventions happen in complex sociopolitical contexts — any
three cases I choose will inevitably have different political institutions, different baseline risks of
civil conflict based on their levels of poverty, ethnic fractionalization, and so forth30 — the best
way to understand the effect of these interventions specifically on the likelihood of conflict is to
process-trace them. Through detailed secondary-source research and interviews in the field with
key contemporary government officials, rebel or potential rebel leaders, agricultural interest-
group representatives, and the like, I hope to tease out the direction of the effect of each
intervention on the likelihood that conflict would erupt. No one of these state responses to
natural resource shocks could ever prevent or cause violent civil conflict on its own, but by
measuring the direction of effects, we can add valuable insight into which tools developing
world policymakers should have in their toolboxes, and which they should deemphasize.
Conflict Cases: Haiti (1991) and Chiapas, Mexico (1994)
The selection of the two conflict cases is fairly straightforward. Since the end of the Cold
War, the deadliest two violent civil conflict onsets in the Western Hemisphere have both
occurred partially as a result of environmental changes that led to increased scarcities of
30 Scholars do not agree about what causes violent civil conflict in general, but for a seminal overview, see James D.
Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97,
No. 1 (2003): 75-90.
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agricultural land: the onset of the Haitian civil war in 1991, and the onset of the low-intensity
Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas (southern Mexico) in 1994.31
The Haitian civil war began with a military coup in 1991 that ousted the newly elected
populist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide drew his popular support from the hundreds
of thousands of slum-dwellers in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, who had been systematically
disenfranchised both by the wealthy proponents of the successive Duvalier dictatorships and by
the military — which had played a significant role in national politics since the exit of Jean-
Claude Duvalier in 1986. Though Aristide was a priest by training and a “liberation theology”
socialist by philosophy, Port-au-Prince under his rule quickly descended into a barely controlled
chaos. Vigilantism against the privileged classes, including the practice of “necklacing” (dousing
a tire with gasoline, putting it around the victim’s neck, and lighting it on fire), became
increasingly common. Aristide gave a speech on September 27, 1991 in which he not-so-subtly
encouraged the practice. Meanwhile, his government stripped senior military commanders of
command authority and permanent appointments, while Aristide talked of setting up a private
“security force” that would compete with the regular military for legitimacy. All of this was
eventually too much for both the military and the aristocracy, which ousted Aristide on
September 29-30, 1991 and, under a new junta, began a brutal crackdown on his supporters,
31 I identified the two “deadliest” violent civil conflict onsets in the Western Hemisphere since 1990 by consulting
the Uppsala Data Conflict Program and Peace Research Institute, Oslo Armed Conflict Dataset (Version 4-2012)
and conflict synopses, available online at
http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset and
http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/search.php. “Best” estimates of annual battle-related deaths were compiled.
According to these estimates, the Haitian conflict killed 200 people in 1991; the Chiapan conflict killed 182 people
between 1994 and 1996; the Venezuelan conflict (Hugo Chávez’s attempted coup) killed 145 people in 1992; and
the Trinidadian conflict (another attempted coup) killed 34 people in 1990.
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killing about 200 people in battle and about 3,000 overall, before the threat of U.S. intervention
heralded Aristide’s restoration in October 1994.32
Urban overcrowding was a significant underlying cause of the civil war in Haiti, then.
Had the slums not been overrun with unemployed young men with a taste for revolution,
Aristide’s populist preaching would not have enjoyed nearly the reception that it did; it is
unlikely such a man would have become the president of Haiti; and it is unlikely that the military
and aristocracy would have been so distraught with the political status quo that they would have
sought to overturn it by force. Urban overcrowding, in turn, was to a large extent caused by the
collapse of Haiti’s agricultural sector in the two decades preceding the Aristide election and
subsequent coup. The loss of Haitian agricultural land was the consequence of several factors.
First, unsustainable farming practices were left unchecked by the Duvalier government. As the
rural population increased, peasants cut down trees to clear more land and harvest charcoal.
Deforestation led to reduced rainfall and increased soil erosion. Second, with the assistance of
the U.S. and Canadian governments, the Haitian government slaughtered over one million
Kreyòl pigs that were feared to be carriers of swine fever in the early 1980s. Attempts to replace
the Kreyòl pigs with American pigs were an utter disaster, since American pigs require a far
better diet and shelter than most Haitian farmers can provide, and thus a major component of the
Haitian peasant’s livelihood was eliminated. Third, Jean-Claude Duvalier began an ambitious
industrial development program in 1971, which diverted attention from the agricultural sector
while failing to replace the number of farm jobs lost from the factors above. All of these factors
32 Philippe R. Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 118-131; Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl with Michael Heinl, Written
in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1995, Third Edition (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
2005), p. 700; the battle death estimate comes from UCDP/PRIO (see footnote 31); the total death estimate of 3,000
comes from the replication data for James D. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer than
Others?” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2004): 275-301, available at http://www.stanford.edu/~jfearon.
