The relationship between conflict and the right to food has emerged as one of the most pressing human rights challenges of our time. A groundbreaking UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis by Michael Fakhri reveals how violence permeates every aspect of global food systems, creating a vicious cycle of dependency, inequality, and human rights violations that affects billions worldwide.
Table of Contents
The Stark Reality: Violence as the Primary Driver of Hunger
The latest UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis delivers a sobering truth: conflict and violence remain the primary drivers of acute hunger globally. This comprehensive examination of conflict and the right to food challenges conventional understanding by demonstrating that food systems don’t merely produce sustenance—they systematically generate and amplify violence that renders populations more vulnerable and marginalized.
Breaking Down the Numbers
The scope of this crisis is staggering. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), violence and conflict continue to fuel hunger across multiple continents. The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis reveals that nearly 278 million people in conflict-affected countries faced crisis-level hunger in 2023, accounting for 99% of the global population experiencing severe food insecurity.
What makes this particularly alarming is that food-sector billionaires’ wealth increases by a billion dollars every two days while millions struggle with starvation. Cargill, one of the world’s largest food traders, recorded nearly $5 billion in net income in 2021—its highest profit in 156 years—highlighting the stark inequality embedded within global food systems.
The Four Pillars of Food System Violence
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis identifies four interconnected forms of violence that structure global food systems, fundamentally challenging how we understand the relationship between conflict and the right to food.
1. Discrimination and Structural Inequality
Discrimination represents the most pervasive form of violence within food systems, manifesting through systematic denial of access to food based on identity, class, legal status, gender, race, and other characteristics. This discrimination operates intersectionally, meaning individuals often experience multiple forms of oppression simultaneously.
The report documents how LGBTQ+ adults are nearly twice as likely to experience food insecurity compared to non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Similarly, agricultural workers face systematic exclusion from labor protections globally, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and bodily harm. These patterns reveal how food systems perpetuate structural inequalities rather than addressing them.
2. Bodily Harm and Physical Violence
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis examines five critical contexts where food systems systematically produce bodily harm: malnutrition, famine, sexual and gender-based violence, unilateral coercive measures, and armed conflict.
Malnutrition affects prison populations disproportionately, with Brazil’s Public Defender’s Office documenting how prisons impose a de facto “hunger penalty” on over 800,000 incarcerated individuals. The report emphasizes that every famine constitutes a severe violation of the right to food, with Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen remaining at the highest alert levels.
3. Ecological Violence and Environmental Degradation
Industrial food systems represent a massive source of ecological violence, emitting approximately one-third of global greenhouse gases while violating rights to life, health, water, and a sustainable environment. The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis identifies this as “slow violence”—harm that occurs incrementally rather than spectacularly, making it less visible but equally devastating.
Around one million animal and plant species now face extinction, largely due to industrial agriculture and export-oriented policies. This ecological violence cannot be separated from human harm, as environmental destruction directly undermines communities’ ability to sustain themselves.
4. Erasure and Cultural Obliteration
Perhaps the most insidious form of violence identified in the conflict and the right to food analysis is erasure—“the practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible”. This manifests through dispossession of ancestral lands, destruction of traditional knowledge systems, and systematic marginalization of Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers.
The report documents how Indigenous communities across Mexico, Cambodia, India, and Guatemala face displacement through land grabs enabled by trade agreements and neoliberal policies. These cases represent a global pattern of erasure that threatens the very existence of diverse food cultures and sustainable practices.
The Ukraine Crisis: A Case Study in Systemic Vulnerability
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis uses the conflict in Ukraine to illustrate how dependency relationships amplify violence rather than containing it. Despite Ukraine and Russia supplying only 30% of global wheat exports, and the expected shortfall affecting merely 0.9% of global production, wheat prices spiked nearly 70% immediately following the invasion.
This extreme volatility stemmed not from actual shortages but from fear and panic among financial speculators operating through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The analysis reveals how 36 countries depending on Russia and Ukraine for over half their wheat imports suddenly faced heightened food insecurity risks, demonstrating the dangerous fragility of globalized food systems.
The Fertilizer Dependency Crisis
The conflict also disrupted chemical fertilizer supply chains, given that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are the world’s largest suppliers. However, the UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis emphasizes that the real problem isn’t fertilizer availability but farmers’ heavy dependency on these environmentally harmful inputs.
