In a groundbreaking display of humanitarian forecasting, the world has become exceptionally good at predicting where people will starve - and has apparently decided that's a perfectly acceptable substitute for actually preventing it. A family in Somalia with four children abandoned their farm after armed groups demanded payment for the right to keep farming, walked roughly 100 kilometers to a displacement camp, and lost one child along the way. Carl Skau, acting head of the World Food Program, met them last week and shared their story at a UN Security Council debate on conflict and hunger on Tuesday, painting it as a prime example of the "vicious conflict-hunger cycle" - where war creates hunger, and hunger creates more war.
Somalia's farmers are being driven off their land. Sudan's markets are being hit by drones and missiles. Haiti's gang violence has isolated entire communities. Humanitarian workers are being blocked from reaching people in Gaza, Mali, and Myanmar. And the food systems themselves - farms, ports, markets, storage facilities, shipping routes - are increasingly collateral damage in conflicts whose economic fallout extends far beyond the battlefield. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it, "Critical food systems - and the lives and livelihoods they sustain - are under attack."
Last year, at least 266 million people faced acute food insecurity, and the world recorded its highest number of armed conflicts since World War II. For the first time this century, famine was confirmed simultaneously in two places: Sudan and Gaza. Conflict and violence are now the primary drivers of hunger in 12 of the 13 hunger hot spots the UN considers most concerning. But the geography of hunger is shifting: a missile strike on a port or an attack on a cargo ship can now raise food prices thousands of miles away.
The Black Sea is a case in point. Russia and Ukraine are major grain exporters, and escalating attacks have disrupted a crucial artery of global food trade. Grain shipments through the Bosporus are down 40% from a year earlier, according to WFP. Meanwhile, attacks on commercial vessels have disrupted Red Sea trade, and the Strait of Hormuz - which carries roughly one-fifth of global oil supplies and one-third of fertilizer trade - has seen restrictions and closures that pushed commodity prices higher. Mr. Skau called it a crisis of three maritime choke points: the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz. Disruptions there ripple through interconnected energy, fertilizer, and food markets, turning distant wars into higher costs for import-dependent countries. For wealthy nations, that means pricier groceries; for countries already on the edge, it means fewer meals.
In Sudan, basic food costs have risen almost 40% since February. Higher fuel prices ripple through irrigation, transportation, and milling, while disruptions to fertilizer exports threaten planting seasons across Africa and Asia - meaning the full consequences of today's conflicts may not be visible until future harvests. Conflict destroys farms, markets, and supply routes, driving people from their homes. But hunger also leaves displaced and impoverished communities more vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups and criminal networks.
Somalia offers a particularly grim illustration. Mr. Skau said six million people - about a third of the population - face acute hunger or worse, while nearly two million children suffer from acute or severe malnutrition. Yet the WFP is assisting roughly 600,000 people, about one in ten of those facing acute hunger. Last week, fighting in Baidoa prevented the agency from reaching about 5,000 children with nutritional assistance. And when families can't put food on the table, desperation creates opportunities for armed groups and criminal networks to recruit vulnerable young people.
It's the cycle the Security Council formally recognized in 2018 with Resolution 2417 on conflict and hunger. Eight years later, as Mr. Guterres noted, "the vicious cycle rolls on." The failure isn't one of diagnosis - the international community has developed systems for detecting hunger and predicting famine. The problem is what happens after the warning. Somalia's 2010-12 famine killed nearly 260,000 people, roughly half of them children. Later crises in 2017 and 2022 didn't reach the same catastrophic scale, partly because assistance was increased before famine took hold. Sudan, Mr. Skau argued, offers the opposite lesson: the warning signs were visible, but the international community failed to act decisively.
Mr. Guterres urged the Council to protect farms, water systems, markets, storage facilities, ports, and supply routes - and above all, to respond before hunger crosses the formal threshold into catastrophe. "We cannot wait for famine or catastrophic conditions to be formally confirmed," he said. "I call on this Council to act when the warning lights are flashing."
That warning comes as the machinery designed to prevent starvation is itself shrinking. Humanitarian agencies are confronting more wars, more displaced people, and more disrupted trade routes with fewer resources. In Somalia, the WFP is reaching only a fraction of those it once could. The result is a disturbing inversion: the world has become better at predicting where people will starve, even as it becomes less capable - or less willing - to prevent them from doing so.