By Samantha Barnes, International Banker
On October 16, World Food Day was celebrated globally in commemoration of the same date in 1945—the date the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was founded. This year, however, World Food Day also saw Oxfam release its report, “Food Wars: Conflict, Hunger, and Globalization, 2023”, which revealed that crisis-level acute food insecurity reached an all-time high last year, with violent conflict a key driver. The report also confirmed a record high of forcibly displaced people, 117.3 million, was reached, with 77 percent of them in countries affected by hunger crises.
The research analysed 54 “active conflict, refugee-hosting, and conflict legacy” countries with populations facing “crisis-level” acute food insecurity in 2023. This is equivalent to at least the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) 3, which is deemed “crisis” level, whereby some households are not consuming enough food and have high levels of malnutrition while others are adopting irreversible coping strategies—such as selling assets that support their livelihoods—to support a limited diet.
The report found that nearly 278 million people in these countries faced crisis-level hunger in 2023, accounting for 99 percent of the global population at IPC 3+ (281.6 million people). In all 54 countries, conflicts were major causes of food insecurity. As such, conflict-induced food insecurity led to between 7,784 and 21,406 deaths per day last year, with the conflicts not only fuelling hunger but also enabling warring parties to actively use food as a weapon by targeting food, water and energy infrastructure, as well as blocking food aid.
“As conflict rages around the world, starvation has become a lethal weapon wielded by warring parties against international laws, causing an alarming rise in human deaths and suffering,” said Emily Farr, Oxfam’s food and economic security lead. “Today’s food crises are largely manufactured. Nearly half a million people in Gaza—where 83 percent of needed food aid is currently not reaching them—and over three-quarters of a million in Sudan are currently starving as the deadly impact of wars on food will likely be felt for generations.”
Indeed, the Oxfam report identified countries that continued to rely heavily on primary-product exports as prime locations for war-displacement-hunger crises, with gold and livestock products in Sudan, petroleum in South Sudan, coffee in Burundi and grain and oilseeds in Ukraine some of the key global focal points. “Paradoxically, peacebuilding efforts have often assumed that economic liberalisation offers the best or only pathway to sustainable peace,” the report also noted. “Yet struggle for control over fungible primary commodities can fund more violence, increased inequality, continued instability, and the risk of renewed conflict.”
“It is no coincidence that the lethal combination of war, displacement and hunger has often occurred in countries rich in natural resources. The exploitation of these raw commodities often means more violence, inequality, instability, and renewed conflict,” Farr also observed. “Too often, large-scale private investment—both foreign and domestic—has also added to political and economic instabilities in these countries, where investors seize control over land and water resources, forcing people out of their homes.”
The World Food Programme (WFP), a global UN organisation that provides food assistance worldwide, shared similar results to Oxfam’s in its 2024 “Global Report on Food Crises” (GRFC), published in April. Nearly 282 million people, or 21.5 percent of the analysed populations in 59 countries and territories facing high levels of acute food insecurity, required urgent food and livelihood assistance, the report found. This was a massive 24-million increase from the WFP’s findings a year earlier, partly explained by the latest report’s expanded analysis coverage but also by the deteriorating, more acute food insecurity in some countries outweighing the improvements in others.
Again, conflict was among the root causes of this deteriorating situation, with the report noting “conflict/insecurity” as the primary driver in 20 countries and territories, with 135 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity, as well as the main driver in most of the 10 largest food crises (by number or share). “The conflicts erupting over the past 12 months compound a dire global situation. The Gaza Strip has the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Global Report on Food Crises, even as blocked aid trucks line up at the border,” António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, said of the report, adding that the Sudan conflict had created the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, with “atrocious” impacts on hunger and nutrition, particularly for women and children.
“In a world of plenty, children are starving to death. War, climate chaos and a cost-of-living crisis—combined with inadequate action—mean that almost 300 million people faced [an] acute food crisis in 2023,” Guterres added. “The number of people on the brink of famine rose to over 700 000—almost double the number of 2022.”
To compound matters, the WFP experienced a massive decline in funding compared to previous years, and as such, almost half of its country operations had to cut the size of food, cash and nutrition assistance by up to 50 percent. “The consequences of not investing in long-term resilience could result in increased migration, destabilization and conflict. Recent history has shown us this: when WFP ran out of funds to feed Syrian refugees in 2015, they had no choice but to leave the camps and seek help elsewhere, causing one of the greatest refugee crises in recent European history,” the programme recently warned. “Unless resources are made available to end the global food crisis, lost lives and the reversal of hard-earned development gains will be the price to pay.”
And what of those “hard-earned development gains”? Has there been any marked improvement in reducing the global hunger numbers? According to the Global Hunger Index’s (GHI’s) findings published in October, “little progress” had been made since 2016, and the prospects for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2’s target of zero hunger by 2030 are now “grim”, with 42 countries still experiencing alarming or serious hunger. As such, the situation reflects the series of complex challenges now hitting the world’s poorest people hardest and amplifying “structural inequalities”, the findings also noted, with large-scale armed conflicts again cited as a principal underlying factor, along with increasingly severe climate-change impacts, high domestic food prices, market disruptions, high debt burdens among low- and middle-income countries, income inequality and economic downturns.
The GHI, a tool prepared by the European NGOs (nongovernmental organisations) Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe (WHH), measures and tracks hunger globally as well as by region and country, releasing its results every year in October. Despite the international community’s repeated emphasis on the importance of the right to adequate food, the GHI found that there remains “a troubling disparity” between the established standards and the reality that in many parts of the world, the right to food is being blatantly disregarded.
“The wars in Gaza and Sudan have led to exceptional food crises. Conflict and civil strife are also generating food crises elsewhere, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Mali, and Syria,” the latest GHI noted, whilst also identifying Somalia, Yemen, Chad, Madagascar, Burundi and South Sudan as countries “with levels of hunger considered alarming, indicating widespread human misery, undernourishment, and malnutrition”.
The GHI’s 2024 results also shone a spotlight on the impact of gender inequality, particularly its intersection with hunger and climate change, in placing households, communities and countries under extreme stress. “Among the undernourished, women consistently remain the most food insecure,” the index stated, noting that the gender gap in food security is as high as 19 percentage points in some countries, with the situation for women especially severe in countries affected by conflict. “Women who are poor, rural, migrants, refugees, or engaged in informal employment are even more vulnerable.”
So, how do we move forward from here with regard to resolving conflict-related hunger issues? According to Oxfam, states and institutions such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) must hold to account those committing “starvation crimes” in accordance with international law. “To break the vicious cycle of food insecurity and conflict, global leaders must tackle head-on the conditions that breed conflict: the colonial legacies, injustices, human rights violations, and inequalities—rather than offering quick band-aid solutions.”
“We cannot end conflict by simply injecting foreign investments in conflict-torn countries without uprooting the deep inequalities, generational grievances, and human rights violations that fuel those conflicts,” Farr added. “Peace efforts must be coupled with investment in social protection and social cohesion building. Economic solutions must prioritize fair trade and sustainable food systems.”