A new analysis published this week documents a sharp surge in what researchers term “food-related violence” — the deliberate targeting of agricultural infrastructure, aid convoys, food markets, and humanitarian workers in conflict zones. The Guardian’s reporting, drawing on data from multiple monitoring organisations, finds that hunger is being used with increasing calculation as a weapon of war, with frontlines in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, the Sahel, and Myanmar all featuring documented instances of sieges, aid blockades, and crop destruction as tactical instruments. The figures arrive as the UN’s food agency warns of record levels of acute food insecurity affecting hundreds of millions of people, with conflict — rather than climate or supply-chain failure — cited as the primary driver in the most severe cases.
The received wisdom
The mainstream humanitarian framing is clear and morally serious: using hunger as a weapon is a war crime under the Rome Statute and Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. The international community must hold perpetrators accountable through the International Criminal Court, impose sanctions on regimes that deliberately starve civilian populations, and massively expand humanitarian access. Climate finance and food systems investment need to be dramatically increased to reduce underlying vulnerability. The surge in food violence is, on this reading, evidence that the rules-based international order is under assault and must be defended — through diplomatic pressure, prosecutions, and aid.
A different read
The humanitarian legal framework is the right framework — and yet its persistent failure to deter food violence raises the question of whether the rules-based order is doing the deterrent work its advocates claim, or whether it is, in important respects, a moral vocabulary that powerful states use selectively while the practice continues.
The surge in food-related violence does not represent a breakdown of a previously functioning system. It represents the revealed preferences of states and non-state actors who have concluded that the cost of using hunger as a weapon is lower than the cost of fighting conventionally. That calculation is not irrational from their perspective — it is a reflection of the enforcement gap at the heart of international humanitarian law.
Consider the cases. Sudan’s RSF and SAF have both used food denial as a tool; neither has faced serious international sanction. Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian grain infrastructure prompted condemnation and the collapse of the Black Sea grain deal, but no meaningful accountability for the individuals who ordered the strikes. In Gaza, the question of whether aid blockades constitute deliberate starvation of a civilian population has been contested in international courts while the blockade continued. The ICC issued warrants; major Western powers debated whether to cooperate with them.
This creates a structural problem that right-of-center realism is better placed to name than progressive internationalism: norms without enforcement are not law; they are aspiration. The proliferation of humanitarian law instruments since the 1990s has not been matched by a corresponding growth in enforcement capacity. If anything, the weaponisation of humanitarian language by all sides in modern conflicts — states invoke “food security” for sanctions policy, non-state actors claim “self-defence” for aid blockages — has degraded the normative clarity that gave those instruments what limited force they possessed.
The historical parallel is the inter-war period’s faith in the League of Nations. The Covenant prohibited wars of aggression; the machinery for enforcement was inadequate; states with revisionist ambitions tested the system and found it hollow. The lesson drawn by serious strategists was not that norms were useless but that norms required great-power commitment to enforcement, and that commitment could not be assumed.
Today’s equivalent would require the United States, the European Union, China, and Russia to agree on at least a minimal floor of enforcement for food-weapon prohibitions. That is not going to happen in the current geopolitical environment. Which means that the honest task is not more declarations but more targeted capacity: building the logistical and security infrastructure to deliver aid in contested environments, and funding the armed protection of humanitarian corridors where necessary — a position that makes many NGOs uncomfortable but reflects the realities on the ground.
What to watch
- The UN Security Council’s response to Sudan: whether China and Russia will permit a stronger resolution is the acid test of multilateral seriousness on food-as-weapon.
- ICC enforcement on Gaza and Sudan: whether arrest warrants translate into actual custody is the single biggest test of whether accountability mechanisms have any deterrent value.
- US posture under the current administration: if Washington continues to treat humanitarian law as a political instrument — applying it to adversaries, exempting allies — the norm erosion will accelerate.
- The Sahel corridor: as jihadist factions in Mali and Burkina Faso increasingly target food supply lines, the question of whether France’s withdrawal leaves a vacuum that anyone will fill becomes urgent.
— J