Reshaping Multilateralism: Linking Food and Security in Munich

Reshaping Multilateralism è un nuovo podcast sull’intersezione tra cibo, clima, sicurezza e migrazione, realizzato dal team di Nexus25. Nel corso di questa serie, il team tratterà le ultime novità in materia di finanziamenti per il clima, disaccordi multilaterali, sfide per la sicurezza e altro ancora, con la partecipazione di esperti provenienti da ogni angolo del mondo.

Reshaping Multilateralism è una produzione del progetto Nexus25, un’iniziativa congiunta dell’Istituto Affari Internazionali e del Centro per il Clima e la Sicurezza finanziata dalla Stiftung Mercator e prodotta in collaborazione con storielibere.fm.

AffarInternazionali vi propone il primo episodio della serie in cui il responsabile di Nexus25, Michael Werz, conduce gli ascoltatori a margine della Conferenza sulla sicurezza di Monaco di Baviera dove, nell’era del rinnovato conflitto israelo-palestinese, della guerra della Russia in Ucraina e dei dibattiti sulla sfida della Cina, i partecipanti di quest’anno hanno cercato di mediare accordi sulle implicazioni del cambiamento climatico per la sicurezza – e su come costruire società, militari e sistemi alimentari più resistenti in risposta. Michael è affiancato dal direttore del Programma alimentare mondiale di Berlino, Martin Frick, e dall’attivista sudanese per il clima, Nisreen Elsaim, per discutere del successo ottenuto nell’affrontare il tema della sicurezza alimentare globale e di cosa tenere d’occhio nello spazio multilaterale questa primavera.

 

My name is Thin Lei Win. I’m a journalist specializing in food and climate issues, a member of the Nexus25 team, and one of your hosts. This. is reshaping multilateralism, a podcast at the intersection of food, climate security, and migration from the team at Nexus25 featuring experts from every corner of the globe.

Thin Lei Win:

In this episode, we’ll give you an insight perspective of the Munich security conference. Known colloquially as the MSC, beyond debates over strategic competition with China and aid to Ukraine, this year’s agenda reflected growing focus on the security implications of climate change and how to build more resilient societies, militaries, and food systems in response.

But what is the MSC and why is it so important that we dedicate an entire podcast episode to it? To understand the MSC, you have to go all the way back to 1963. Then, memories of the Second World War were still fresh, while a new world order, the Cold War, was at full throttle. It is under these circumstances that roughly 60 leaders from the world’s biggest military powers gathered in a dark back room in Munich.

The aim? To support collective defense efforts and debate confrontation with the Soviet Union. This first conference, unofficially dubbed as a transatlantic family meeting by its founders, didn’t have the grandstanding, global reach, and tight security parameters of the Munich Security Conference we know today.

But it has since evolved into one of the most important, if not the most important, independent forum for global policy makers. Today, the MSC has become a place to see and be seen, or as one prominent think tank has said, after MSC 2020, a sort of can film festival for ugly people. The conference includes hundreds of voices from the Global South and civil society representatives and women.

Covering more policy areas than ever before. The conference has also become a place for leaders to make political waves. In 2003, then German Minister for Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer questioned the rationale for a war against Iraq, publicly signaling division between the U. S. and Germany. and a key European ally on Middle East policy.

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin used the forum to rail against Western, aka American, military might and warn against NATO’s eastward expansion. In 2011, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratified the New START treaty on the MSC sidelines.

And just this year, Yulia Navalnaya took the stage just hours after the news of her husband Alexei Navalny’s death to call for Putin and his allies to be held accountable. Today’s geopolitical environment. is even more complicated than the events that drove war leaders to a dark back room in 1963.

These include longstanding conflict between Israel and Hamas that erupted into a war in Gaza in October, leading to thousands of civilian casualties. The shadow of the 2024 US elections and a potential second Trump administration continues to threaten multilateral institutions. Conflict and instability continues throughout much of sub Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

And European leaders are nervously anticipating right wing gains. in the European Parliament. To top it all off, November 2023’s pessimistic global stocktake and the controversial COP28 in Dubai showed the urgency of addressing the development, migration, and security challenges related to climate change.

Staving off catastrophic levels of global warming will require trillions in climate finance. trillions that the international community seems hesitant to commit. After a few weeks of holiday, many of the same leaders we saw in Dubai reconvene in Munich to discuss what’s next for the climate security nexus.