New research demonstrates that using significantly less or no chemical fertilizer can increase productivity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This finding challenges the dominant narrative that intensive chemical agriculture is necessary for food security.
Global Food System Dependencies: The Architecture of Vulnerability
The conflict and the right to food analysis reveals how contemporary food systems rely on multiple dangerous dependencies that create systemic vulnerabilities.
Crop Diversity Loss
Only nine species account for more than 66% of global crop production by weight, including sugar cane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava. This extreme lack of diversity results from developed countries subsidizing large-scale monocrop operations, with nearly 90% of the $540 billion in annual agricultural support actively harming human health and driving inequality.
Corporate Concentration
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis documents how four agrochemical companies control 60% of the global seed market and 75% of the pesticide market. This concentration enables price manipulation and forces farmers into dependency relationships that undermine their autonomy and resilience.
Extractivist Economic Model
Global food systems exemplify extractivism—“non-reciprocal dominance-based relationships” among humans, non-human beings, and natural resources. This model treats ecosystems as collections of commodities, justifying ecological destruction through promises of economic growth that rarely benefit affected communities.
Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis provides crucial insights into how international humanitarian law addresses conflict and the right to food, while highlighting significant limitations in current legal frameworks.
The Starvation Paradox
While international humanitarian law prohibits starving civilians, it permits the starvation of combatants. The Special Rapporteur condemns this distinction, noting that starvation is inherently indiscriminate and violates non-derogable human rights regardless of a person’s legal status in conflict.
Supply chains in conflict zones typically overlap or are identical, making it impossible to separate civilian and military food access. This reality renders legal distinctions meaningless while potentially legitimizing widespread hunger and malnutrition.
War Crimes and Legal Accountability
The 2018 amendment to the Rome Statute, led by Switzerland, includes starvation as a war crime in non-international armed conflicts. However, the UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis notes the limitations of international criminal law in addressing systemic violence within food systems.
International criminal accountability focuses on individual perpetrators rather than structural causes, potentially equating justice with criminal prosecution while neglecting survivors’ needs for remedial justice.
Unilateral Coercive Measures: Food as a Weapon
The report’s examination of unilateral coercive measures reveals how economic sanctions often transform conflict and the right to food dynamics into weapons of warfare.
The Yemen Catastrophe
The blockade against Yemen since 2015 has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. With Yemen importing 90% of its consumption needs, the coalition blockade has been described as “torture in slow motion”.
The agricultural sector, employing 60% of Yemeni households, has been devastated, with 1.5 million family farmers lacking access to inputs. Today, malnutrition rates among Yemeni women and children rank among the world’s highest, with 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under five requiring acute malnutrition treatment.
Humanitarian Exemptions’ Failure
Even “targeted” sanctions produce side effects that disrupt local, regional, and international food systems. Humanitarian exemptions prove ineffective due to absent monitoring and sanctions’ scattered economic effects. Financial institutions’ tendency to over-comply with sanctions further inhibits aid delivery and magnifies human rights harm.
Gender-Based Violence in Food Systems
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis documents how conflict and the right to food intersect with gender-based violence in particularly devastating ways.
The Vulnerability Cycle
When families experience food insecurity, women and girls face increased risks of sexual and gender-based violence, which in turn reduces their food access. The COVID-19 pandemic widened this gender gap, as women bore disproportionate job losses while shouldering additional unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
Workplace Exploitation
Women in food industries, particularly hospitality services, face endemic harassment. The fast-food sector exemplifies these problems, with McDonald’s identified as among the worst offenders in creating hierarchical environments that enable bullying and harassment.
Many employers exploit their hiring power to demand sexual favors, especially from seasonal workers, as employment conditions. Isolated workers, such as those on plantations, face heightened risks due to poor working conditions and limited oversight.
Ecological Violence and Climate Change
The conflict and the right to food analysis reveals how environmental degradation represents a form of slow violence that undermines human rights over time.
Land Rights and Human Rights Defenders
People’s access to land and their ability to control and steward it significantly determines their fate. Insecure tenure rights make vulnerable groups—including women, racialized people, migrants, people with disabilities, older persons, and Indigenous peoples—more susceptible to climate change effects.
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis expresses concern about increasing threats and attacks against land and environmental defenders, who are often from Indigenous and racialized communities. Agribusiness corporations frequently participate in murdering human rights defenders, using intimidation and terror to stop community resistance.
