“The same countries that endorsed the CFS Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises not only stand silent in the face of genocide, ecocide and starvation, but they actively enable it.” – Razan Zuayter, Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, CSIPM Protracted Crisis Working Group participant
For several years global food insecurity has been worsening, fueled by a combination of deeply interconnected factors: protracted conflicts, military occupations, climate crises, structural inequalities, and neocolonial policies. In 2024, nearly 300 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity, most of them living in contexts of war, or protracted crises.
The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises alerts that this is the sixth consecutive annual increase in hunger across the world’s most fragile settings, identifying armed conflict as the primary driver in at least 20 countries, including Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti.
It is in this urgent context that the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the main intergovernmental body of the United Nations system on food security issues, held the Collaborative Governance Dialogue on food security and nutrition in protracted crises, as part of its four year workplan (MYPoW 2024–2027). The dialogue aimed to strengthen policy coordination in response to crises and provided an inclusive platform to analyze the root causes of hunger and identify systemic responses.
Some of the key ideas raised during the dialogue include:
- The continued dissemination, implementation and monitoring of the CFS Framework for Action (FFA) as a global commitment.
- A call for the CFS to act as an early warning and accountability platform to protect the right to food and prevent its weaponization.
- The need to link spaces such as CFS, the UN General Assembly, and ECOSOC, to reinforce multilateral responses, and coordination in a coherent manner.
- The importance of reinforcing CFS as a space for inclusion, particularly for voices from regions most affected by structural violence.
- The necessity of anchoring all responses in a human rights-based approach, recognising that all states have legal obligations under international law which must be respected, and that international institutions have a responsibility to hold them accountable and to stop impunity.
The CSIPM participated in the dialogue bringing the voices of peoples affected by war, organized famines, prolonged occupations, and the destruction of food systems. Through truthful interventions by Razan Zuayter (Arab Group for the Protection of Nature) and Souad Mahmoud (Feminist Coordination for Food Sovereignty in Tunisia), who clearly stated that hunger is not a natural phenomenon, but often a tool of political domination.
Food cannot be separated from life, dignity and sovereignty
Razan Zuayter, from the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN)/ Arab Network for Food Sovereignty and member of the CSIPM Working Group on Protracted Crises, delivered a powerful statement on behalf of CSIPM constituencies:
“How can the right to food be realized in the absence of the right to life itself?”
She denounced the international community’s silence and complicity in the face of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, despite the unanimous endorsement of the CFS Framework for Action, which explicitly delegitimizes the use of food as a weapon. Emphasizing that the CFS must go beyond coordination, and fulfill its role as a platform for global accountability, Razan highlighted how from Gaza and rest of Historic Palestine to Lebanon, Congo, Sudan, Haiti and Yemen, settler and extractive colonialism, militarization, and donor-driven policies continue to destroy food systems and livelihoods.
Razan also called on member states and institutions to:
- End trade and financial flows that fuel war crimes;
- Support international justice mechanisms, such as the International Court of Justice;
- Enforce international accountability.
Reinforcing the role of CFS
Faced with this situation of lawlessness and structural injustice, Souad Mahmoud, from the Coordination Féministe pour la Souveraineté Alimentaire/Tunisia and CSIPM Coordination Committee member, reinforced CSIPM’s demands for the CFS to:
- Participate in international investigations, particularly on the situation in Gaza, like the one from ECOSOC on the health and nutrition situation in Gaza
- Explicit support for the International Court of Justice and the mechanisms of the Human Rights Council.
- The integration of contexts of occupation, colonialism, and inequality into the analysis of food policies, developed by the HLPE-FSN.
- Recognition of the central role of social movements and communities in the governance of food systems.
- The reconstruction of food systems by the peoples themselves, through a human rights-based approach.
Enough silence, enough impunity. Souad’s message at the CFS dialogue clearly expressed:
- Enough silence in the face of death. Through the persistent impunity of state and non-state actors involved in the deliberate destruction of food systems.
- Enough with famine being used as a weapon. Showing the ineffectiveness of international institutions in guaranteeing the protection of the right to food in contexts of military occupation or prolonged colonization.
- Enough of governance subject to neocolonial logic. The inadequacy of global policies, sometimes in contradiction with the principles promoted by the CFS, particularly with regard to access to land, seeds, and agroecological transition.
- Enough of a UN paralyzed by vetoes. International justice is currently hostage to geopolitical power relations while people are starved to death.
Gaza: deliberate collapse, planned genocide
The case of Gaza dramatically illustrates the limits of the current humanitarian approach. Since October 2023, the Gaza Strip has been the scene of an organized collapse, where famine is deliberately used as a weapon of war.
Alarming data:
- More than 38,400 people were killed, including more than 14,000 children and 10,000 women.
- 1.9 million people forcibly displaced, representing more than 87% of the population.
- 95% of agricultural land destroyed: greenhouses, irrigation systems, water infrastructure.
- 97% of water is unfit for consumption.
- The healthcare system has collapsed, with more than 30 out of 36 hospitals out of service.
