Food Insecurity Bulletin - I2/2024 – Issue No.31
Since 2009, the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) has periodically published the Food Security Bulletin as a voluntary contribution from its own resources to support the
efforts of the Food Security Sector in Palestine. The Bulletin aims to support decision-makers and institutions operating in improving the conditions of this sector and serve as a periodic useful reference for reviewing developments in and conducting a comparison of the conditions of the sector biannually. The Bulletin is one of MAS’s research and scientific contributions to food security issues in recent years, especially through research projects carried out in collaboration with partners, such as the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Given these disastrous conditions experienced by the Gaza Strip since 2023, which are only worsening as the war continues, we have retitled the Bulletin in 2024-2025 (Autumn and Winter
2023, and Summer 2024) as “the Food Insecurity Bulletin”, to emphasize the manner in which deployment by the Israeli occupation of starvation policies as a weapon of war, has devastated all vital aspects of Palestinian life. Within this context, the Bulletin complements efforts by MAS since 2023 not only to document and monitor the continuing Israeli aggression on Palestine in its multiple social and economic dimensions, but also to assess the relief, policy, funding, and institutional requirements to address the repercussions of the aggression.
By the end of its fifteenth month, the war has left in its wake unprecedented impacts that are evidence of the ongoing Israeli attempts to weaken the Palestinian society and undermine its
development structures. The prospects for the repercussions of the aggression grow increasingly grim with every passing day, an outlook manifested in the fact that it could take decades to complete the relief, social and economic reconstruction and bring back life in Palestine in general, and in the Gaza Strip in particular, to a state resembling pre-2023 life. Needless to say, such a life could barely be described as developmental or sufficient.
This Bulletin sheds light on the latest humanitarian developments regarding food insecurity, exploring the most prominent indicators of a food catastrophe in the Gaza Strip on the supply and demand sides. Given the attempts to undermine varieties of food crops, MAS reviews the most prominent models of nutritional resilience of displaced people who managed to make optimal use of the narrow areas of land, located next to tents, to provide a few staple food items. In this section, MAS discusses the continued systematic destruction of food infrastructure in the West Bank along with their indicators as an attempt intended for the expansion of Israeli settlements and the displacement of Palestinians. The Bulletin highlights individual and collective initiatives in addition to some institutional and government initiatives launched in this regard and questions the possibility of transforming these initiatives into a sustainable alternative to work in the Israeli labor market. It devotes a section to cover the recent olive season, the most prominent indicators and challenges in light of the aggression on the Gaza Strip, in addition to the upsurge in attacks by the occupation and settlers on agricultural lands in the West Bank.
The second section of this Bulletin updates the regular monitoring of developments in food prices globally and locally, as such prices have been greatly affected by blocking the entry of commercial goods or aid into the Strip. It also monitors the decline in oil production in some oil-producing countries, which has affected global prices and caused them to rise, in addition to the rising prices of dairy products.
The third, literature review section of the Bulletin first covers a report issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in July. The report presents the most
prominent indices of food security at the global level in 2023, reviewing the progress and decline in the four dimensions of food security. It explores the challenge of achieving the goals of the elimination of hunger as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), focusing on the necessity for developing financing mechanisms for food and nutrition security. The Bulletin then reviews three recent studies, based on field surveys conducted in the Gaza Strip in the course of the war, to clarify the most prominent food insecurity indices along with some future prospects for their effects. Finally, the section presents a review of a policy summary on the history of the concept of food sovereignty in Palestine, given settler-colonialism and the attempts to destroy the production infrastructure. It offers a conceptualization of food sovereignty as a tool for resilience in the course of the current aggression.