Dr Rathi Guhadasan
When we hear talk of food used as a weapon, we might think of distant wars. But the weaponization of food operates at multiple scales: from the blockade of Gaza to the quiet violence of corporatisation and food banks in British cities, and to the legacy of colonial extraction that still shapes who eats – and who starves.
Food becomes a weapon when access to it is deliberately restricted, manipulated, or controlled to achieve political, economic, or military objectives. This can be overt—soldiers blocking humanitarian aid — or structural — think of trade policies that perpetuate dependency and vulnerability.
Food as a Weapon in Contemporary Conflicts
Let’s start with the most visible forms: food weaponization in active conflicts. In Gaza, there is not only blockade of food, both humanitarian aid and commercial imports, – and remember for infants and children with severe acute malnutrition, food is actually a medicine – but we’ve seen bakeries bombed, UNWRA and World Central Kitchen attacked, a “flour massacre” and food distribution diverted to mercenaries in the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. In Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the blockade and restrictions on imports have pushed millions to the brink of famine. Food access isn’t just collateral damage; it’s a strategic tool. Control the ports to control the food and thereby, the population.
The war in Ukraine disrupted grain exports. This didn’t just harm Ukraine—it sent shockwaves through global food prices, hitting the world’s poorest countries hardest. Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, and numerous African nations faced soaring bread prices and food insecurity.
Across these war zones and others, the UN has documented starvation being used as a method of warfare—a clear violation of international humanitarian law – yet it continues.
What does hunger mean for health in these conflict zones? Here are just four examples of how children are affected.
- For a child recovering from major trauma or major burns, after being caught up in an attack, their metabolic requirements are 150% of normal. If that child is already malnourished, both their healing and ability to fight infection are compromised. Their wounds are more likely to get infected and that infection is more likely to get into the bloodstream, leading to organ failure and death
- The first 1000 days – a crucial period from conception to age 2y – is a critical window for antenatal and early-life nutrition that shapes growth, health, and long-term outcomes. What is lost then cannot be regained later, meaning that these children will not achieve their full potential.
- Food deprivation also affects access to micronutrients, such as iron. Without it, children don’t reach their potential and women die in childbirth because when they bleed, they have no reserves.
- When calories are available, it may be in the form of poor quality, diabetogenic food.
The Quiet Violence: Global North-South Inequity
But while this is horrifying, the weaponization of food doesn’t actually require bombs or blockades. It was built into the architecture of our global food system.
Colonial powers extracted resources and reorganized entire economies around cash crops for export—cotton, sugar, coffee, cocoa—rather than food for local consumption. Ghana, for instance, was pushed toward cocoa production. Today it’s one of the world’s largest cocoa exporters, yet it imports substantial amounts of its food, leaving it vulnerable to global price shocks. This isn’t an accident of history; it’s a designed dependency.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s is often celebrated for increasing crop yields, but it also locked developing countries into dependency on expensive inputs: hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides—all controlled by multinational corporations based in the Global North. Farmers who once saved seeds now must purchase them annually. When global fertilizer prices spiked recently, partly due to the Ukraine conflict, farmers in Kenya, India, and across the Global South faced impossible choices.
Then there’s debt. Many developing countries are trapped in cycles of debt to Global North institutions. Structural adjustment programs from the IMF and World Bank have historically required countries to cut food subsidies, reduce agricultural investment, and open markets to cheap imports—often subsidized food from wealthy nations that undercuts local farmers.
Trade agreements reinforce these dynamics. The UK, EU and US heavily subsidize their agricultural sectors allowing European and American farmers to sell products below production cost, flooding Global South markets and making it impossible for local farmers to compete. When Haiti was forced to reduce rice tariffs in the 1990s, subsidized US rice flooded the market, devastating local production. Haiti went from being largely rice self-sufficient to importing most of its rice.
The climate crisis compounds these issues. I lived in Cambodia cumulatively for a decade, and a lot of my patients’ families were subsistence rice farmers. We saw temperatures rise, rains come late or stay too long and rice crops fail. The children were malnourished and sick. It is families like that who are on the frontlines of a climate crisis, which we created and continue to exacerbate and deny.
The UK Context: Austerity as Weaponization
Food weaponization here doesn’t look like sieges, but it’s no less real.
In 2010, there were tens of thousands of food bank uses annually in the UK. By 2023, the Trussell Trust alone distributed nearly three million emergency food parcels. That increase isn’t about individual failure or poor budgeting. It is about political choice: welfare cuts, the roll-out of Universal Credit with its built-in waiting periods and sanctions, the freeze and below-inflation increases in benefits, rising housing costs, and stagnant wages.
16 million people in the UK live in poverty, including > 5 million children. Food insecurity is highest among single parents, disabled people, and ethnic minorities—groups already marginalized by other policies.
These aren’t unfortunate side effects. Austerity was a deliberate choice, framed as necessary, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable and leaving wealth concentrated at the top.
The UK also sits within this global system of inequity. We benefit from cheap food imports produced under exploitative conditions abroad. The Kenyan green beans on British supermarket shelves, the Ghanaian cocoa in British chocolate—these come from systems where farmers earn poverty wages while corporations and retailers capture most of the value.
Connecting the Dots: Systems of Control
Controlling food access is about controlling people.
In conflicts, starvation forces surrender. In the global economic system, dependency ensures compliance. When your country can’t feed itself, when farmers can’t compete, when food prices are set by distant commodity markets and multinational corporations, sovereignty becomes hollow. You may have political independence, but if you can’t feed your population without external permission, that independence is meaningless.
In the UK, food insecurity correlates with political disengagement. When you’re struggling to survive, you have less capacity to organize, protest, or demand systemic change. This helps elites maintain the status quo.
Why This Matters and What We Can Do
This isn’t about charity or aid as the primary solution. It’s about justice, about dismantling systems of control.
At the global level, this means confronting the legacy of colonialism, reforming trade rules that favour the Global North, cancelling debt that traps countries in dependency, and supporting food sovereignty movements that prioritize local control over food systems.
In the UK, it means recognizing that food banks, while providing some acute relief, are a symptom of policy failure, not a solution. We need an adequate social safety net, living wages, affordable housing, and an economy that prioritizes human wellbeing over profit extraction.
It means asking: who controls our food systems, who profits, and who pays the price? Who do we have more in common with in this global system and where should our solidarity lie?
Conclusion
Food is not neutral. In a world of abundance, hunger is a political choice. Whether through a drone strike or the mechanisms of global finance, food access is weaponized to maintain control, extract profit, and punish dissent.
But weapons can be disarmed. Recognizing food weaponization is the first step. The next is building solidarity across borders and contexts, supporting food sovereignty, demanding accountability from governments and corporations, and insisting that access to adequate food is a human right, not a privilege to be granted or withheld based on power.
Current threats to global health make this all the more urgent. From Trump to Farage to our own Labour government which has cut foreign aid to unprecedented levels. From anti-vaccine disinformation to defunding WHO – this poses a real and present danger to us all. Protecting global health is in our interest. Pandemics don’t respect borders. Climate-induced health crises will drive migration. Global health is national security, but we refuse to see it because there’s no profit in peace.
When we eat, we’re participating in a global system. The question is: will we allow that system to continue weaponizing the most basic human need, or will we demand something better?This is the first article of a planned “In Place of Hunger” series from our Food Security Working Group. Please contact admin@sochealth.co.uk to get involved – all welcome!