- 50% of children under the age of 5 suffer from acute malnutrition (source: UNRWA, May 2025).
- Fishermen are prevented from accessing the sea, agricultural inputs are blocked, and markets are empty.
This is not a “classic” humanitarian crisis: it is a deliberate, documented, and planned genocide. And yet the international community remains paralyzed, not out of ignorance, but through silent complicity and the dictatorship of vetoes in the Security Council.
Other examples, such as Sudan, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, confirm a worrying trend: food is being used as a tool for military or geopolitical ends, in flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law and the commitments made in the CFS Framework for Action on Protracted Crises (FFA).
Resist, sow, rebuild: food sovereignty as dignity
The CSIPM recalls that food sovereignty is not only a right: it is also a form of active resistance. Even in Gaza, despite the bombs and blockades, farmers continue to sow, feed and rebuild. This collective dignity deserves to be supported, honored and defended.
During the dialogue, Razan shared the example of grassroots initiatives like APN’s Green Resistance in Palestine, which has succeeded in supporting 600 farmers to grow food and supply Gaza’s markets with 6 million kilograms of vegetables and food during the genocide.
About the CFS Collaborative Governance Dialogues
For the CSIPM these dialogues are a key opportunity to shed light on the structural causes of food insecurity and malnutrition, beyond the consensus-based negotiations. As an open platform, the dialogue allows for direct testimony, and knowledge-sharing, particularly from constituencies most affected by conflict and food insecurity.
As CFS Chair Ambassador Nosipho Jezile emphasized in her opening remarks, the dialogue’s outcomes could complement other processes taking place at the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, and the Human Rights Council, by providing space for concrete discussion grounded in realities lived by people.
At the CFS Collaborative Governance Dialogue, the CSIPM has affirmed an often forgotten truth:
“There can be no food security without political justice. And there can be no justice without solidarity among peoples.”
Read, share, amplify
- This blog is a call to action:
- A call to make the CFS a space for action and truth, not a space for oblivion.
- A call to resist dehumanization and to demand life, justice, and sovereignty for peoples.
- A call to be heard wherever voices that say NO to impunity, NO to hunger as a weapon, YES to dignity, YES to resistance, are silenced.
We gather here, haunted by death in Gaza and wonder, is it only them, or are we more dead in our humanity and integrity?
Ten years ago, after a long struggle, we celebrated the CFS Framework for Action, endorsed by all countries, delegitimizing the weaponization of food in the context of protracted crises.
The same countries now not only stand silent in the face of genocide, ecocide, starvation — they actively enable it. Should we allow everything we have built to remain a delusion?
To the US: Is the extermination of over 900 Palestinians seeking the crumbs of survival at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation death traps consistent with your ambition to be a peacemaker?
To the EU: Who and how many must be killed before reviewing trade agreements?
To corporate actors: Is genocide worth market competition?
To CSOs: Isn’t it timely to break donor conditionality?
To WFP: Why are you unable to get a single tomato seed into Gaza?
To FAO: why did you not work on reviving the local food system since the beginning of the genocide?
These are the ABCs of the FFA.
In fact to the UN and all CFS actors: Why did you paralyze the FFA which advances sovereign food systems grounded in lasting and just peace?
The world order is not designed to concretely address military or settler colonial occupation.
The genocidal and ecocidal tactics seen in their most depraved face in Gaza are also deployed across the rest of historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, and in extractive colonial projects in Congo and Sudan.
Food aid is also weaponised, seen in Yemen, Haiti and many other places.
These are profound violations of the right to food—but how can the right to food be realised in the absence of the right to life itself?
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report reveals the global network of corporate actors and charities bankrolling genocide and settler colonialism in Palestine. Corporations continue to operate in a space of impunity.
The potential of the UN decades and conventions is to ensure justice is handicapped by donor conditions, or rather instructions.
Orientalist narratives recycled through media, education, and foreign policy recast colonial domination as a divine right, lending moral legitimacy for states to neglect their extraterritorial obligations to prevent and redress crimes.
This is shockingly displayed in how the UN security council veto power is used to protect regimes that genocide, starve and displace.
Yet, we are not powerless. Power works through us: how we speak, how we remember, how we resist and how we act.
Nothing should keep those here from calling for an immediate end to genocide in Gaza now.
Let us reclaim international law as a tool that strikes at the roots of structural injustice.
How have we not yet recognised ecocide as an international crime?
We can pursue food sovereignty and support farmers, even during conflicts.
It is possible. Our organization, the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, and without any foreign funding has supported 35,000 farmers in Palestine with agricultural inputs, planting 3.1 million fruit trees that support a quarter of a million people. We salute the organizations and families doing this critical work everywhere.
We need to disseminate and translate the FFA as a viable framework to revive food systems via roots-cause redressal, rights-based peace-building and development. All actors must also assess and actualise their alignment with the FFA.
We urge CFS not to only coordinate policy but serve as a platform for international accountability. This must extend to demonstrating support for the international court of justice.
States must cease all trade that sustains genocide and enforce corporate accountability. We salute here the Hague Group who are taking concrete action to enforce international law against genocide.