Michael Werz:

So welcome back everyone. I’m Michael Werz, one of the co leads of the Nexus 25 project. This week we’re discussing this year’s Munich security conference where leaders convened to assess the state of global security, Europe’s role in a changing environment, but also had a lot of representatives from countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to discuss world affairs.

The Nexus 25 team was in Munich as well. We did host a high level dialogue with the UN food program on the food, climate, and security nexus. Over lunch, roughly 30 policymakers, academics, and officials debated the state of global hunger and how to get actors thinking and acting in a more integrated way.

Before we discuss, I wanted to take a step back and lay out by the MSC, the Munich Security Conference, and our team here at Nexus 25, are talking more and more about food systems. After all, you might ask, isn’t the Munich Security Conference about defense and military cooperation? Those things are still important.

And as has been mentioned in the early beginning, this was a transatlantic convening, but the MSC has considerably shifted away from an exclusive hard power military capabilities oriented conversation and is now recognizing that the international community needs to discuss that food is power. And that food security also is an integral part of national security considerations.

The interactions between climate, food, and security have the power to destabilize governments in entire regions. They drive mobility and migration. And they also threaten the health and safety of billions of people. And most critically, maybe, food security is a valuable predictive tool. When you start tracking indicators like futures, prices of commodities, individual country stockpiles, and dramatic dips in crop yields, you begin to see patterns of instability and potential security risks that tend to fall.

This is exactly why sustainable food systems and food security are on the MSC agenda and on our minds at Nexus 25. Recognizing that connection, policymakers are now asking themselves increasingly What changes need to be made to our current food systems approach? How can multilateralism be leveraged to address nexus challenges in the future?

And questions that are related to these important issues. To discuss this further, I’m joined by two experts working at the nexus of European security and climate change, and also have a deep expertise in the African continent.

Dr. Martin Frick is the director of the World Food Programme’s Berlin office and a former senior director of the UN Climate Change.

And Nisreen Elsaim is a Sudanese climate activist and former chair of the UN Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.

Both of you We’re at this year’s Nexus side event at the Munich Security Conference. So let’s start with a debrief of the conference as a whole and other key multilateral forums this year.

Martin, let me begin with you. From your perspective, how are multilateral fora like the Munich Security Conference addressing or how are they failing to address the intersectional impacts of climate change that we have just talked?

Martin Frick: Well, thank you, Michael. both. Let me start by the failure. Indeed, we just had the last climate conference that prominently spoke about climate and security, climate and food.

And it was about time because this was the conference number 28. And I think if something has changed over the last four years, then it’s in the aftermath of the COVID crisis, in the aftermath of Russia’s Invasion in Ukraine, world leaders have seen and understood how very vulnerable our global food system is.

And that this vulnerability also applies to shocks from climate change, which we are seeing more frequently and more severe than ever before. So having heads of states, ministers of foreign affairs, top brass, discussing food systems and the impact that climate change is having on food systems is really something that makes me hopeful that we are starting to understand and even to manage the complexity that we are seeing here.

Michael Werz: Let me turn it over to you, Nisreen. Again, what is your experience at the Munich Security Conference, also in the context of COP28, how do you see these issues of intersectional impacts being integrated in international platforms?

As you know, Michael, the topic of climate change, peace and security, climate conflict driven, the nexus of climate, peace and security, but also climate with food security, with energy security, and of course with water security, are not new topics.

Yet the interest of it and putting them as main agendas in different forums and different platforms is recently, I can say something that is reasonably new comparing to the actual need of it, but I think it’s a great step forward. And I think, um, as we are moving and talking about the problem, Then we are doing the first step of acknowledging what’s happening.

And then of course we move to the next step of putting different solutions to it. And yes, I think it is a great progress that we are now talking about these topics. And it’s even greater that now people realize that nexuses are not enough. We need the nexus of the nexuses. And I think this is what everyone is looking forward now.

The holistic approaches for climate change and climate peace and security next.

Michael Werz: Thank you, Nisreen. And let me follow this up with a question. Martin, you are a veteran of multilateral organizations and you’ve been working for the World Food Program for a number of years now. Um, do you feel that people in the diplomatic arena have or even in the military and national security arena are looking differently at organizations like the world food program than they might have five, six, seven, or even 10 years ago?

