Gaza is no anomaly: Hunger and hoarding are the West's oldest weapons

Al Jazeera

a day ago

For all the West's lofty claims about spreading freedom, prosperity and progress, the world remains scarred by chronic instability and mass hunger. Last month, as part of its wind-down of international food and medical aid, the United States destroyed 500 metric tonnes of emergency food aid in the United Arab Emirates. Over 60,000 tonnes of emergency food aid have remained stockpiled in warehouses around the world due to the shutdown of USAID. Meanwhile, Israel – with US and European Union support – has been systematically starving the nearly two million remaining Palestinians in besieged Gaza, part of the almost 320 million people globally who are malnourished or at risk of starving to death in 2025.
It's part of a much larger pattern of hoarding and starvation that has its roots in Western norms around capitalism and settler-colonialism, a crime against humanity that rarely faces meaningful international repercussions. This is not an isolated atrocity: The rise of the West and the US was built on the massive hoarding of food resources for profit and the deliberate use of starvation to cow those already living under oppression.
It is difficult to miss, in both the international news reports and the desperate social media posts of starved Palestinians begging for money, food and clean water, with many showing themselves and their children reduced to emaciated bodies. It should shame us all, yet Westerners and their allies have all committed themselves to genocide, with ample food mere kilometres away. A recent poll by the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israeli Democracy Institute shows that 79 percent of Israeli Jews are 'not so troubled' or 'not troubled at all' by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Gaza, though, is hardly alone in facing mass starvation as part of a genocidal campaign, whether in 2025 or in recent world history. What has been all too easy for the West to miss are famine-level crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Sudan. As of March, 'a record 27.7 million people are in the grip of acute hunger … amid ongoing conflict linked to massive displacement and rising food prices' in the DRC, according to the United Nations. The two-year-long conflict in Sudan, which has killed an estimated 150,000 people, many of whose deaths were linked to famine, disease and starvation, has also left nearly 25 million in need of food assistance, including nearly 740,000 in North Darfur's capital, el-Fasher, where the population faces starvation while under siege.
To be sure, nearly every major power in human history has attacked or withheld food and water supplies in the process of conquering other nation-states and plundering their resources at one time or another. But the West, as the world knows it today, began its quest for global dominance with the First Crusade in the 1090s, and with it, perfected its tactics for siege warfare and the deliberate starvation of Muslim and Jewish populations in the Holy Land (present-day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), all in the name of Catholicism. Those first Crusaders, short on food supplies themselves, also died in their thousands from hunger or committed acts of mass cannibalism to survive.
Denying food and water in this Western-dominated world has always been a political and capitalistic weapon of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism. Western Europe's plundering of the Western Hemisphere not only formed the foundation of capitalism and the never-ending pursuit of profit worldwide, it also entrenched the use of famine, malnutrition and deprivation as tools to control and exploit subject peoples. From the 16th through the 19th century, the transatlantic slave trade, African chattel enslavement and forced labour of Indigenous peoples helped fill royal coffers in Europe and build great wealth for landowners across the Western Hemisphere. Enslaved and coerced labourers, denied adequate food and water, toiled in the fields to grow cash crops such as sugar, coffee and tobacco, or mined gold and silver, and frequently died from starvation, disease and abuse. One recent study estimated that as many as 56 million Indigenous people died between 1492 and 1600 alone. Outside the eventual United States, seven years was the average lifespan for most of the 12 million Africans who survived the horrors of the Atlantic crossing and arrived in the Western Hemisphere.
Beyond the Americas, around 10 million people starved to death during the Great Bengal Famine of the 1770s because the East India Company prioritised collecting food for Europe's ports and imposing punitive taxes on South Asian peasants over saving lives. This famine, like so many others under colonial rule, was not an accident of nature but the outcome of deliberate economic policies that treated human life as expendable. Between 1904 and 1908, in what is now Namibia and Tanzania, the ruling Germans 'directly killed or starved to death' approximately '60,000 Herero' and '10,000 Nama' in Namibia, as well as 'up to 250,000 Ngoni, Ngindo, Matumbi and members of other ethnic groups' in crushing colonial uprisings.
Perhaps the political and psychological impact of famine and bubonic plague in 14th and 15th-century Europe helps to explain both the West's penchant for colonisation and its weaponisation of food, and the denial of access to it, as punishment. As noted in the results of the 1944–45 Minnesota Starvation Experiment with 36 white men, the participants 'would dream and fantasise about food' and 'reported fatigue, irritability … and apathy,' including 'significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis'. Imagine the psychological impact of generations of food insecurity and starvation across an entire civilisation, especially one that believed itself to be religiously and morally superior because of its Christianity. The West has been consistent in denying populations everywhere the fundamental human right to eat.
As for the United States, the nation that began as the Jamestown colony in 1607 has operated under John Smith's words for the past 400 years: 'The greater part must be more industrious or starve. He that will not work, shall not eat.' America's own colonial history and post-independence expansion also involved stealing land from Indigenous groups, burning crops and ensuring famine and massive Indigenous population decline. Growing heaps of cash crops such as tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar and cotton left little land for enslaved Black folk to cultivate food for themselves. Enslavers often provided the enslaved with meagre rations such as corn mush and salted pork fatback, hardly enough to sustain life.
Even when the United States became an agricultural juggernaut, the 'work or starve' song remained the same, its classist and racist message only evolving with the times. For the past 40 years, US presidents and Congress have enacted multiple bills requiring the nation's poor to work for minimal food benefits or go without, including new work requirements for SNAP (food stamps) benefits enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year. In 2015, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up the thinking of US business leaders and the Western world towards those living with food precarity: 'They're doing too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest.'
I can attest to the impact of malnourishment and working just to eat. From the end of 1981 until I went off to college in 1987, one-third of every month at home in Mount Vernon, New York, was spent with little or no food in my belly, often with massive intestinal gas pains bloating my abdomen. It did not matter whether my mother worked full-time for Mount Vernon Hospital or relied on the US welfare system for food aid. Once, I dropped from 83 to 76 kilogrammes on my 188-centimetre frame in the 18 days after finishing my undergraduate degree, while working for Pitt's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in 1991. I walked the five kilometres each way to and from work for those three weeks because I only had $30 to get me through. Fantasies of hoarding food and controlling access to resources were definitely part of my experiences with moderate hunger and malnutrition.
Today, the United States produces enough food to feed more than two billion people, and the world produces enough to feed more than 10 billion every year. Yet the quest for profit and markets for agribusinesses, and the continued deliberate denial of access to food for vulnerable and marginalised populations, all to subjugate them for their land, their resources and even the very food they grow, continues largely unabated. Hunger remains one of the West's most enduring weapons of control and domination. Geopolitically, there can be no peace in a world full of people whom the West has deliberately helped starve.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.