By the Witness Radio team.
War now extends beyond guns and bombs, with food systems becoming strategic tools in modern conflict, a crucial factor for understanding global security and the deliberate targeting of food as a weapon.
Fields are burned before harvest. Irrigation systems are destroyed. Fishing zones are blocked. Grain silos are bombed. Seeds are contaminated or confiscated. Entire communities are cut off from their ability to grow or buy food for months or years, deliberately harming people’s access to food.
The result is not only displacement or destruction, but a slower, more deliberate outcome: hunger. In many cases, it functions not as a side effect of war but as a method of weakening populations and reshaping control over land, resources, and survival itself.
A new position paper by La Via Campesina, representing over 200 million peasants, Indigenous peoples, farmers, and rural workers, argues that controlling land and food is a deliberate political act, and that defending these resources is vital to life itself. This underscores the critical need for collective action to safeguard food security.
The report frames war and hunger as interconnected forces within a global political order, highlighting the widespread implications of targeting food systems.
The document states that “war and hunger are two faces of the same system,” and adds that defending land and food systems is inseparable from defending life itself.
La Via Campesina describes the current global moment as one defined by overlapping conflicts across Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, the Sahel, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other regions. Rather than isolated crises, the report suggests these wars reflect a broader global system shaped by intensifying geopolitical competition, expanding military industries, weakening international governance, and growing pressure on land, water, and food systems.
“Rare earth elements, fossil fuels, water, and agricultural land are the true stakes of most contemporary conflicts. The targeting of Ukrainian grain exports, the scramble for Congolese cobalt, and the siege of Gaza’s fishing grounds all reflect this logic,” the paper reveals.
The rural poor, who produce most of the World’s food, are bearing the heaviest burden. They face poverty, hunger, displacement, and vulnerability.
Modern conflicts target food infrastructure-irrigation, grain reserves, and seed banks-highlighting how warfare deliberately undermines food security and calls for increased vigilance.
“The use of starvation as a weapon of war is strategic. Throughout history, empires understood that destroying a people’s capacity to feed themselves is among the most effective tools of subjugation.” La Via Campesina describes.
Across the cases examined in the report, La Via Campesina argues that controlling food has long been a way of controlling populations. What is different today, it suggests, is the scale, coordination, and technological sophistication through which food systems are disrupted in modern warfare.
In Gaza, the report cites widespread destruction of agricultural land and severe restrictions on fishing areas, alongside repeated disruptions of food supply corridors. Humanitarian assessments referenced in the paper indicate that more than 80% of farmland has been damaged or rendered unusable, deepening already severe food insecurity and famine risk warnings.
In Yemen, years of restrictions on key ports, particularly Hudaydah, through which most food imports enter, have significantly limited access to essential supplies. Combined with ongoing conflict, this has contributed to one of the most severe and prolonged hunger crises in the world.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, cycles of armed violence have repeatedly destroyed crops and forced farming communities from their land. In many areas, agricultural production has collapsed entirely due to insecurity and the presence of armed groups controlling rural territory. The result has been persistent and widespread food insecurity affecting millions of people.
In Sudan, the conflict has similarly disrupted food systems through the looting of grain stores, destruction of farms, and mass displacement of rural populations. Entire agricultural regions have been emptied, turning once-productive farmland into zones of acute hunger.
The environmental degradation in war zones, including soil contamination and deforestation, is linked directly to global climate and resource crises, calling for a heightened awareness of these interconnected issues.
The report also links these local environmental impacts to global ecological pressures. It argues that as climate instability, water scarcity, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss intensify, competition over natural resources is increasing. In this context, land, water, and fertile agricultural regions become strategic assets in broader geopolitical struggles.
What emerges from both the data and case studies is a picture of hunger that is not only humanitarian but deeply political. It is shaped by conflict, resource control, and global systems that determine who can produce food, who can access it, and who is excluded from both.
In this sense, the report suggests, war is no longer confined to battlefields. It extends into wheat fields, fishing waters, seed banks, and supply routes. Hunger becomes not just a consequence of war, but one of its most powerful instruments.