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contributed to an exodus from the countryside into Port-au-Prince; overall, Haiti’s urban
population increased from 1,166,001 in 1980 to 2,030,590 in 1990.33
The Haitian civil war is thus a textbook example of a natural resource shock contributing
to the onset of violent civil conflict. The increased land scarcities in Haiti’s interior were caused
by both human and environmental factors — poor planning and bad rainfall (which was affected
by poor planning) — as is frequently true in these cases, and which, as noted above, will be true
for climate change-related natural resource shocks as well.
Recognizing the increased scarcity, the Haitian government fully implemented one of the
policy interventions detailed in the Hypotheses section above. Namely, the government was quite
successful at curbing food exports and increasing food imports. Between 1971 and 1981, Haiti
went from exporting $62 million more in food than it imported to importing $188 million more
in food than it exported (in constant 2012 dollars).34 What the government was not successful at
was finding new employment for the peasants whose labor they replaced with imported food.
Instead, unemployment among males ages 15-24 skyrocketed, reaching 49 percent in 1988.35
Redistribution of land or other agricultural resources was never seriously attempted in Haiti
during the 1970s or 1980s, nor was it encouraged by USAID.36 Meanwhile, the Haitian Ministry
of Agriculture, USAID, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank did try to
implement technological improvements to Haitian agriculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
including reforestation and improved irrigation — but inattention and corruption at the top of the
33 Girard, “Haiti,” pp. 107-110; Heinl and Heinl, “Written in Blood,” p. 637; Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: A Shattered
Nation (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2011), p. 249; Jean-Germain Gros, State Failure, Underdevelopment, and
Foreign Intervention in Haiti (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 126-131; World Bank, World Development
Indicators (accessed September 18, 2012). 34 World Development Indicators; current-to-constant dollar conversion using http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. 35 World Development Indicators. 36 James Ridgeway, ed., The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis (Washington: Essential Books, 1994), p. 123;
interview with Bernard Ethéart, Director General of the Haitian government’s agricultural reform office (Institut
National de la Réforme Agraire), 1995-present, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 24, 2013.
17
Haitian political system prevented such efforts from meaningfully improving more than about 5
percent of Haiti’s land supply.37 As for insurance, the government never implemented an official
insurance scheme, and the unofficial insurance for Haitian peasants — Kreyòl pigs that
“constituted reserve savings accounts that enable peasant families to weather bad times”38 —
was decimated by the slaughter of the early 1980s.
In Haiti, then, we have a case where a natural resource shock contributed to conflict, and
though the corrupt and dictatorial government did much less than it could have to stop it, neither
did the government do nothing. What they did do did not work, so Haiti is an important
cautionary tale. As of February 2013 my research on the Haitian case is complete, including
interviews with 12 current and former Haitian government officials, American government
officials, peasant organizers, and other experts.
The conflict in Chiapas, which began in January 1994 and has been simmering since, has
killed fewer people but is tied even more closely to a natural resource shock. The “principal
goal” of the rebel Zapatistas is “relief from escalating environmental scarcities that have
impoverished their communities.”39 Most Zapatistas are indigenous coffee growers whose land
has become increasingly scarce since 1970. Increased scarcity has been caused by several
factors: deforestation and soil erosion linked to slash-and-burn agriculture, the explosion of the
cattle ranching industry in southern Mexico that has pushed traditional farmers off their lands,
and growth of the indigenous population (exacerbated by indigenous refugees escaping civil war
37 Interview with Ethéart; Interview with Frantz Flambert, Haitian Minister of Agriculture (1984-1986), by e-mail,
January 22, February 7, and March 11, 2013; Interview with Hebert Docteur, Haitian Minister of Agriculture (1986
and 2011-2012) and Vice Minister of Agriculture (1984-1986), in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 23, 2013; Josh
DeWind and David H. Kinley III, Aiding Migration: The Impact of International Development Assistance on Haiti
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 42, 50. 38 Heinl and Heinl, “Written in Blood,” p. 637. 39 Philip Howard and Thomas Homer-Dixon, “The Case of Chiapas, Mexico,” in Thomas Homer-Dixon and Jessica
Blitt, eds., Ecoviolence: Links among Environment, Population, and Security (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield,
1998), p. 19.
