Sir Graham was looking for adventure when he took a call asking if he would serve as a military assistant to the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, working on peacebuilding in Bosnia.
It was the mid-1990s and up until then, Sir Graham had a conventional career in the Air Force’s RAF Regiment, a combat unit tasked with capturing airfields and defending helicopters.
The next year was spent in Sarajevo and occasionally Brussels. “It was the beginning of my transition from traditional military operations into nation-building and post-conflict recovery,” Sir Graham explains – and ultimately to his involvement with United Against Malnutrition & Hunger (UAMH).
Moving up the ranks while serving in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, Sir Graham looked deeper into the root causes of conflict and confrontation. “I was always struck by the vicious circle between wars and combat and food security and hunger,” he says.
“Throughout history, food has been used as a weapon of war. From biblical explanations of sowing salt into soil, to the scorched earth policy in the Second World War, to the American Civil War when it was deemed legal to starve the enemy, to Gaza now. War strips people away from the land.”
Adopted in 2018, UN Security Resolution 2147 condemns the starving of civilians as a method of warfare — as well as the unlawful denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations. Nevertheless, says Sir Graham, who tomorrow chairs Hunger and Conflict: A Deadly Cycle, the event UAMH is staging with RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), food is wielded as a weapon of war on “a daily basis.”
A thoughtful and considered man with obvious people skills and a wealth of experience, Sir Graham has witnessed horrors in his military career that he wishes he could unsee. The word ‘peacekeeping’ tells only half the story.
“The reality is that most conflicts do not have clear winners or losers. There is always a compromise, which means unfinished business and tension,” he explains.
“The ability of human beings to inflict pain and suffering on others is terrifying. But for each time I have seen the worst of humanity, I have seen ten examples of the best of it. I have always wanted to try to facilitate the good in people and not dwell on evil.”
He says the military is typically the first organisation deployed in post-conflict situations to establish safety and security because it holds the resources to act quickly. “It has 10,000 people sitting in barracks ready to go,” he explains. But peacekeeping extends to all manner of endeavours to support regeneration.
Repairing the power supply in Afghanistan, rebuilding the port in Basra, and replacing Iraq’s currency because “it had Saddam’s face on it,” provide a snapshot of Sir Graham’s varied activities.
He explains that since government departments take time to spin up their activities, NGOs are often the only other international groups operating on the ground and the relationship can be far from easy. “Some humanitarian organisations have a healthy suspicion of the military which has a different chain of command. We have secrets and planning rooms they cannot enter, so it is unsurprising it does not feel like teamwork to them,” Sir Graham explains.
“Once I was invited to a meeting only to be told I could not enter because I was in uniform. There is a lack of trust. It takes a forward-thinking commander to make it work. But the common ground is that we are both trying to improve lives.”
After leaving the military Sir Graham eschewed lucrative job offers, deciding instead to use his global knowledge and ability for strategic thinking to challenge what he considers to be the root cause of the planet’s problems. “If you asked me what my four horsemen of the apocalypse would be, one is inequality,” he explains.
The injustice of food inequality, so often locked in a vicious cycle alongside conflict, propelled him to join UAMH’s alliance as an advisor on our Global Leadership Council. In addition to being a Senior Consulting Fellow at the European Leadership Network, a group working to reduce nuclear risk, he participates in the International Military Council on Climate and Security.
The inflammatory influence of climate change is increasingly apparent to him. “In my mind, the relationship between conflict and hunger has been put on steroids by climate change. It is a multiplier that makes bad situations much worse,” he says, pointing to the current situation in Sudan as one of the starkest examples of how climate change coupled with conflict-driven hunger is propelling migration.
“The horrible mix of conflict and climate change completely breaks the agricultural system. Large numbers of people move. That is already a bad situation, but add an ethnic, religious, or tribal element and there is a different level of concern.”
He gets frustrated when people deride migrants and refugees, elucidating, “the fact is that we live in a world where in one part life expectancy could be as much as 100 years and in another part it is 50 years. If someone said you can double the life expectancy of your children by migrating, you can understand why you might have a go.”
During his career, he has witnessed hunger’s palpable effect. “People become more interested in self-survival than society,” he says. “It makes them more vulnerable to exploitation. Women who are often second-class citizens suffer most in food crises.”
Sir Graham stresses his support of capitalism and its ability to generate wealth but is adamant that it must adapt to function for a fairer world. “If we want to stop people moving around the globe, they need the tools to feed themselves where they are,” he says. A key to the solution is restructuring the world food system, “so people can plant the food they need and want to consume locally, rather than supply green beans and strawberries for us to buy in Waitrose all year round. It is up to us to take responsibility for that too.”
We end our interview on a note of optimism. “The next generation gives me enormous hope,” he says smiling. “All over the world, from the UK to Afghanistan, I have seen 19-year-olds doing amazing things. So, I believe that there are people out there who can make this world work better than it does now.”
