Weaponizing Famine
What used to be a side effect of our wars and inequality is now used as a weapon
Famine has been used historically to weaken invading armies and besieged garrisons alike. An army that can’t eat, can’t fight. Or, as Napoleon famously said:
“An army marches on its stomach”
Of course, in the case of sieges, civilians also paid the price of resistance against an invader. This put the defenders in a quandary: they were supposed to be fighting to protect a city and its people. So what happened when the people started dying en masse from starvation? It boiled down to a decision between not letting the enemy have their prize and surviving. Usually, morale crumbled and the city surrendered.
In the 21st century, sieges are not as common, but famine is used as yet another geopolitical tool. Putin is blocking grain exports from Ukraine, not only to deprive it of valuable income but also to put pressure on third parties to advocate for an end to hostilities. He knows that the West can’t risk escalation, as it could mean the end of civilization as we know it. He also knows that if people go hungry, there will be international pressure against the war. He clearly doesn’t care about that pressure himself, so the weight will mostly be on Ukraine to negotiate.
It’s a despicable tactic, of course. But that’s to be expected from an autocrat.
The German foreign minister said last month that the already existing, life-threatening wave of the hunger crisis was being turned into a tsunami by Russia.
When did anyone ever care to prevent famines in the Third World, apart from throwing the odd concert or forming another NGO or UN food initiative? The root causes were never seriously addressed. Well, people will start to care once refugee flows from Africa and Asia increase even above current levels due to famine.
Russia, predictably, blames Western sanctions for the delays in grain exports. The sanctions might be making Russian grain more difficult to move. Ukrainian grain has nothing to do with that, however.
But, as always, there is another side to this coin.
The U.S. might be rightfully blaming Russia for this crisis, but it’s using the same tactics, just not on the battlefield. It’s also weaponizing famine by using economic warfare: the very same sanctions I just mentioned. Sanctions imposed on Russia affect the global supply of fertilizers, among other things. It’s not just that the supply is more limited, it’s also that the shortage is causing a spike in fertilizer prices, and that will be reflected in rising food costs. These are costs that developing countries can’t afford to pay.
According to data from the Fertilizer Institute, Russia is the world’s largest exporter of fertilizers, accounting for 23 percent of ammonia exports, 14 percent of urea exports, 10 percent of processed phosphate exports, and 21 percent of potash exports. All key ingredients in fertilizer production.
Without them, agricultural production on the scale needed to sustain the population of our planet is impossible.
So, on top of reduced grain supply from Russia and Ukraine, global farming production and sales are threatened due to lack of fertilizers and mounting costs. Thus, the U.S. can blame everything on Russia: fuel prices, inflation, food shortages. And all that regardless of whether Putin’s war really caused these disruptions or accelerated already existing trends. Hint: inflation was beginning to rise even before the war.
Is Russia using Ukraine’s grain supply as a means to exert pressure? It seems so, even though there is hope that some kind of agreement can be reached.
However, the U.S. is also using hunger as a weapon more directly than that, in Afghanistan. The first wave of sanctions came last August when 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank were frozen. Shortly before the war in Ukraine began, the U.S. freed 7 billion dollars and froze the other half of Afghanistan’s reserves with the stated intent to use them to compensate families of victims of the 9/11 attacks.
So here lies the problem: Even if we accept that there was a direct link between 9/11 and Afghanistan (which is doubtful), only the parts of the Taliban organization that co-operated with Al-Qaeda were involved. The Taliban as a whole were often even at odds with Al-Qaeda. More importantly, the Taliban weren’t Afghanistan any more than Saddam Hussein was Iraq. They were totalitarian regimes that fully controlled their countries (and the Taliban still are). No one voted for them, they just took power by force. The sanctions imposed on them not only failed to hurt these fascists, they killed the people who suffered under their yoke.
The infamous quote by Madeleine Albright, “we think the price is worth it,” was referring not to children killed by war, but by sanction-fueled starvation.
Lesley Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
Madeleine Albright: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
No, the price was not worth it, and even Albright herself acknowledged that. Personally, I can think of very, very few things that would conceivably justify such a sacrifice, and sanctioning a dictator is certainly not one of them. Especially considering that Hussein was still very much in power until 2003, when the U.S. decided to invade, no less than seven years after that interview.
He found ways to lessen the impact of the sanctions and could always blame the “evil U.S.” for the deaths of innocent children. Any good dictator would know how to do that.
A similar scenario is playing out in Afghanistan right now. Only, in this case, the U.S. spent more than a trillion dollars trying to prop up and support the failed state it created, and when it was no longer sustainable to keep up the pretense of control, it fled the country, leaving behind millions to fend for themselves.
The sanctions are meant to punish the Taliban government, but it’s not hurting them, any more than the sanctions against Russia are hurting Putin. It’s the Afghan people that can’t access their money (those who are lucky to have some) to buy food. It’s not like the Taliban are lining up in front of ATMs on their way to buying weapons from the store.
This is not a result of ignorance. The U.S. policymakers know full well that they’re hurting Afghan citizens and not the theocratic regime which rules them. But they also know that if there’s one thing that can mobilize people into action, it’s hunger.
Freezing half the assets of the country was like a Parthian shot: We weren’t able to defeat you, but your own people will when they grow hungry.
Yet weaponizing famine has been tested again and again, and it has never been successful. It just makes the life of an already suffering people that much harder.
