Resilience of food system actors to armed conflicts: empirical insights from Burkina Faso

In this article we analyse the resilience of food systems’ actors exposed to violent conflicts, using primary data collected in the Yagha province of Burkina Faso. The different resilience strategies adopted by actors of the local food systems when faced with recurrent attacks and high level of insecurity are analysed. We also analyse the factors that may explain why those actors demonstrate different capacities to resist and to adapt to shocks. For this purpose, we use a series of econometric models in which the change in actors’ economic activity is linked to a series of variables, including their exposure to insecurity, sociodemographic characteristics, wealth and social network. Overall, our analysis shows that local food system actors have reduced the volume of their economic activity by about 50% between mid-2020 and mid-2021. The analysis also reveals that actors who were exposed to more frequent violent events are more likely to have opted for strategies that are detrimental for their businesses; and that food system actors who have broader social networks are able to mitigate better the impact of armed conflict. In contrast, no robust evidence was found about the potential mitigating effect of actor’s individual wealth. The article concludes by a series of short recommendations.