In late August, two of the world’s leading food crisis assessments came to the same conclusion about what is happening in Gaza: “famine with reasonable evidence.” One was the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC); the other was the U.S.-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a partnership of government agencies formerly under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Both bodies use rigorous criteria to designate five progressive levels of food insecurity, with “famine” as the worst. In concluding that Gaza had reached level 5, the IPC further noted that since the crisis is “entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”

For months, the starvation of Gaza has seized international attention. But it is not the only war-induced famine unfolding in the world right now. In fact, it is not even the worst. In July 2024, the IPC concluded that “famine with reasonable evidence” was unfolding in war-torn Sudan, where large parts of the population have been cut off from food aid. Since then, the situation has only worsened. According to recent IPC estimates, some 800,000 Sudanese are now suffering full-blown famine and another eight million face what the IPC calls a level 4 food “emergency,” just one step below that threshold. And just below that, some 22 million people—an astounding half of the country’s total population—are contending with a level 3 food “crisis,” meaning they need aid in order to avoid becoming trapped in a doom loop of hunger and destitution. Current cease-fire proposals for both Sudan and Gaza—including the Trump administration’s new plan for Gaza unveiled on September 29—call for the reopening of humanitarian-aid channels as soon as the fighting stops. But for both populations, that may be too late. International humanitarian law dictates that essential aid should not be contingent on a cease-fire.

Famines under any circumstance have been comparatively rare since the late twentieth century. In recent decades, bigger and more skilled relief agencies and better early-warning systems have made it much easier to address hunger crises before they reach catastrophe. By the 2010s, an international consensus also seemed to have emerged against the starvation weapon. In 2018, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2417—which formally highlighted the link between armed conflict and hunger and condemned depriving civilians of food as a method of warfare. At the time, China, Russia, and the United States each preferred to denounce some regimes while being more lenient toward others. But they all voted for the principle that intentionally starving civilians was a war crime.

Just seven years later, that looks like a long-lost era, and not only because of the disastrous wars in Gaza and Sudan. In conflicts around the world, including in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Ukraine, military forces and their backers have once again been weaponizing hunger. Yet leading global powers, distracted by volatile geopolitical shifts, new rivalries, and economic challenges at home, have done little to stop them. Meanwhile, the humanitarian-aid budgets of many wealthy countries have been drastically cut. The result is that more and more, belligerents can inflict mass starvation on vulnerable people with impunity.

Withholding access to food is among the oldest weapons of war. In the twentieth century alone, it was used by all sides in both world wars, by colonial powers such as the French in Algeria and the British in Malaya, and by governments fighting separatists such as Nigeria in the 1960s and Ethiopia in the 1980s. In Sudan, successive regimes have for decades resorted to starvation campaigns to achieve military aims. In 1988, near the frontline of a previous civil war between the government and southern rebels, I witnessed unchecked starvation, with civilians dying at a rate almost 50 times the IPC famine threshold. The Sudanese brigadier in charge of that sector made no pretense about the government’s aim: “We’re hungering out the rebels,” he said. As the officer well knew, the men with the guns are always the last to go hungry—so his forces were creating a famine and emptying the land of civilians, at which point the insurgents would have to either surrender or starve.

The horrors of that war were a catalyst for change. The next year, under U.S. pressure, Khartoum allowed the UN to set up Operation Lifeline Sudan, the first time the UN crossed the battle lines to aid civilians in a rebel zone. It had an immediate impact. (Khartoum’s generals later complained that the intervention cost them victory and ultimately led to the secession of South Sudan.) Over the following decades, data on hunger crises also improved. During the 2010s, when manmade famines loomed in northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, FEWS NET and the IPC—which had been set up in the 1980s and the early 2000s,........

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