We should be accurate in the terminology that informs policy. Genocide is not a dispute and ‘resilience-building’ is not ‘shock’ absorption but structural transformation. This is part of a broader project of decolonising the production of knowledge.
Civil society can play an instrumental role in restoring food sovereignty in conflict, occupation, and genocide.
Look now to Gaza. Farmers continue to sow seeds in the face of systematic starvation. APN’s green resistance succeeded in supporting 600 farmers to grow food and supply Gaza’s markets with 6 million kilograms of food during the genocide, imagine what could be realised if all actors mobilised in defense of life.
Thank you, Madam Moderator.
We welcome the CFS’s commitment to strengthening coordination and governance mechanisms for food security and nutrition. However, the challenges we face today go far beyond a lack of coordination. They are systemic, structural and linked to deeply asymmetrical global governance.
The data for 2024 is clear: nearly 300 million people face acute food insecurity, mostly in contexts of conflict and instability. The case of Gaza is emblematic: the collapse of food production, restricted access to the sea for fishermen, and the inability to access agricultural inputs all illustrate a strategy in which hunger becomes an instrument of war.
Other examples, such as Sudan, Yemen and the DRC, confirm a worrying trend: food is being used as a tool for military or geopolitical ends, in flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law and the commitments made in the CFS Framework for Action on Protracted Crises (CPA).
It is important to recognise that each crisis – whether in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan or the DRC – has its own root causes, geopolitical dynamics and specific consequences. Grouping them together in the same analysis without distinguishing their historical, political and social contexts risks obscuring specific responsibilities, erasing the specific demands of the peoples concerned and rendering invisible the structural mechanisms of domination, occupation or war that underpin them.
Mixing these situations amounts to standardising struggles that are nevertheless different, which weakens the political impact of each cause. In the face of global political challenges, it is crucial to build international solidarity based on an understanding of particularities, rather than on simplifications that could undermine the justice that each people demands.
Structural challenges
Three interconnected factors must be addressed:
1-The persistent impunity of state and non-state actors involved in the deliberate destruction of food systems.
2- The ineffectiveness of international institutions in guaranteeing the protection of the right to food in contexts of military occupation or prolonged colonisation.
3- The inadequacy of global policies, which sometimes contradict the principles promoted by the CFS, particularly with regard to access to land, seeds and agroecological transition.
Operational recommendations
In this context, we make the following recommendations:
- Strengthen the accountability function of the CFS: beyond coordination, it is imperative that the CFS assume an explicit monitoring, alert and advocacy role, in particular through support for the mechanisms of the Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice.
- Recognise contexts of occupation and structural injustice in the CFS analysis: a specific methodology needs to be developed to assess the relevance and applicability of the CFS recommendations in situations where national sovereignty is denied.
- Promote a human rights-based approach: resilience cannot be a substitute for justice. It is essential that future CFS policies are based on a logic of reparation, access to resources and the reconstruction of food systems by the communities themselves.
- Act in coordination with existing dynamics: as an intergovernmental forum, the CFS has a responsibility to ensure that consultation processes remain open and accessible to social movements, to create a framework conducive to the autonomous expression of these initiatives, and to ensure that they are recognised and taken into account in global policy debates and guidelines.
- Furthermore, the HLPE initiative on emerging issues could be an important lever for addressing these structural challenges in a forward-looking manner. It would be relevant to ensure that such an initiative incorporates the perspectives of affected communities, particularly in contexts of protracted crises, and engages with existing work on human rights and food systems in reconstruction.
- We hope that the CFS will participate in the survey that ECOSOC plans to conduct on the health and nutrition needs of the population of Gaza, as well as in the development of a plan to address these needs in a continuous and sustainable manner.
The results of this survey be presented at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly
Conclusion
Collaborative governance cannot be limited to a platform for dialogue. It must include mechanisms for accountability, active support for affected communities, and a political reading of the root causes of protracted crises.
For there can be no food security without political justice. And there can be no justice without truth, accountability and international solidarity.
As an inclusive platform, the CFS has the opportunity and responsibility to contribute to systemic transformation centred on the dignity, rights and sovereignty of peoples.
The CFS must be a space that rejects neutrality in the face of injustice, a space where the rights of peoples are not subject to geopolitical balances but are defended as universal.
Relevant resources:
- Agenda of the Fourth Collaborative Governance Dialogue on food security and nutrition in protracted crises
- From economy of occupation to economy of genocide. Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (2025).
- CFS Chairperson statement on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and other areas of conflict. (2025)
La Via Campesina Condemns Israeli Forces’ Attack on UAWC Seed Bank in Hebron, Palestine
- Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty. Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2024).
- Ensure the right to food for all and everywhere! Civil society organizations’ statement on the Conference “Policies against Hunger 2025“
- Gaza: Internationale Verhandlungen müssen dauerhaften Waffenstillstand erreichen.Press release by Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe. In German only.
Conflict-induced acute food crises: potential policy responses in light of current emergencies. HLPE-FSN issues paper (2024)