Seed Sovereignty and Biodiversity
Seeds represent life itself, yet dominant systems treat them as private property. The “Big Four” agrochemical companies not only control seeds but also produce associated pesticides that pollute environments, reduce biodiversity, and harm agricultural workers’ health.
Farmers’ and Indigenous seed systems create resilience against climate change, pests, and pathogens through diversity. Since humanity depends on plants for food, feed, fiber, and functional ecosystems, nothing less than the right to life is at stake when these systems are undermined.
Pathways Forward: Eliminating Violence from Food Systems
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis provides concrete recommendations for addressing conflict and the right to food through systemic transformation.
Fundamental System Change
Member States must eliminate violence in all forms across all aspects of food systems while transitioning away from economies dependent on extractivism toward agroecology. This requires recognizing that current food systems produce violence alongside food.
Addressing Discrimination
Nations should devote food pathways to ensuring substantive equality regardless of ability, class, legal status, age, gender, race, or other characteristics. This includes recognizing how individuals experience intersectional discrimination across multiple identities.
Combating Gender-Based Violence
The analysis recommends ratifying ILO conventions, particularly the Right of Association (Agriculture) Convention, since union membership and collective bargaining provide fundamental protection against sexual and gender-based violence.
International Cooperation
The report emphasizes that without international cooperation on pandemic recovery and food crisis response, every national plan will fail. This cooperation must address structural causes rather than merely symptoms of food insecurity.
Looking Ahead: Building Resilient Food Systems
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis demonstrates that conflict and the right to food represent interconnected challenges requiring comprehensive solutions. Violence in food systems is systemic and results from human choices—meaning it can be eliminated through different choices.
The Role of Solidarity
Realizing the right to food depends not only on recognizing identity and hearing claims but also on communities’ ability to build solidarity-based campaigns. This solidarity must extend beyond local communities to encompass international cooperation and structural transformation.
From Victims to Survivors
The report emphasizes that vulnerable people are not helpless victims but survivors with strength. Many give their lives confronting food system violence, but if the dead receive justice, they can empower survivors. This perspective reframes discussions around conflict and the right to food to center human agency and resistance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the main causes of global food insecurity according to the UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis?
A: The report identifies violence and conflict as primary drivers, manifesting through four forms: discrimination and inequality, bodily harm, ecological violence, and erasure. These create a vicious cycle with structural inequality, leading to widespread human rights violations.
Q: How does the Ukraine conflict relate to global food systems according to the conflict and the right to food analysis?
A: Despite affecting only 0.9% of global wheat production, the conflict caused 70% price spikes due to financial speculation rather than actual shortages. This demonstrates how dependency relationships amplify rather than contain violence.
Q: What role do transnational corporations play in food system violence?
A: The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis shows corporations profiteering during food crises, with food-sector billionaires gaining $1 billion every two days. Four companies control 60% of global seed markets and 75% of pesticides, creating dangerous dependencies.
Q: How do unilateral coercive measures affect the right to food?
A: Economic sanctions often turn food into a weapon, as seen in Yemen’s blockade creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. Even “targeted” sanctions disrupt food systems and prove ineffective due to over-compliance by financial institutions.
Q: What solutions does the conflict and the right to food analysis propose?
A: The report recommends eliminating all violence from food systems, transitioning to agroecological approaches, ensuring substantive equality, protecting human rights defenders, and building international cooperation based on solidarity rather than dependency.
Q: How does gender-based violence intersect with food insecurity?
A: When families face food insecurity, women and girls experience higher risks of sexual and gender-based violence, which further reduces their food access. The COVID-19 pandemic widened this gender gap significantly.
Q: What makes current food systems particularly vulnerable to shocks?
A: The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis identifies dangerous dependencies: only nine species provide 66% of crop production, four companies dominate seed/pesticide markets, and 90% of agricultural support harms health while driving inequality.
Q: How does international humanitarian law address starvation in conflicts?
A: While prohibiting civilian starvation, current law permits combatant starvation—a distinction the Special Rapporteur condemns as inherently indiscriminate and violating non-derogable human rights.
The UN Special Rapporteur Report Analysis on conflict and the right to food reveals that transforming global food systems requires acknowledging and addressing the violence embedded within them. Only through such comprehensive understanding can we build food systems that nourish rather than harm, that create solidarity rather than dependency, and that uphold human rights rather than violating them.
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