This piece is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.
Conflict is the largest driver of hunger and starvation, and food has become one of the cheapest weapons of war. More than 120 million people are currently displaced by violence or persecution, and 60 percent of the world’s hungriest live in conflict-affected countries. At last count, the Center for Preventive Action found 27 active conflicts around the world. From Gaza to Sudan and from Ukraine to Yemen, withholding food is now a deliberate strategy of war.
The ongoing war in Ukraine illustrates this reality. Once Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine’s farmland has been mined and blockaded, cutting off global grain supplies. Similar tactics appear elsewhere: in Gaza, famine now compounds the humanitarian crisis as food access is restricted as a part of Israel’s war against Hamas. Whether defined as genocide or not, the reality is that food deprivation is being weaponized to achieve military and political ends.
A Historical Pattern
Weaponizing food is nothing new. The Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) starved over a million civilians. The Bengal famine of 1943, exacerbated by British policies, left millions of dead. During Nigeria’s Biafran War (1967–1970), famine was used to weaken separatists. In the 1990s Balkans war, Sarajevo was cut off from food supplies. More recently, Syrian forces bombed bakeries to terrorize populations, while Russian forces destroyed Ukrainian grain.
History makes clear: starvation is not collateral damage—it is a tactic. Yet international law still struggles to hold perpetrators accountable.
International Law and Limited Action
Since its founding in 1946, the United Nations has repeatedly confronted ongoing crises marked by manmade famine and starvation. The 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Protocols prohibit withholding food from civilians, but these are considered broadly as crimes against humanity. It was not until 2018 that the U.N.’s Security Council adopted Resolution 2417 condemning famine as a weapon.
While sanctions are intended to enforce international law by penalizing those who obstruct humanitarian assistance, accountability remains elusive. The International Criminal Court (ICC) established in 1998 includes intentional starvation of civilians as a crime. Yet, as a recent review by Chase Sova highlighted, prosecutions remain rare, the legal framework is weak, and U.N. investigations often stall as powerful states block enforcement.
Meanwhile, millions continue to suffer. Today, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, northern Nigeria, and South Sudan are on the verge of famine. These crises share a common thread: deliberate obstruction of food.
Why Food is a Powerful Weapon
Food’s power lies in its universality. It is also the cheapest weapon of war. Starvation kills slowly, demoralizes populations, and erodes cultures. Women—often primary farmers—are disproportionately targeted and their livelihoods destroyed.
Modern communications now expose these crimes in real time. As global famine expert Alex de Waal notes, in the age of social media, perpetrators can no longer hide famine. Anyone with a cell phone or a laptop can see what is happening in real time. Instead, countries resort to “statistical denialism,” contesting or suppressing data to obscure accountability. But suppressing the news to deny what one can see is no longer an option.
Still, visibility alone does not translate into action. Global outrage rarely leads to intervention. The U.N. has limited tools to enforce accountability, and political divisions prevent coordinated responses.
Today’s Urgent Challenge
The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals pledged in 2015 to get to Zero Hunger by 2030. Yet progress is faltering. It will get worse since the United States withdrew its support for the SDGs in September.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture’s State of Food Insecurity 2025 report, 673 million people–or 8.2 percent of the global population–remain hungry. Hunger has declined slightly since 2022, but ending hunger by 2030 is now unlikely. Unless we address the connection between conflict and food, the cycle of manmade famine will continue.
The moral urgency is clear: starvation should be treated not as an inevitable byproduct of war, but as a deliberate crime. Sanctions, international monitoring, and accountability mechanisms must target those who use food as a weapon. Governments and civil society alike must insist that the global community move beyond condemnation to action.
Ending the Weaponization of Food
From Leningrad to Gaza and Biafra to Ukraine, the lesson is the same: food is not only sustenance, but also a cheap weapon. Conflict-driven hunger is man-made, preventable, and one of the gravest injustices of our time. The world must recognize withholding food as an inhumane act of warfare, strengthen mechanisms to prosecute perpetrators, and mobilize political will to protect civilians.
Striving to end global hunger by reducing the number of people on this planet who are hungry is a means of conflict prevention. What we do know is that since the U.N.’s founding global hunger has been reduced because of great advances in agriculture such as the Green Revolution, the increased coordination of humanitarian assistance, and economic development in places like India and China. Working to get to Zero Hunger by 2030, however, may not happen as other factors such as climate change, epidemics, and ongoing conflicts create insurmountable barriers, headwinds that destroy the progress made in the last eighty years.
Unless the global architecture is refreshed so that access to food no longer becomes the main driver of global conflict, we are likely to see more suffering and death going forward. That means we must focus on democratic governance and giving voice to people remains essential to the fight against global hunger. At the end of the Cold War we saw a window to expand the benefits of more open societies across the globe and there was documented progress in many parts of Africa and Asia. Linking this message to the discussions about food weaponization is essential.
Ending hunger will not be possible without ending the weaponization of food. Until nations commit to resolving conflicts and holding aggressors accountable, we will continue to witness famine not as a natural disaster, but as a deliberate tool of destruction.
Photo courtesy of Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons
