The 2012 crisis in Mali and its implications on resilience and food security

Food security can be considered an outcome of resilience. From this perspective, a household can be considered resilient if it manages to recover from a shock and return to the previous level of food security that it held prior to the shock occurring. As such, exploring the nexus between resilience and conflict means looking at both a theoretical and an analytical framework that can help to establish the channels through which conflict affects resilience and, ultimately, food security. This approach also draws policymakers' attention to the key aspects to be considered (in the case of conflict) in order to restore and/or maintain resilience and, thus, food security. This analysis highlights that household resilience deteriorates as a result of: reduced adaptive capacity; a decrease in productive and non-productive assets; and an increase in exposure to shocks. This paper looks at datasets from Mali in order to econometrically measure the impact of conflict ' namely, the 2012 Tuareg rebellion and insurrection of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) ' on resilience to food insecurity for the population in northern Mali. The findings of this paper show that these conflicts have had a strong impact, which must be adequately addressed with supportive interventions.