Millions of civilians around the world are being deliberately starved to death. These victims of ongoing conflicts, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, find themselves not as the collateral damage of ravenous wars but as the targets of orchestrated starvation campaigns. And yet, no cases of human-made famine have ever been prosecuted at an international level.
From the 1870s to the 1970s, famines killed an average of nearly 1 million people each year. But by the start of the 21st century, natural famines were all but eliminated. Starvation deaths plummeted as technology, law, and humanitarian efforts sprinted ahead. But the brutal conflicts of the last decade—wars in Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, among others—are reversing the trend. (Last year, 20 million people faced starvation due to civil conflicts, and global hunger is rising.) And because today’s famines are neither random nor accidental “costs of war” but intentional atrocities, lawyers and scholars are making a case to punish starvation at the highest levels.
“Mass starvation is not a natural phenomenon nor is it a haphazard by-product of war,” saysAlex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation. “It is the foreseeable result of intentional actions and should be treated as criminal.”
The evidence is plain enough. At the height of the Syrian war, approximately 7 million people, nearly 40 percent of the country’s population, were unable to meet their basic food requirements. Protracted sieges and halted aid convoys under the Bashar al-Assad regime’s “kneel or starve” strategy have beleaguered the country for most of its eight-year war. According to the U.N., 1.5 million in South Sudan are starving, and another 6 million face “extreme hunger.” The citizens of Yemen may be suffering under the worst famine-as-war program in the world today, with most of the population in need of aid as armed forces seize food shipments, militias divert aid, and combat keeps stockpiles out of reach. Even the United States is facing starvation accusations for refusing to feed 30,000 displaced Syrians living in a camp near an American outpost.
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