For decades the number of people dying from famine was in retreat, reduced to almost nothing by a world intolerant of witnessing people starving to death. Not any more.
From Sudan to Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza – where a United Nations-backed panel declared a famine on Friday – experts say more people are dying of hunger as public opinion shrugs and humanitarian agencies lose their ability to counter leaders willing to use food as a weapon.
“About 10 years ago, famines began to make a return, and over the past few years we have seen the numbers dying from starvation begin to escalate in a terrifying way,” said Alex de Waal, a famine expert and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
The resurgence, experts said, has resulted partly from a weak humanitarian response, hobbled by a declining commitment to multilateralism and reduced aid budgets.
RM Block
More recently, the ability of the world even to count deaths from famine has been hampered after the suspension in January, as part of sweeping US aid cuts, of the US Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which has been at the forefront of famine data collection for decades.
In Gaza, the world has watched impotently as Israel has prevented aid agencies from delivering sufficient food to the blockaded enclave of 2.1 million people to ward off starvation.
Israel in March imposed a total siege on Gaza, preventing all humanitarian deliveries for 10 weeks, in what they claimed was a strategy to defeat Hamas.
Amid fierce international condemnation, Israel went on to relax some restrictions on the entry of food, but the World Food Programme has said it remains a “fraction” of what is needed.
A UN-backed food security monitoring panel called the IPC said on Friday that a famine – which it described as “entirely man-made” – had taken hold around Gaza City and warned it could spread elsewhere. It said half a million people were already facing “catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death”.
“Israel has tried to persuade the world it isn’t a famine, but it has driven Gaza into one,” Mr De Waal said. “Now the consequences are going to be many times more horrible than if they had listened to the people who were saying this was going to happen.”
In Sudan, where war broke out more than two years ago between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, there has been far less global attention. But in sheer numerical terms the scale of suffering in the country exceeds that in Gaza.
The conflict has displaced 15 million people and plunged some 25 million, nearly half the population, into acute food insecurity, the WFP said. It also said 638,000 people were experiencing “catastrophic hunger”.
Among the millions of people fleeing are farmers, who have been forced to abandon crops or been unable to sow future harvests, exacerbating food shortages and pushing prices beyond the reach of many people.
“The international community has said that we will protect the people of Sudan. The people of Sudan should ask us if, when and how we will start to deliver on that promise,” Tom Fletcher, under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs of the UN, which has scaled back its fundraising targets, has said.
Lamenting the lack of funding, he said Sudan had become “a grim example of twin themes of this moment: indifference and impunity”.
Among the most desperate situations is in El Fasher, the only city in Darfur – in western Sudan – not controlled by the RSF. Nearly 750,000 people have been surrounded by RSF militias, who are blocking the entry of supplies into the city and preventing most people from leaving.
The UN declared a famine in the nearby Zamzam camp last year. Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which monitors the conflict in Sudan using satellite imagery, said this month that famine-like conditions had now reached El Fasher itself. “Civilians have resorted to eating ambaz, an animal feed supplement made of fermented seed oils,” it said.
[ How the IPC global hunger monitor determines famine ]
The strict definition of a famine is determined by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, which operates on a scale of one to five.
A famine – five on the IPC scale – is reached when at least a fifth of households are facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 per cent of children have acute malnutrition and two of every 10,000 adults are dying every day of either outright starvation or disease caused by malnutrition.
Tufts University, in Massachusetts, has compiled a database of all major famines since 1876. It found that deaths from starvation peaked in 1960, at the height of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in China, in which 36 million people died from 1958 to 1962 largely as the result of censorship and a disastrously flawed attempt at both collectivisation and industrialisation.
Though famines have occurred regularly since – for example in Nigeria in 1968-70 during the Biafran war, in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s regime from 1975-79 and in Ethiopia in 1983-85 – the numbers of those dying this century had been falling “to a near vanishing point” before the recent resurgence.
That was probably because of the spread in democracy during that period, experts say. Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has written that famines cannot occur when information circulates freely and when governments are responsive to civil society.
Between 1870 and 1970 an average 928,000 people died a year from famine, according to the Tufts database. After 1980, the annual death toll dropped to just 75,000, with no deaths recorded from famine between 2008-10.
But Tufts estimates deaths at between 200,000 and 300,000 in each of the years since 2020, with many occurring in Yemen and Ethiopia, both of which were fighting civil wars.
Experts attributed the return of famine to several factors including the rise of authoritarian leaders less accountable to democratic checks.
Israel has sought to replace the UN aid-distribution system, which has decades of experience, with the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial group that operates distribution hubs in military zones guarded by American mercenaries and the Israeli army.
Since GHF launched in May, hundreds of Palestinians seeking to collect supplies from its chaotic centres have been killed by Israeli soldiers, and UN experts have called for the immediate dismantling of GHF.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has denied there is starvation in Gaza, accusing the UN of spreading “lies”.
In Sudan, the leaders of both main factions have also brushed aside evidence of famine and have actively restricted supplies of food, particularly to people in areas controlled by the opposing side, aid workers said.
Last December, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the SAF and de facto president of Sudan, denied the existence of widespread hunger. “What is being circulated about famine is pure fabrication and intended to interfere in Sudanese affairs,” he said in a television broadcast.
On the other side of the conflict, troops controlled by former warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the RSF, have also prevented food from reaching civilians, humanitarian officials say.
Though arms have streamed across the border from Chad into regions controlled by the RSF, food supplies have slowed to a trickle, with consignments taking weeks to gain permission to cross.
Francesco Checchi, professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said reversing famines once they started “becomes like steering a supertanker, which takes a long time to change course or slow down”.
“If you don’t improve food security once there is an exponential rise in child malnutrition, you can expect what we have seen in other settings which is up to 50 to 100 times higher child mortality than before,” he said.
The cruellest lesson from previous famines, experts say, is that they often scar societies for generations. Not only do they kill children or stunt their development, but they can also polarise societies as communities compete for food.
Historians of Bengal have linked deadly intercommunal riots in 1947 during partition of India with rifts that opened up during a famine that occurred four years earlier.
Tufts University’s Mr de Waal said the looting of aid in Gaza by desperate people and gangs, as well as the reselling of stolen supplies, were signs that hunger was tearing at the fabric of Palestinian society.
“Israel is not ignorant of this,” he said. “They are pushing a society to that point of breakdown where people turn on each other.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
