1

Breaking the Link between Climate Change and Conflict: Best Practices for Peacefully Managing Future Natural Resource Shocks in

the Western Hemisphere

Nathan Black (nblack@fas.harvard.edu)

Harvard University Center for the Environment / Harvard Government Department

Harvard-Yale-MIT Conference on Political Violence

April 27, 2013

2

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

3

Figure 1. Possible causal pathway from climate change to violent civil conflict.4

—

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.

4

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

5

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.

6

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).

7

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.

8

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.

9

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.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.

13

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.

14

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.

15

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.

16

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