From Gaza to Sudan, conflict is driving a rise in hunger worldwide

by DYLAN SCOTT

In the 21st century, famine isn’t inevitable. It’s a policy choice.

Over the long term, humanity has made great progress in eradicating hunger. Famines on the scale of the 20th century’s catastrophes — the Nazi starvation policies, social transformations in China and Soviet Russia that came at the cost of tens of millions of lives — have not been experienced in decades.

There was a general decline in conflict over the second half of the 20th century, with notable exceptions, but in the aftermath of two global wars, more peace has led to less hunger. Agricultural tech advances have led to bigger crop yields, despite the pressures a warming climate has put on food production.

The improvement was such that, in 2015, the UN set the ambitious goal of eliminating world hunger by 2030. Over the last decade, though, all that progress has started to reverse: Instead of moving toward zero, the number of hungry people worldwide has been on the rise.

Conflict is the culprit. Palestinians in Gaza are running dangerously short of food amid the Israeli army’s invasion, putting half a million people — a quarter of the total population — at risk of starvation within the next year. Sudan is experiencing a deadly civil war that has threatened food access, leaving 13 million people facing dangerous levels of food insecurity. The recent Western attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, where some 17 million people are food insecure, have halted humanitarian aid in what is already one of the world’s long-running hunger crises.

For the past decade, almost anywhere there has been conflict in the world, hunger has followed. Gaza and Sudan reflect a longer trend of increasing international and intranational combat: The Syrian civil war and the war in Ukraine have led to serious food insecurity for millions of people. The repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes from Venezuela to North Korea have fostered food crises across the world; in the latter country, an internal crackdown on informal marketplaces and a focus on militarization over the citizenry’s material needs have led to fresh reports of people starving.

“We’re not back to where we were, but the same factors that have historically caused famine, like totalitarianism and using starvation as an instrument of war, they’re now happening again,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “That’s why we’re seeing a return of famine.”

Solving hunger is not merely a matter of improving humanity’s technological capacity to produce food — if that were the case, no one today would go to bed hungry. Hunger these days isn’t primarily the result of bad harvests and acts of God, but of politics and policymaking. Conflict and human choices are now the driving forces in global access to food.

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