GENEVA – The international community faces an unprecedented moral challenge as the world witnesses a dramatic surge in the use of starvation as a weapon of war, a UN expert said today.
“So far the world has met this challenge with an alarming lack of accountability and with impunity,” said Sofía Monsalve Suárez, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food.
Presenting her first thematic report to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly on World Food Day, Monsalve Suárez said famine figures are on the rise after decades of decline and while the number of hungry people may have decreased in 2025, the share of those facing famine or famine-like conditions is climbing fast.
Monsalve Suárez unveiled her vision and an actionable path towards a transformation of food systems in her first report. She begins her mandate at a time of looming food crisis due to the combined effects of El Niño, ongoing conflicts and wars, cuts in humanitarian assistance, economic shocks from geopolitical instability, and global war economies.
“All this explains the return of famine and the intensification of hunger as a weapon of war. This is accompanied by a dramatic erosion of the normative framework that is rendering global governance and accountability dysfunctional,” she said.
The Special Rapporteur said that as part of this warfare and geopolitical competition, the world was witnessing attacks on food supply and infrastructure, economic coercion through tariffs, sanctions and debt, financialisation of nature, and an increase in military spending that is diverting the resources needed to transform food systems.
At the same time, the current food systems, based on an agro-industrial, extractive model of nature commodification and profit maximisation through globalised markets and corporate concentration, are playing a major role in the triple planetary crisis, leaving many behind and threatening our collective present and future wellbeing.
“I am calling on all Member States to guarantee the right to food and preserve human dignity for all, with a special focus on those whose access to adequate food is systematically denied,” Monsalve Suárez said. “I am particularly urging all States to focus all their efforts on stopping all wars, illegal occupation and conflicts. This is the most effective and straightforward way to guarantee the right to food and prevent famine, hunger and malnutrition.”
Monsalve Suárez also called for a rethink of the international financial architecture to allow for debt relief and restructuring mechanisms that make food systems transformation possible.