Nisreen Elsaim: By all means, because it’s becoming obvious that the classic term of a military stabilization intervention is shifting. Look at what happened in Mali, for example, where military was sent, but was not able to stabilize the situation. Now, if you are on the ground in the Sahel, you can see how once arable land has disappeared and how precisely the hotspots of land degradation and the hotspots of food insecurity equal the hotspots of hard security situations are recruitment areas for extremism.

Now, it has come to, um, world leaders and to military planners that these developments are over and beyond the military capacities they might have, even if you are a superpower. But building food systems from the bottom up can actually provide exactly the stabilization dividend we are looking at.

Michael Werz: Nesrin, also to you, what does food security mean to you and how do you address it in your work?

Are there steps forward that you see or what are the deficiencies in the food security conversation and food security policy debate that you could identify?

Uh, first of all, the topic of food security is a topic of survival and that’s why a lot of countries are taking this topic as one of their top priority.

Um, the big question for me is what does global food security mean and why I added global? Is because now, as we speak, some nations are using the land and water and the opportunities and let me say the resources of other other nations to secure the food for their own people and neglect the owners of the land or the people of the nations that they are using their land for their food safety or food security.

When we speak about global food security, then we are speaking about zero hunger, about the SDGs goal number one, because if one nation is secured in terms of food, for example, another nation is not, then It is a different catastrophes. It’s a migration catastrophe is an unjustice catastrophe. And of course it will be business as usual in terms of development, in terms of education, in terms of everything.

Because if someone is hungry, then I cannot tell them to send their kids to school. If someone is hungry, I cannot educate them. If someone is hungry, then a lot of diseases come that if someone is hungry, then how can we talk about democracy and rule flow? For me, it’s specifically from a climate change perspective.

If someone is hungry, how can I tell them don’t cut the tree? And of course, the normal question and answer will be, if I am hungry, then how can I feed the tree? If I’m thirsty and I don’t have water, for example, if we talked about water security itself, am I going to irrigate a tree? So it is an equilibrium situation that we need to conserve.

And we need to remember that in terms of safety and security, no one is safe until we are all safe. And I think COVID made a great example of that.

Michael Werz: Moving on to food security, I’ll pose this question to both of you. What does food security mean to you and how do you work to address it in your daily profession?

Are there major wins or gaps in our food security policy that you see? Martin, let me start with you.

Well, the World Food Programme is most known for its humanitarian intervention, but really has a double mandate. It’s not only addressing the food security issues of people in acute need, it’s also trying to get people out of poverty.

of disaster areas into food security. So what we are seeing is that if you start building food security, you also start building structures on the ground that help people to live in a more stable environment. Food security is a function of peace and the lack of food security is the last consequence of everything else, um, going wrong.

So I would argue that, you know, as in an interconnected crisis, hunger is what you ultimately get, that in a complicated situation, food security is the lens you can apply to actually make your way through. through a difficult situation and create the conditions that really are needed to get a country into development and hopefully into stability.

Michael Werz: Nisbet, let me follow this up with a question. You have been involved in many conversations and had a bunch of speaking opportunities at this year’s Munich Security Conference. This is traditionally at least a military to military conference. Do you feel that you Your arguments and the issues that you bring to the table are being taken seriously in that environment.

Uh, well, I think this is a very good question. Um, but the answer for it is a bit complicated because I’m not sure whether the traditional security army people, for example, Are now more interested in climate change and other drivers for conflict, or the conference itself have opened to more audience who are interested in climate change.

And I think I’m saying this because I’ve met a lot of people, young people, but also senior officials from different countries and different areas. Uh, they were already in climate change when they came to the conference, but I cannot say it’s the same on the people who came with different ideas and topics in their minds and then got influenced by, by climate change.

This is basically a thing because of the nature of having parallel sessions that everyone can choose, of course, what they, they want to attend. Uh, so sometimes, uh, people get, of course, if they didn’t choose to attend the climate change sessions and so on, they get somehow more bubbled in their own world of sessions because they have the choice of.

If I may, of course, give a small recommendation, it would be to have more diversity topics on the main stage so everyone, even if not interested, can attend somehow. And then, of course, it might influence their attention and catch their attention a little bit. But yes, there is, of course, a huge crowd in most of our sessions, and most of the crowd are already, as I observed earlier, interested in climate change.