18
in neighboring Guatemala). Again, then, human and environmental factors have combined to
create an increased paucity of agricultural land for Chiapas’ most vulnerable residents. Instead of
contributing to rural out-migration that contributed to conflict, as in the case of Haiti, here a
natural resource shock contributed directly to rebel grievances.40
As in the Haitian case, the governments in Mexico City and the Chiapan capital of Tuxtla
Gutiérrez tried to intervene to mitigate this increased scarcity, although they tried less than they
could have. The picture on the trade balance is unclear, and Chiapas-level data is required. As in
the Philippines, land redistribution was attempted but was subverted by powerful landholders,
who grabbed up newly available land for ranching as local communities cleared it of trees.
Improved agricultural technologies were introduced into Chiapas in the 1980s but they were too
capital-intensive to trickle down to small farmers, instead simply allowing large landowners to
produce more products with fewer laborers. I found no evidence of insurance schemes in my
original survey of the case.41 Potential interview subjects include “Subcomandante Marcos,” the
anonymous leader of the Zapatistas; former Mexican Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-
1994) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), and six of the former governors of Chiapas: Absalón
Castellanos Domínguez (1982-1988), Patrocinio González Garrido (1988-1993), Elmar Setzer
Marseille (1993-1994), Javier López Moreno (1994), Eduardo Robledo Rincón (1994-1995), and
Julio César Ruíz Ferro (1995-1998).
Both conflict cases, then, have an array of state interventions that ultimately failed to
preserve civil peace, though peace was better preserved in Chiapas than in Haiti. The question
becomes whether a different set of interventions was at work in cases which did not see conflict.
40 Ibid, pp. 19-38. 41 Ibid, pp. 39-49.
19
Non-Conflict Case: Uruguay (1985-1999)
One significant challenge with civil conflict research is that because substate violence is
rare, there are many more cases of non-conflict than conflict. Researchers face the non-trivial
task of determining which cases of nonviolence to study. A number of different approaches to
this negative case selection could be envisioned, but for my purposes, I am looking for cases
where the most severe natural resource shocks were not associated with violent civil conflict.
Accordingly, I collected data on arable land supply (in hectares) and average annual rainfall (in
millimeters) for every independent developing country in the Western Hemisphere from 1961 to
2000, excluding states with extremely small and arguably irrelevant stocks of arable land (less
than 10,000 hectares).42 For each country-year I measured the mean-deviation of both
commodities — for rainfall, this took the form:
(rainfallcountry-year – rainfallaverage in country, 1961-2000) / standard deviationof rainfall in country, 1961-2000
I then filtered my dataset, which consisted of 1,040 observations, to the 40 observations in which
both mean-deviations were –1 or greater. I next simply ordered these 40 cases by the magnitude
of the mean-deviation in rainfall, which tends to vary more than the mean-deviations in arable
land (arable land supply in many countries stays the same, year after year). The three most
“shocked” country-years in the developing Western Hemisphere are shown in Table 1. Finally, I
set aside the Brazilian and Chilean cases. Although both rainfall and arable land supply were
substantially below the four-decade average in Brazil in 1963, arable land was actually
42 Arable land data come from the Food and Agriculture Organization’s “FAOSTAT” database
(http://faostat3.fao.org/home/index.html, downloaded September 6, 2012). Rainfall data come from Philip N.
Jefferson and Stephen A. O’Connell, “Rainfall Shocks and Economic Performance in Four African Countries,”
Department of Economics, Swarthmore College (http://acadweb.swarthmore.edu/acad/rain-
econ/Framesets/Data.htm, “Area” (Rain_AW_web.dta) dataset, downloaded September 14, 2012), and have been
validated with data from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, version 1.1
(http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/cty/obs/TYN_CY_1_1.html, downloaded May 9, 2009).
20
Table 1: Worst Agricultural Shocks in the Developing Western Hemisphere, 1961-2000
State Year Mean-Deviated
Rainfall
Mean-Deviated
Arable Land
Chile 1996 –2.30 –1.73
Brazil 1963 –2.24 –1.68
Uruguay 1989 –1.99 –1.59
—
increasing relative to prior years. Chile and Uruguay are both interesting cases of non-conflict,
but Uruguay is a more compelling case because of the higher baseline likelihood of the
reemergence of political violence in the late 1980s and 1990s, discussed below. Thus I presently
plan to proceed with the Uruguay case alone — resources permitting, I may add a fourth, Chilean
case at a later point.
