Food as a Weapon: Starvation, Blockades, Export Bans and Sanctions

Food becomes a weapon when someone deliberately uses hunger to gain power — most starkly by starving civilians in war. That is prohibited under international humanitarian law and is a war crime under the Rome Statute. In peacetime, food is also a policy tool — through export bans, sanctions, tariffs and aid. Those are different things.

This site is called War on Food, so it’s fair to ask what that means. It doesn’t mean one hidden plot. It names several real, separate pressures on what people eat. This guide walks through them one at a time.

Starvation as a weapon of war

The oldest and gravest form is simple: cut off a population’s food until it gives in. Sieges, burned fields, poisoned wells and blocked aid convoys have been tactics for as long as there have been wars.

Modern law draws a hard line against it.

• International humanitarian law — the rules that bind parties in armed conflict — prohibits using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The International Committee of the Red Cross records this as a rule of customary law that applies in both international and internal conflicts.
• The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court makes it a war crime in international armed conflicts to be “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.”
• A 2019 amendment extended the same crime to non-international armed conflicts — civil wars, which is where much of today’s conflict-driven hunger happens. The ICC’s Assembly of States Parties adopted it by consensus on 6 December 2019. Like other amendments to the war-crimes article, it applies to states that ratify or accept it.

“Objects indispensable to survival” is a phrase worth knowing. In Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (Article 54), it covers more than food on the shelf: farmland, crops, livestock, drinking-water installations and irrigation works. Destroying a grain store or a well can starve people just as surely as a blockade.

What is UN Security Council Resolution 2417?

On 24 May 2018, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2417, which draws attention to the link between armed conflict, food insecurity and the threat of famine. Its sponsors described it as the first time the Council had unequivocally condemned starvation as a method of warfare. In it, the Council:

• “Strongly condemns the use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” in a number of conflict situations, noting it is prohibited by international humanitarian law;
• Condemns the unlawful denial of humanitarian access and depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supply;
• Urges all parties to protect civilian infrastructure needed for aid and to keep food systems and markets functioning in armed conflict;
• Recalls that it can impose sanctions on people or entities that obstruct humanitarian assistance;
• Asks the UN Secretary-General to report swiftly when the risk of conflict-induced famine and widespread food insecurity arises.

The resolution also underlines that starving civilians as a method of warfare may constitute a war crime. That word “may” matters: whether a specific famine was a deliberate weapon or the brutal side effect of war is a legal question, decided on evidence about intent. Courts, inquiries and historians can take years to settle it. Be wary of anyone who settles it in a headline.

Blockades, ports and the physical path of food

Not all wartime hunger comes from a deliberate starvation policy. War also wrecks the physical food system: mined fields, bombed silos, closed ports, fuel shortages and farmers who’ve fled.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is the clearest recent example on a global scale. FAO warned that the war had already led to port closures and suspended oilseed crushing, and that between 20 and 30 percent of areas under winter cereals, maize and sunflower in Ukraine might go unplanted or unharvested in the 2022/23 season. The UN-backed Black Sea Grain Initiative later reopened a shipping corridor from three Ukrainian ports; over 32 million metric tons of grain and foodstuffs moved to 45 countries before it was terminated on 17 July 2023.

Our guide to food supply chains explains how that disruption travelled all the way to grocery prices.

Export bans: when countries keep food at home

In peacetime, the most common way governments turn food into policy is the export restriction: a ban, quota, license or tax that keeps a crop at home.

The motive is usually defensive. When prices spike, a government wants to keep bread affordable for its own people. The trouble is the collective effect. When several exporters restrict at once, world supply tightens further, prices rise more, and countries that depend on imports pay the most.

That’s what happened after the Ukraine invasion. A World Bank analysis found that by February 2023, 101 export restrictions — quotas, licenses and outright bans — were still in place, covering more than 11 percent of 2022 food trade. In early 2022, wheat export bans covered 34.5 percent of global wheat shipments.

None of that requires a villain. It’s what happens when many governments each make a reasonable-looking choice in the same scary week.

Sanctions and humanitarian carve-outs

Sanctions restrict trade or finance with a country, group or person. Food and medicine are generally meant to be protected, but in practice banks, insurers and shippers often steer clear of sanctioned places altogether rather than risk a mistake. Aid groups call this “over-compliance,” and it can slow food deliveries even when they’re legal.

In December 2022, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2664, creating a standing humanitarian exemption to the asset freezes imposed under UN sanctions regimes. It says that funds, goods and services needed to deliver humanitarian aid or support basic human needs are permitted. The resolution passed with 14 votes in favour and one abstention, from India.

Food aid as policy

Food aid saves lives. It’s also never fully separate from politics. Donors decide where it goes and on what terms. Governments and armed groups decide whether convoys get through. Resolution 2417’s focus on humanitarian access exists because blocking aid is one of the most common ways food becomes a weapon in modern conflict.

Peacetime pressures that people also call a “war on food”

Away from the battlefield, people use the same phrase for slower, quieter fights:

• Consolidation. A small number of firms dominate key links like seed and meatpacking. (See what a food system is.)
• Rules and standards. Food safety, labelling, raw milk and cottage food laws all decide who can sell what, to whom.
• Prices. Inflation, input costs and trade shocks squeeze household budgets.
• Control over seed and land. The heart of the food sovereignty movement.

These are real and worth arguing about. But they are not the same thing as a siege, and treating a grocery-price complaint, a seed patent and a bombed grain terminal as one coordinated campaign makes all three harder to understand.

How to read a “war on food” headline

When you see the phrase, ask:

1. Which thing is this? Starvation in war, physical disruption, an export ban, sanctions, aid access or a peacetime policy fight?
2. Is intent claimed — and shown? Deliberate starvation is a crime that needs evidence of intent. Disruption can be devastating without it.
3. Who is the source? Look for FAO, the World Food Programme, UN bodies, USDA or peer-reviewed research behind any number.
4. What would fix it? Ceasefires and aid access, reopened trade routes, policy changes or more local capacity — different problems need different tools.