Starvation is a preferred atrocity of war. But how long can this go on?

People eat after a round of food distribution in a displaced persons camp at the Lycee Marie Jeanne school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on October 2, 2024. The weaponisation of food today is no different than in historic wars where millions perished. AFPShow less

The starving of two million people in Gaza is rightly outraging the world. So should the hunger that is stalking 25 million people in Sudan, 16 million in Afghanistan, 14 million in Myanmar, and two million in Haiti. Or any of the nearly 300 million seriously food-insecure people in 53 countries.

Of that, 227 million people in 40 countries endure food inaccessibility ranging from “crisis” to “emergency” and “catastrophic”, as defined by the expert Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system.

Their judgements are statistically determined from factors such as the proportion of a population not ingesting 2100 daily calories, malnutrition rates and associated diseases and deaths. Also weighed are forced population displacement and dysfunctional coping such as selling-off land and household assets, taking on crippling loans, or selling daughters into forced marriages.

Two-thirds of the world’s most food insecure people are also conflict-affected. Appreciating their personal experience is important to understand how food is weaponised.

To start, IPC assessments are not precise when food becomes militarised. Belligerents obstruct monitoring or manipulate data to suit their narratives. This is a particular problem when authorities feel that hunger determinations undermine national security or prestige.

There is a credibility problem when the same humanitarian agencies determine both the extent of food insufficiency and compete for resources to counter it. Disagreements get finessed to blur the true picture, and multiple simultaneous crises dilute world attention.

All these factors are at play in the world’s biggest conflict-hunger spots - Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali - where fine-tuned gradations of need provide no comfort to famished victims. Each dies or endures in their unique way and not on the standardised IPC schedule that determines relief priority.

A South Sudanese asylum seeker carries fortified biscuits received as part of WFP food assistance at the Matar refugee camp in Gambella region, Ethiopia, on June 12. Reuters

Meanwhile, the irony is that although a climate-stressed world still produces nearly 3000 calories per capita and hosts a billion obese people, emergency food provision is about the science of doing the least necessary. How little that could be has been well-researched since Nazi experiments in concentration camps. Six hundred calories may keep body and soul together in the short term while 1200 calories allow bare longer-term existence.

But getting even that is a lottery determined by shrinking humanitarian resources and access. It obliges discounting the variable energy needs of beneficiaries. For example, shivering in wintry Afghanistan, carrying heavy water pots in Congolese refugee camps, or sweltering across a Sahelian migratory route. Let alone the special needs of children and pregnant or breast-feeding mothers.

The desperate focus on energy intake impairs quality, causing body-sapping ailments through micronutrient deficiencies. As starvation advances, the body battles to survive through “cellular auto-cannibalisation”. The resulting multi-organ failure is fatal if accompanying diseases caused by reduced immunity do not kill first.

Starvation’s trajectory is accelerated with the parallel shortage of potable water. This is a most wretched progression from maddening thirst and gut-wrenching pangs to excruciating bodily agony as muscles shrink and all movement, including breathing, gets excruciating. This blends into overwhelming fatigue, despair, and mental agony that constitute an all-encompassing torture package.

That is further compounded in population-level starvation, as in Darfur or earlier in Tigray. At the start, communities share what they have but solidarity crumbles with rising shortages. Families make heartbreaking choices on which members eat and experience soul-destroying torment watching loved ones die. Neighbours squabble over scraps. Law and order break down and looting, hoarding, and racketeering prevail as the strong prey on the weak.

Gaza provides a textbook illustration of how a society can be broken by degrading and dehumanising its people. There are intergenerational consequences as undernourished mothers beget weaker children with physical, psychological, and cognitive vulnerabilities that may not be fully remediable by subsequent rehabilitation. Thus, the potential of a whole generation is blunted.

Gaza provides a textbook illustration of how a society can be broken by degrading and dehumanising its people. EPA

Obviously, conflict disrupts food growing, trading, storage, and distribution. But that is not all. The logic of war requires efficient achievement of military objectives through weapon systems that cause greatest lethality, casualties and incapacities at least self-risk.

And so, food deprivation is a perfect cheap weapon for physically and psychologically undermining opponents. In his classic “Art of War, the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu advised “foraging on the enemy to drain away their substance”. Perhaps that informed Napoleon’s dictum that “an army marches on its stomach”. Prussian General Clausewitz’s 19th century “Principles of Wars” explain how to use famine to make war.

Endless attrition follows with low-grade atrocities being a low-cost way to pressure opponents. That favours the weaponising of food in different ways.

The weaponisation of food today is no different than in historic wars where millions perished. Provoking extreme hunger was central to the Roman siege of Jerusalem around 66 CE. Starvation tactics were deployed during the American Civil War, colonial wars in Africa, and within Europe, notably the 1870 siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. A million Russians starved in the Second World War siege of Leningrad. and two million Biafrans starved to death in Nigeria’s civil war in 1967-1970.

Atrocities commonly accompany wars, with starvation the preferred atrocity. That is because most fighters find it difficult to stomach the intimate engagement necessary for other atrocities such as sexual violence and torture which are also labour intensive to commit on the scale needed to achieve campaign success. In comparison, the depersonalised nature of starvation tactics and their “wide area impact” through, for example, blockades and scorched earth policies, make it easier for aggressors.

But the starvation tool is inherently imprecise and difficult to limit only to combatants nowadays. First, because the nature of war has changed to multi-dimensional belligerence waged across all social, cultural, and economic segments of society, thereby making civilians central to any war effort. Their morale and capacities are easily targeted through the food chain.

Second, in our globalised era, conflict impacts never stay confined. For example, the food sector, targeted early in the Russia-Ukraine war affected agriculture on both sides and seriously affected poor consumers internationally. More generally, trade embargoes and sanctions are normalised part of warfare and inevitably affect food supplies.

Third, most conflicts are indeterminably long with unclear outcomes that allow the losing side to avoid accepting defeat. Endless attrition follows with low-grade atrocities being a low-cost way to pressure opponents. That favours the weaponising of food in different ways.

This happens despite moral invocations of human rights and international humanitarian law, and repeated reminders that deliberately starving non-combatants is a war crime and potential crime against humanity including genocide.

What can be done? Wars are not illegal although the justness of many is disputable. Regardless, the imperatives of war, once embarked upon, make atrocity-ridden violence difficult to overcome through diplomatic calls for decency or threats of justice and accountability. Because concerned international mechanisms are themselves often partisan, conflicted, or lack enforcement ability.

So, if wars cannot be prevented, is there hope in limiting their duration? Shorter spells of combat - even recurrent when solutions are not found to underlying causes - are less likely to spawn atrocities that inflame passions and lead to “forever wars” of endless cruelty.

What, then, is the “least-intolerable” duration of war? The science of starvation provides a clue: without food, death is generally inevitable within two months. Limiting wars to that is a good ambition for results-minded peacemakers.