The Geopolitics of Food Security: Barriers to the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger

The report argues that achieving Zero Hunger requires a geopolitical understanding of food security, as unilateralism and competition over resources, trade disruptions, and armed conflict create barriers to eradicating hunger. It highlights that climate change further complicates these dynamics by reshaping both the physical environment and political calculations, necessitating integrated policy analysis.

• Geopolitical challenges, characterized by unilateralism and zero-sum security approaches, obstruct efforts to eliminate hunger and weaken the governing frameworks for those efforts, specifically across the domains of trade, natural resources, climate change, and armed conflict.
• Food insecurity is linked to geopolitics through three primary interacting drivers: competition for agricultural resources, politically motivated supply disruptions in international trade, and armed conflict, which can both cause and be exacerbated by food insecurity.
• Climate change acts as a cross-cutting force that interacts with resource competition, trade, and conflict, altering both the physical landscape and the political calculus of food security.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2020). The Geopolitics of Food Security: Barriers to the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger. https://www.sei.org/publications/the-geopolitics-of-food-security-barriers-to-the-sustainable-development-goal-of-zero-hunger/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. The Geopolitics of Food Security: Barriers to the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger. 2020. https://www.sei.org/publications/the-geopolitics-of-food-security-barriers-to-the-sustainable-development-goal-of-zero-hunger/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=The Geopolitics of Food Security: Barriers to the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger |date=12 November 2020 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/the-geopolitics-of-food-security-barriers-to-the-sustainable-development-goal-of-zero-hunger/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2020geopolitics, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{The Geopolitics of Food Security: Barriers to the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2020}, month = nov, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/the-geopolitics-of-food-security-barriers-to-the-sustainable-development-goal-of-zero-hunger/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }