Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War

Watch the Episode

Video originally published on May 29, 2024.

This analysis examines Why Famine is Returning as a Weapon of War in historical and strategic context. It traces how the core developments unfolded, which institutions and actors shaped outcomes, and what those decisions changed on the ground. Rather than repeating headline-level claims, it focuses on concrete mechanisms, constraints, and tradeoffs that explain the trajectory of events. The discussion moves from Key Developments through Strategic Implications to Risk and Uncertainty, then evaluates wider consequences. The goal is to clarify not only what happened, but why these developments still matter for current planning, risk assessment, and policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

Technological improvements meant getting lifesaving nutrients to starving people was easier than it had ever been.
In global hotspots from Sudan, to Haiti, to Gaza, millions teeter on the brink of famine.
One of those dreadful but unavoidable things - like wars - that aren't so much a bug, but a feature of life on Earth.
Unlike Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad, the Haitian gangs likely don't have any grand geopolitical goals.
The article is grounded strictly in the source video script and listed references.

Key Developments

Technological improvements meant getting lifesaving nutrients to starving people was easier than it had ever been. And while famine in war zones was still an issue, the Security Council would pass a unanimous resolution in 2018 that suggested depriving civilians of food during combat could constitute a war crime. In short, these were the heady days of optimism. An era when it looked like famine would soon go the way of smallpox or the Sega Dreamcast - a strange relic of a past best forgotten. Sadly, that optimism would turn out to be misplaced. Fast forward just nine years, and the number of people facing critical hunger is rising. Fast forward just nine years, and the number of people facing critical hunger is rising. In global hotspots from Sudan, to Haiti, to Gaza, millions teeter on the brink of famine. The one common denominator uniting them all? After decades as a taboo, the use of hunger as a weapon has come roaring back into fashion. As we're about to see, the reasons why range from the deeply cynical to the truly terrifying. (TITLE): Hungry Ghosts If you were to look at the sweep of human history prior to 1980, you might assume that famine was an inescapable part of civilization. One of those dreadful but unavoidable things - like wars - that aren't so much a bug, but a feature of life on Earth. The World Peace Foundation, for example, has estimated almost 115 million people died of starvation between 1870 and 1980 - mostly as a result of conflict, conquest, or totalitarianism. Prior to that the data gets sketchier, but any glance at history will throw up innumerable famines affecting almost every continent. But something strange happens when you look at the figures from 1980 onwards. After centuries as a fact of life, the number of starvation deaths starts falling, sharply. According to Vox, the average annual death toll due to famine post-1980 was 75,000. While that's still a lot of deaths, the outlet notes that it represents: “Just 8 percent of the historical average from the 1870s to now, even as the global population nearly doubled.” The reasons why aren't too hard to fathom. On the one hand, we made significant agricultural advances across the 20th century, leading to far-greater crop yields. On the other, a wider geopolitical shift towards democracy and cooperation eliminated the circumstances that characterized some of the previous century's worst famines. Gone were most of the highly-personalized regimes that allowed men like Mao Zedong or Josef Stalin to starve millions of their own citizens. Gone, too, were the brutal interstate conflicts - like WWII - that saw hunger deployed widely as a weapon. By the early-2010s, while famines still occurred, they were doing so only in isolated hotspots.

Strategic Implications

In global hotspots from Sudan, to Haiti, to Gaza, millions teeter on the brink of famine. The one common denominator uniting them all? Conflict. After decades as a taboo, the use of hunger as a weapon has come roaring back into fashion. As we're about to see, the reasons why range from the deeply cynical to the truly terrifying. (TITLE): Hungry Ghosts If you were to look at the sweep of human history prior to 1980, you might assume that famine was an inescapable part of civilization. As recently as 2016, the UN estimated that the number of people needing emergency food aid was a mere 130 million - again, a big number, but small by historical standards. That same year, the British researcher Alex De Waal was even able to write an article for the New York Times titled “Is the Era of Great Famines Over?” Unfortunately, it would soon turn out that the answer to his question was a resounding “no”. In an update to his 2016 article published this spring, De Waal noted that the number of people in desperate need of food aid had increased 180 percent in the last eight years, to 363 million. A resurgence of starvation being used as a weapon of war. In his words: “Many things go into the conditions that create a food crisis: crop failures, high food prices, unemployment. But it's war that has created the famines taking shape today.” De Waal isn't alone in making this conclusion. British medical journal The Lancet notes that (quote): “The destruction of the food supply can be deliberately used to starve people as a weapon of war, which has been more commonplace since 2010.” Overall, it's estimated that two thirds of people going hungry in 2024 live in, or are trying to escape, war zones. To see this in action, we need only glance at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (or IPC). Developed and maintained by UN agencies working in tandem with several non-profits, the IPC is considered the “gold standard” for measuring worldwide hunger. For ease of understanding, they break their measurements down into five categories: Minimal, Stressed, Crisis, Emergency, and Famine. A famine classification means that (quote): “20 percent of households in a region face an extreme lack of food, 30 percent of children have acute malnutrition, and two people out of every 10,000 in an area are dying every day from starvation or hunger-related health problems.” At time of writing, the IPC places 1.19 million people globally in this famine category, spread across just three countries. Around 79,000 are in South Sudan. The other 1.1 million are all in Gaza. All three locations are either ridden by instability and violence (South Sudan) or are active warzones (Mali and Gaza).

Risk and Uncertainty

One of those dreadful but unavoidable things - like wars - that aren't so much a bug, but a feature of life on Earth. The World Peace Foundation, for example, has estimated almost 115 million people died of starvation between 1870 and 1980 - mostly as a result of conflict, conquest, or totalitarianism. Prior to that the data gets sketchier, but any glance at history will throw up innumerable famines affecting almost every continent. But something strange happens when you look at the figures from 1980 onwards. After centuries as a fact of life, the number of starvation deaths starts falling, sharply. According to Vox, the average annual death toll due to famine post-1980 was 75,000. The same is true for other epicenters of hunger. Of the nearly 25 million people the IPC classifies at the Emergency phase, the largest number - nearly 5 million - are in Sudan, where a civil war rages. Globally, Alex De Waal reports that the region facing the worst food crisis is on the edges of the Red Sea, where Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen are all descending towards mass starvation. Not coincidentally, all five nations are either in a state of war or recently emerged from one. If that's the case, then, we need to ask an important question: why? Why is the use of hunger in conflicts rising this decade? The answers range from the banal to the utterly chilling. (TITLE): Starvation Weapon Historically, armies have not been shy about using starvation to achieve their goals. During WWII, Nazi Germany was explicit about wanting to eliminate enemy populations via hunger. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union saw about 4.5 million die as a result of these policies. Those fighting internal conflicts also knew how useful control of the food supply could be. Foreign Affairs recently described the way the Bolsheviks took advantage of unintentional famines during the Russian Civil War to consolidate their power. As the magazine noted (quote): “Famines across eastern Europe (...) offered the Bolsheviks such leverage over domestic opposition that they even contemplated rejecting food aid from the American Relief Administration, explicitly telling the Americans that “food is a weapon.” These are just two examples, but the 20th Century alone is littered with them. Ethiopia's Great Famine of the 1980s, for example, was in part so cataclysmic because the ruling Marxist Derg regime used it as an opportunity to starve northern regions where rebel groups opposed to their rule were based. Even the United States has acknowledged the advantages of controlling the food supply. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told Time magazine: “Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit.” In that case, Butz was talking about using the carrot of American agricultural abundance to lure developing nations onside, rather than using the stick of starvation to beat them into submission.

Outlook

While that's still a lot of deaths, the outlet notes that it represents: “Just 8 percent of the historical average from the 1870s to now, even as the global population nearly doubled.” The reasons why aren't too hard to fathom. On the one hand, we made significant agricultural advances across the 20th century, leading to far-greater crop yields. On the other, a wider geopolitical shift towards democracy and cooperation eliminated the circumstances that characterized some of the previous century's worst famines. Gone were most of the highly-personalized regimes that allowed men like Mao Zedong or Josef Stalin to starve millions of their own citizens. Gone, too, were the brutal interstate conflicts - like WWII - that saw hunger deployed widely as a weapon. By the early-2010s, while famines still occurred, they were doing so only in isolated hotspots. But it shows how widely-acknowledged the idea of food as a tool for achieving geopolitical goals was even recently. The reasons why aren't all that complicated. In an international conflict, control of the food supply can give you outsized leverage. We can see this most-clearly today in the Russia-Ukraine War. Since launching its full-scale invasion, the Kremlin has targeted not just Ukraine's ability to produce crops by destroying agricultural land, but also its ability to export them by targeting Kyiv's Black Sea shipping. In this case, the goal isn't to starve Ukrainians. Instead, it's to create instability in the global food market, driving prices up and pushing developing countries that rely on Ukrainian grain towards hunger. This creates incentives for those countries to push for a quick negotiated settlement - one that would solidify Russian gains in Ukraine's south and east. Internal conflicts, likewise, create conditions where starvation becomes useful. If an armed group is embedded in a civilian population, an effective - if extremely-brutal - way to destroy that base of support is to starve the civilians offering them shelter. We saw this in the Syrian Civil War, where Bashar al-Assad's regime launched what it openly called its “Starvation Until Submission Campaign,” stopping food from reaching residential areas where rebels were through to be holed up. Hunger can also be used to induce an unfriendly population to leave a certain area. During the 2023 blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan cut off all access to the ethnically-Armenian enclave, in what was interpreted as an attempt to force the hungry locals to flee. In the end, Nagorno-Karabakh fell to a lightning Azeri assault. But inducing hunger in its soldiers and civilians for months beforehand may well have helped hasten the end. Finally, controlling access to food can likewise give you leverage over a civilian population. Do it well enough, and you can effectively hold an entire city or even nation hostage. This is what's happening in Haiti right now, where armed gangs have taken over the ports, airports, and roads leading into Port-au-Prince.

The Waning Optimism: Famine Eradication Efforts in the 2010s

Unlike Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad, the Haitian gangs likely don't have any grand geopolitical goals. They just want to accumulate wealth and power, and controlling food access points gives them that - even if the result is an estimated 1.4 million Haitians now teetering on the brink of famine. So, those are some common reasons why states and armed groups might be incentivized to use hunger as a weapon. But there's also a practical dimension, one that's extremely depressing. Starvation as a weapon has one of the best cost-to-effectiveness ratios out there. Grim as it may be to say, it's extremely cheap to stop food reaching an unfriendly population. During Ethiopia's Tigray War, government forces and their Eritrean and Amhara allies required nothing more sophisticated than fire and machetes to burn swathes of farmland and kill all the animals. Oftentimes, warring parties don't even need to do that. One reason famines often accompany wars is because the instability and violence affect local farmers. As Foreign Policy notes: “When the quotidian is marred by violence and uncertainty, farmers plant smaller areas and lower-value subsistence crops. They also keep small livestock rather than more valuable cattle.” Alternatively, they may outright flee. Once productive land can therefore quickly be abandoned, meaning once warehouses are empty there's nothing coming down the pipeline to restock them. In this scenario, starving a population can be as cheap as refusing aid workers visas or refusing aid convoys entry. In Sudan, both warring factions are currently refusing to let aid trucks enter via all but a handful of crossings, thereby all but guaranteeing mass starvation. But it's not just individual bad actors who allow modern famines to take place in conflict zones. It's only thanks to a severely dysfunctional global system that they are able to get away with it. (TITLE): Global Problems Formed in the wake of WWII, the UN Security Council must've seemed - to 1940s' folk - like the biggest collection of great powers ever seen. Alongside its rotating members, the Council included five permanent members at the apex of their military and economic might: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and China. Since then, of course, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and its seat been inherited by Russia. The Republic of China created by Chiang Kai-shek has been replaced by the People's Republic of China that was forged by Mao Zedong. Importantly, though, all five countries still hold vetoes over United Nations' action on any military crisis. Vetoes that help explain why the UN is often so impotent in the face of modern famines. To illustrate, look no further than Russia's attempted blockade of Ukraine's ports.

The Resurgence of Famine as a Weapon of War

Although it created food instability for millions across parts of the Middle East and Africa, the UN was powerless to do anything as Moscow would simply veto any resolution. On the issue of Gaza, America has vetoed three calls for a ceasefire that might have allowed aid in. China, in turn, has vetoed a US call for a ceasefire in Gaza on the basis that it included language Beijing objected to. The result is that the very body set up to police conflicts around the globe and authorize action against rouge states has become a talking shop where Washington, Beijing, and Moscow score points against one another, while London and Paris - which have not used their vetoes since 1989 - simply keep their heads down. Obviously, this dysfunction affects more than just conflict-related famines. But it's a major reason why the world is so-frequently powerless to act in the face of starvation. Another major reason is the withering of global interest in regions suffering famine. Yeah, we know: given all the hubbub on US campuses about Gaza, the idea that global interest in starvation is “withering” might seem absurd. But aid agency budgets tell a different story. Writing in the New York Times, Alex De Waal notes that: “Until five years ago, the United Nations' annual appeals for emergency aid were funded to the tune of 60 percent. In 2023, that dropped to about 35 percent.” To take a representative case, it's been known for many months now that Sudan faces a catastrophic famine this year if aid cannot get in. As recently as January, though, the UN refugee agency's Sudan budget had only received slightly over three percent of the money it needed. That situation has since improved, thanks to an unlocking of US humanitarian aid and an April conference held by France, where multiple nations pledged millions of dollars. Even now, though, the appeal is not close to fully funded. Finally, another major issue stopping the world from uniting on famine relief is that things have just got a lot crazier in the past couple of years. Where aid agencies could once send supply ships via the Red Sea, the danger of Houthi missile attacks are now forcing them to take long, expensive routes around South Africa. Inflation and price shocks related to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have likewise pushed up the costs of simply getting a crate full of food to a country in need. Combined with shrinking aid budgets, it doesn't take a genius to see that this vital work is becoming much harder. OK, so those are some major reasons why starvation is returning to warfare in such a big way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does famine cause war?

See the full article for details on Does famine cause war?.

Why is world hunger not solved yet?

See the full article for details on Why is world hunger not.

What actually caused the famine?

See the full article for details on What actually caused the famine?.

Can famine be stopped?

See the full article for details on Can famine be stopped?.

How does famine affect people?

See the full article for details on How does famine affect people?.

Related Coverage

Sources

About the Author

Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

About the Team →