Uruguay (1985-1999) is a particularly striking case because it had recently experienced a
violent civil conflict — the urban insurgency of the leftist Tupamaros in the early 1970s. The
Tupamaros had enjoyed recruiting success in large part because the stagnation of the country’s
livestock sector, beginning in the 1930s, devastated the broader economy, and left youth with
fewer viable alternatives to joining up with the violent resistance.43 While the Tupamaro
rebellion was quickly suppressed, agricultural stagnation persisted into the mid-1980s, by which
time a combination of overgrazing and disinterest in investment among ranchers had led to a
precipitous decline in “improved” pastures, from 2.5 million hectares in the 1960s to 605,000
hectares in 1985.44 Meanwhile, political conditions remained tense in Uruguay’s capital,
Montevideo. The military, which had ruled the country from 1973 to 1985 before restoring
43 Rex. A Hudson and Sandra W. Meditz, eds., Uruguay: A Country Study (Washington: Federal Research Division,
Library of Congress, 1992), pp. 100, 105; Alain Labrousse (Dinah Livingstone, trans.), The Tupamaros
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 42, 115-116. 44 Hudson and Meditz, “Uruguay,” p. 105; World Bank Report No. 9134, “Project Completion Report: Uruguay
Agricultural Development Project (Loan 1831-UR),” November 16, 1990, pp. 2-3, 39.
21
democracy, was still populated by some hardliners who periodically threatened to retake the
reins of power, due to either the perceived incompetence of the centrist civilian government or
the perceived threat from the extreme left, including former Tupamaros who had been released
from prison during the return to civilian control.45 These fears of the extreme left were
exaggerated by rightists but not entirely unfounded; during the 1994 election in particular,
former Tupamaros and other militant leftists attempted to mobilize squatters in the slums of
Montevideo for political violence.46
Despite the increased natural resource scarcity and the fragile political situation in
Montevideo that was certainly susceptible to a reemergence of political violence (either from the
extreme left or from the extreme right), the saber-rattling of military hardliners and the slum
mobilization of the ex-Tupamaros came to naught. There was no violent civil conflict in
Uruguay between 1985 and 1999. This lack of conflict appears to have been due in large part to
strong economic growth in the country — GDP grew an average of 3.9% per year during these
15 years, versus an average of 1.0% per year from 1961 to 1984.47 With economic conditions so
improved, the Tupamaros and other radical political groups faced an uphill battle finding new
recruits and retaining old members; the Tupamaros alone lost 90% of their membership between
1985 and 2006.48 This growth, in turn, was significantly supported by a revitalization of the
livestock sector, driven by state-led improvements to agricultural technology. These
technological improvements included the introduction of new seeds and techniques that
45 Martin Weinstein, Uruguay: Democracy at the Crossroads (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 107-110. 46 Luis Costa Bonino, “Uruguay: Democratic Learning and its Limits,” in Jennifer L. McCoy, ed., Political Learning
and Re-Democratization in Latin America: Do Politicians Learn from Political Crises? (Coral Gables: North-South
Center Press, University of Miami, 2000), pp. 78, 84-86. 47 World Development Indicators. 48 Adolfo Garcé, Donde Hubo Fuego: El Proceso de Adaptación del MLN-Tupamaros a la Legalidad y a la
Competencia Electoral (1985-2004) (Montevideo: Editorial Fin de Siglo, 2006), p. 157.
22
increased the productivity of pasture land, 49 and the eradication of Foot and Mouth Disease in
1993, which allowed the export of Uruguayan beef to the United States and Europe and reduced
the dependence of the Uruguayan economy on volatile Argentinian and Brazilian demand.50
The only other policy intervention of which I am aware in the Uruguayan case was an
increase in imports — both food imports, which by constant dollar value rose 381 percent
between 1985 and 1999 (net food imports also increased between roughly 1984 and 1994),51 and
oil imports, as a drought in the late 1980s choked off the hydroelectric power supply.52 The
social effects of these trade balance manipulations are unclear. Resource redistribution did not
take place, given that the top 7% of agricultural landowners owned a higher percentage of land in
2000 than they did in 1990.53 I have not observed evidence of crop insurance schemes, but need
to verify this impression in interviews with current and former principals such as President Julio
María Sanguinetti (1985-1990 and 1995-2000), President Luis Alberto Lacalle (1990-1995), and
the 1990s Tupamaro leader Jorge Zabalza.