Michael Werz: Last question to you, Martin. You have been in this business for a long time. Let me just briefly turn to the current policy changes and also questions to you with regard to potential recommendations that you see that could be implemented. to support sustainable security, food security, and climate security.

In your opinion, how can organizations do better at breaking down the silos that still exist between diplomacy, security, climate, food, migration, and how do we incentivize more complex approaches to these nexus issues and better integrate perspectives from all over the world?

I think what we have witnessed that the Munich security is exactly a step in the right direction.

You’ve seen unlikely people speaking about food security and the ramifications it has for security. We need to deal with the complexity that our world is exposing us to. And if you look, for example, at Sub Saharan Africa, Chad now seems to be the only country still standing and becoming fragile because of the migration out of Sudan and other places.

If we don’t get this stabilized, we will see a belt of instability reaching basically from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This is just something the world cannot afford. Now, starting with food security, starting with With the most vulnerable people is what the UN has pledged to do. The sustainable development goals have the tagline of leaving no one behind, but it’s also, I believe, a security imperative because every community left behind will become vulnerable, will become recipients of humanitarian aid.

And all too often will be the next crisis region, the international community has to pay attention to.

Michael Werz: We’ve been talking a lot about these nexus approaches, and you have spoken about the interface of climate change, migratory movements, food security, and conflict, and how this impacts your home continent of Africa.

What is your idea of how to better integrate perspectives from Africa, from Latin America, from Asia, from the region that we euphemistically call the global south into this conversation?

Well, there is a like sub questions to your question, and I think the sub questions are first of all, how can we get data from Africa?

Um, and Latin America and Asia, and this data can be, of course, trusted and we can from this data actually reach conclusions or make studies and so on. And the second question might be, how can we localize the knowledge or the science making, which is, of course, integrates the universities, the research centers, but I mean, the use of the data that will be collected.

I think the third sub question will be how to increase the participation of the global South nations in these meetings and, and, and these settings. And I think the Munich Security Conference is doing quite well in terms of, uh, integrating different nations, uh, at least in the last two years I attended comparing to the past.

But the bigger question for us as young people specifically, and this is what we were talking about all the time, is not only participation, but meaningful participation and how can we make participation meaningful. Um, the influence being in a position or in a table or in a situation where you can actually influence the decision making and how policies are being made, not only locally but globally, um, is a very key step.

And this is something that we need to discuss with a lot of stakeholders, including, of course, the Munich Security Conference. It is not enough to bring the Global South to an event. It’s not enough to put them in a panel. It is not enough to listen to them. Listening plus acting is what is needed to change things.

And giving certain flexibility and also authorities to these people from the Global South, I think, is going to resolve a lot of the obstacles that we are facing currently.

Michael Werz: Thank you, Ms. Rehn. Let me end this conversation with a couple of notes on why food security is so important. It is not only a humanitarian issue, but it is important that we move towards a more systemic and geopolitically informed conversation.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown that not only the immediate battlefield in Europe is of importance, but that there are secondary and ripple effects that affect tens if not hundreds of millions of people when it comes to the security of commodity supply chains to wheat and commodity prices, but also to making sure that countries that need agricultural products have the fertilizer that they need.

This is not a unique experience that we have. The, um, Ukraine, uh, war is having ripple effects that are really considerable. It is a semblance of what we have lived during the years preceding the so called Arab Spring where droughts and, uh, bad harvests were affecting communities and societies in the Levant and in Northern Africa.

So we try to continue these conversations to inspire a more complex and a more integrated policy conversation. international security, the international diplomacy, but also the climate, migration, and food security arena. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thin Lei Win: Thank you, Michael. In the next episode, we will pivot from Munich to Southeast Asia.

From rising sea levels to heat waves and droughts, one of the world’s most populous regions remains on the front lines of climate change. And with food security challenges, a growing population, historical ethnic tensions, and the ever present disputes around neighboring China, Southeast Asia is squarely at the climate Security migration nexus.

And I will guide you through these topics with the help of several experts living and working in the region.

“Reshaping Multilateralism” is a production of the Nexus25 project, a joint Istituto Affari Internazionali/Center for Climate and Security initiative funded by Stiftung Mercator in Germany and produced in partnership with storielibere.fm. To learn more about nexus challenges and read our latest analysis, please visit www.nexus25.org. Remember to follow us on our website, storielibere.fm and your favorite listening app. Thank you for listening.

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