French version | Ver en español

Beyond numbers: rethinking food security monitoring in conflicts and crisis

In conflicts around the world, millions are facing starvation and famine conditions but the international community’s response remains disjointed and ineffective. In a new briefing paper, FIAN International examines the reasons for this and explores ways to strengthen timely and effective assistance to communities impacted by long term human rights abuses – including deliberate starvation and famine.

As climate disruptions, war, and systemic inequality intensify, the world is confronted with a deepening food emergency. Yet the international systems in place to address it are failing to deliver effective, coordinated solutions.

Areas that are often quoted in the media as “teetering on the brink of famine” or being at “the edge of starvation” already have several thousands of people dead or rapidly dying of starvation and of illnesses related to or exacerbated by a lack of adequate food. Gaza and Sudan are two prominent examples.

In Beyond Numbers: Rethinking Food Security Monitoring in Conflict and Crisis (also available in Arabic here) FIAN analyzes the international community’s approach to starvation, posing several key questions including: What is a “famine”? Who decides whether a famine is occurring? How is it monitored? And what are the implications for the food sovereignty and human rights community?

"We must rethink how we measure famine — too often, we focus on body counts and crisis thresholds, while ignoring the deeper, structural causes that set the stage for disaster,” said FIAN policy officer for corporate accountability Ayushi Kalyan.

“The real challenge is not just counting the dead, but identifying the real, structural risks earlier and addressing the root causes of famine and starvation before they spiral into catastrophe."

Situations of right to food and nutrition violations in crisis situations, including famines, do not emerge in a vacuum. They are the result of long-term, systemic marginalization of communities, of their exclusion in monitoring efforts and decision-making, and of long-term violations of economic, social, and cultural rights.

In such cases, what can early action and real prevention look like? In a recent report, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, offers a human rights lens to starvation, indicating that starvation reflects “a State’s fundamental abandonment of its human rights obligations... and when a State or any other actor systemically violates the right to food, this is an early warning that indicates some degree of intention to starve a population.”

“Mainstream monitoring tools are not designed to assess the root causes of food crises in conflict or occupation settings,” said FIAN policy officer for monitoring and advocacy Emily Mattheisen.

“These methods obscure the power dynamics at play and miss the voices of those most affected. To truly address hunger, we must integrate grassroots insights and human rights indicators into our monitoring systems."

This briefing aims to open a dialogue between the right to food and humanitarian communities, in order to learn from each other while also imagining new ways of supporting affected communities and populations, creating effective human rights-based monitoring mechanisms and greater accountability around actions and structural conditions that result in right to food violations, including starvation and famine.

Download briefing here.

Download Arabic version here

Read Arabic press release here.

For more information please contact Ayushi Kalyan Kalyan@fian.org or Emily Mattheisen Mattheisen@fian.org