Starvation as a Weapon of War

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger. It is a huge privilege to follow that very powerful speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Helic. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, for securing this debate and for her eloquent words which laid bare the scale and devastating consequences of the increasing use of starvation as a weapon of war.

I will focus on two issues: first, how we ensure accountability and meaningful consequences for state and non-state actors that use starvation as a weapon of war; and, secondly, the role that malnutrition plays in destabilising societies and contributing to conflict.

Recent years have seen an explosion of conflict and of what the World Food Programme describes as the

“increasing ‘instrumentalisation’ of humanitarian aid”.

Humanitarian access is frequently denied. Humanitarian workers are targeted and often killed. Crops, livestock and food storage facilities are destroyed and, as the Mines Advisory Group notes, agricultural land is often rendered unusable as a result of mines or contamination with other ordnance. Action Against Hunger draws attention to how critical infrastructure, such as water systems, markets and transport routes, is frequently attacked, denying communities access to the resources that they require to survive.

Some years ago, I had the privilege to visit Sudan on several occasions, working with the civilian democratic parties before the outbreak of the war. I watched with horror as the fighting created one of the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophes. Famine is now ongoing in at least five areas, and there is a risk of famine in 17 additional areas. Warring parties have imposed sieges and attacked food infrastructure, leaving over half the population facing acute food insecurity.

In Gaza, there has also been a deliberate policy to deny access to food, fuel and water, contrary to international humanitarian and criminal law. Before the recent ceasefire, which we hope will allow food to get in and alleviate the situation, 95% of the population was in acute food insecurity, 1 million were in emergency levels of food insecurity and famine conditions existed for 500,000 people. In both cases, ostensible allies of the United Kingdom are either imposing such policies directly or supporting armed groups that are. Despite the obligation of third parties to take all measures necessary to ensure that parties to conflicts respect the provisions of international humanitarian law, we and our international partners have done far too little to impose real consequences for these actions and to enforce accountability.

As Action Against Hunger and others have argued, the UK needs to ratify the amendment to Article 8 of the Rome statute, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, so that non-international conflicts are covered. We need to put UN Security Council Resolutions 2417, 2573 and 2730 at the heart of our diplomatic efforts to prevent starvation being used as a weapon of war and to protect humanitarian workers. Where these resolutions are violated, we should be willing to impose meaningful economic and other sanctions.

We need also to look at how we can best support efforts to prevent conflict in the first place. There is a good understanding of how conflict drives malnutrition, but much less well understood is the role that malnutrition plays in destabilising societies and giving rise to conflict. A research study carried out in north-eastern Nigeria by experts from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, CGIAR and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture found strong links between malnutrition and conflict, and demonstrated that acute malnutrition is an early warning signal of social breakdown in fragile settings.

People who are not getting the food they need may increasingly be inclined to support, or be recruited by, armed groups to ensure food security, shelter and physical protection. This cycle will not be broken without tackling malnutrition, because nutrition is so foundational to individual, societal and economic development, and indeed to global prosperity. We need to look again at the false economy of the huge cuts that we have made to our development budget; there was a cut of more than 60% to the budget for combating malnutrition in 2020-21 alone.

The numbers impacted by deliberate policies to use food as a weapon of war in Afghanistan, DRC, Gaza, Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere are immense, but figures so large can numb us to the real meaning of these actions. That reality was brought home to me by a faded picture of a young boy that my colleague at United Against Malnutrition and Hunger, Roh Yacobi, carries with him always. It is of his younger brother, Mohammad. Roh says this:

“When I was a child, living under a brutal Taliban blockade, thousands starved to death, including my little brother Mohammad. I was the last person to see him alive. He was buried in a small grave in the village graveyard at dawn, and soon joined by more children”.


That is the brutal cost of what happens when parties to conflict use starvation as a weapon of war. Millions of people have been subject to similar blockades, with similar horrific consequences. Such actions will continue with increasing frequency and impunity unless we, with our international partners, are willing to impose meaningful consequences on perpetrators, whether they be our friends or our foes.