Conflict is the primary cause of famine in the world today. Nearly 70 percent of people facing acute food insecurity in 2025 live in countries affected by war or armed violence. While drought, economic shocks, and poverty all play roles, modern famines are overwhelmingly triggered or deepened by human decisions, not nature alone. In 2024, more than 295 million people across 53 countries experienced crisis-level hunger, an increase of nearly 14 million from the year before.
How Famine Is Officially Defined
Famine isn’t just widespread hunger. It has a precise technical definition under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, the international standard used by the United Nations and aid agencies. An area is classified as famine, the highest severity level, only when three conditions are met simultaneously: at least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 people are dying every day from starvation or the combination of malnutrition and disease.
That threshold is deliberately high. Many catastrophic hunger situations never reach official famine status, which means the real scope of starvation-related suffering is far broader than the label suggests.
Why Conflict Is the Dominant Driver
War destroys food systems in ways that compound on each other. Fighting damages farms, irrigation networks, and roads. It forces farmers off their land and separates families from their income. Markets shut down or become impossible to reach. And critically, armed groups often block humanitarian aid from reaching the people who need it most.
Sudan is the clearest current example. Sustained violence between rival military factions has displaced millions, sent staple food prices to levels most families cannot afford, and created man-made blockages that prevent aid deliveries. Famine has been formally identified in multiple areas of the country, with the crisis projected to worsen before the next harvest season even arrives. The primary drivers, according to the UN’s own classification: conflict, displacement, and restricted humanitarian access.
In the Gaza Strip, about 96 percent of the population (2.15 million people) faced high levels of acute food insecurity through mid-2024. Over 495,000 people were classified at the catastrophic level, the threshold associated with famine. The IPC assessment was blunt: the risk of famine persists as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted.
This pattern repeats across nearly every modern famine. Hunger is frequently used as a weapon of war, with blockades and sieges cutting off food supplies to civilian populations. Researchers at Wageningen University have documented that all major famines of the 20th century had primarily political causes, from Soviet-era starvation campaigns to wartime famines during World War II. The 21st century has continued that pattern in Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen, and beyond.
How Famine Causes Have Shifted Over Time
Famines were once driven mainly by nature. A prolonged drought would destroy crops, and without trade networks or stored reserves, entire regions starved. Occasionally a military siege would cause localized famine, but those events were limited in scope.
That changed dramatically in the modern era. Global trade, food storage technology, and international aid mean that a single climate shock, no matter how severe, rarely causes famine on its own. As one food security researcher put it: “It is never just a climate shock, because there is always still trade and food aid.” Famine happens when something prevents those systems from functioning, and that something is almost always conflict or political failure.
Climate and Weather as Amplifiers
Extreme weather doesn’t cause famine by itself in the modern world, but it pushes vulnerable populations closer to the edge. Between August 2023 and July 2024, researchers detected 52 prolonged drought events across South America, central and eastern Asia, central Africa, and North America. A rare convergence of three major climate patterns (El Niño, a shift in Indian Ocean temperatures, and warming in the tropical North Atlantic) intensified drought conditions across multiple continents simultaneously.
The practical effects are severe. Farmers in drought-stricken areas face reduced yields and outright crop failures, which cut into household income and local food supplies. In southern Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia, combined heatwaves and drought pushed millions of people from food stress into crisis. But in nearly every case, the difference between a food crisis and an actual famine comes down to whether political conditions allow aid and trade to reach the people affected.
Economic Shocks Hit the Poorest Hardest
Rising food prices act as a force multiplier for hunger. When the cost of staple foods spikes, wealthier countries absorb the increase. In low-income nations, families already spending 60 to 80 percent of their income on food simply cannot eat enough.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated this vividly. Global supply chain disruptions pushed up the cost of producing and transporting food worldwide. Currency fluctuations in developing countries made imports even more expensive. The resulting inflation hit the most vulnerable populations hardest, increasing inequality and deepening hunger in countries that were already fragile. In conflict zones, these economic pressures layer on top of the destruction caused by fighting, creating conditions where famine becomes almost inevitable without outside intervention.
Shrinking Aid Makes Everything Worse
Even when the causes of a food crisis are clear and the solutions are known, funding determines whether millions of people actually receive help. The World Food Programme currently faces a funding gap that will force cuts to emergency food assistance affecting up to 16.7 million people, a 21 percent reduction from the 79.9 million it assisted in 2024. Yemen faces the deepest cuts, with 4.8 million people at risk of losing life-saving support. Eleven countries could each see more than 500,000 people dropped from assistance.
The consequences cascade quickly. An estimated 3 million people currently at emergency hunger levels risk losing aid entirely. Another 13.7 million people at the crisis level could deteriorate to emergency status without continued support, potentially driving a 31 percent increase in the most severe category of global acute food insecurity. When aid shrinks, the line between a manageable food crisis and a full-blown famine gets thinner.
Why the Answer Keeps Coming Back to Conflict
Drought can destroy a harvest. Inflation can price families out of the market. Poverty can leave communities with no reserves. But famine in the modern world requires something that prevents the normal responses, food trade, government intervention, international aid, from reaching people in time. That barrier is overwhelmingly armed conflict. It displaces farmers, destroys infrastructure, blocks aid convoys, and diverts government resources toward military spending. Every current famine or near-famine situation on the planet involves active conflict or its immediate aftermath.
The world produces more than enough food to feed everyone alive. Famine persists not because of scarcity but because violence and political failure prevent food from reaching the people who need it.