49 World Bank Report No. 18489, “Implementation Completion Report: Uruguay, Second Agricultural Development
Project (Loan 3131-UR and associated Japanese Grant TF 026600),” October 22, 1998, available online:
http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2000/03/03/000094946_99030406222093/Rend
ered/PDF/multi_page.pdf). 50 Andres Domingo Gil-Rodriguez, Epidemiologic Study of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD), in Uruguay (PhD
Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1993); John A. Fox, Lautaro Perez, and Michael Boland, “Grassfed
Certification: The Case of the Uruguayan Beef Industry,” Agricultural Issues Center, University of California-Davis,
May 2005 (http://www.mab.ksu.edu/Research/publication%20pdfs/Grass-
Fed%20Certification,%20Perez%202005.pdf). 51 World Development Indicators; current-to-constant dollar conversion using http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl. 52 National Drought Mitigation Center, “Types of Drought,” University of Nebraska, Lincoln
(http://www.drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/TypesofDrought.aspx), accessed September 20, 2012. 53 FAO Summaries of the Uruguay Agricultural Censuses of 1990 and 2000
(http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/world_census_of_agriculture/main_results_by_country/Uru
guay_1990.pdf and
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/world_census_of_agriculture/main_results_by_country/Urug
uay_2000.pdf).
23
Table 2: Provisional Coding of State Interventions in Case Studies
Case Conflict? Changed
Trade
Balance
toward More
Imports?
Redistributed
Land?
Disseminated
New
Technology?
Implemented
Insurance
Scheme?
Haiti (1991) Yes, civil
war
Yes No Not seriously
attempted
(piecemeal
efforts but no
coordinated
policy)
No; in fact,
eliminated
unofficial
insurance of
Kreyòl pigs
Mexico
(1994)
Yes, low-
intensity
conflict
Unknown Attempted, but
undermined by
large
landowners
Attempted, but
small farmers
did not adopt
due to capital-
intensity
No evidence
Uruguay
(late 1980s-
1990s)
No Yes (but need
more
evidence on
social effects)
No Yes; substantial
technological
improvements
to cattle
ranching
No evidence
—
Table 2 shows a preliminary summary of the state interventions present in each of the
three case studies outlined above. We are still missing some data, particularly on the insurance
variable. The goal of the next year of research will be to fill these gaps, validate the data already
collected, and trace the relationship between individual interventions and the likelihood of
conflict in the state in question. These gaps notwithstanding, technological improvements appear
to be the most promising state intervention at this early stage. The Uruguayan government
appears to have been more effective at pushing through significant and far-reaching
technological upgrades to agriculture than in the Haitian or Chiapan cases. Meaningful
24
technological improvement thus appears to be the one variable that is largely present in the non-
conflict case and largely absent in the conflict cases. Trade balance manipulation happened in
Haiti, where conflict occurred, so that variable seems inadequate to explain variation. I have yet
to find an attempt at redistribution that was actually implemented, and state-imposed insurance
schemes seem absent from this set of empirics so far.
If technology does turn out to be the answer, it will be a relatively optimistic one for the
international community, which arguably has more capacity to influence the adoption of
technological innovation in the developing world than national-level trade, distributive, or
insurance policies. But technology as an answer will open up a whole set of subsidiary questions
about what kinds of agricultural technology will most effectively mitigate natural resource
shocks going forward, how technologies can be disseminated in ways that will trickle down to
small farmers (to avert the apparent failure of Mexican efforts), and the net environmental and
health impacts of technologies that may lower the likelihood of violent civil conflict but also
increase the likelihood of deleterious impacts on ecosystems or disease. Some of these questions
may, of course, have to be saved for another book project.
Research Plan
Table 3 gives a rough timeline of the research plan. The most time has been devoted to
the Uruguay case study, since the reasons for a lack of conflict are always more difficult to tease
out than the reasons for an onset of conflict, and since the Uruguayan case in particular has
limited secondary-source coverage to begin with. If executed successfully, the research plan will
yield a draft book in August 2014, which I then plan to share with both academic publishers and
policymakers in Washington and the developing world.
25
Table 3: Production Timeline as of April 2013
Stage Months Field Interviews
(if applicable)
Status
Background Research September – October
2012
N/A Completed
(prospectus
written)
Research on Haiti November 2012 –
February 2013
One week in
January 2013
Completed
(empirical chapter
written)
Research on Uruguay March – August 2013 One week in August
2013
In progress
Research on Chiapas September –
November 2013
One week in November
2013
Not started
Writing and Editing December 2013 –
August 2014
N/A Not started