Relatively little is known about how households struggling to survive protracted violence and displacement get by economically, what shapes their (agricultural) livelihoods and what determines their food security. This is true both of socio-economic determinants and of the natural science of smallholder agriculture in conflict and fragile settings. Standard agricultural surveys in conflict-affected countries only sporadically feature questions related to the causes and consequences of violence, leaving treatments ad-hoc and incomparable across different settings. This makes it hard to build a systematic and comparable understanding of how violence has affected different people, communities and population groups, and constitutes a key gap in agricultural policies in conflict-affected settings. Building on these insights, one session at the Seventh International Conference on Agricultural Statistics (ICAS VII) will review recent efforts to measure violence, conflict, instability and fragility at the micro-level in the agricultural sector in low, middle and high income countries. Particular preference will be given to papers developing and testing new methodologies for data collection on conflict dynamics or individual behaviour and welfare outcomes in rural settings and to papers using such data analytically to understand the performance of agriculture and rural development in times of violent conflict. The deadline for the submission of abstracts has been extended till 15 November 2015. For more information, see here and here.
Our Initiatives
