For all the high demands of the West on the spread of freedom, prosperity and progress, the world remains marked by chronic instability and mass hunger. Last month, as part of its end of international and medical aid, the United States destroyed 500 tonnes of emergency food aid to the United Arab Emirates. More than 60,000 tonnes of emergency aid have remained stored in warehouses around the world due to the closure of the USAID. Meanwhile, Israel – with the support of the United States and the European Union – systematically hungry the nearly two million Palestinians in Assieged Gaza, being part of the nearly 320 million people worldwide who are poorly fed or at risk of starving in 2025.
This is part of a much more important scheme of hoarding and famine which has its roots in Western standards around capitalism and colonialism of the colonists, a crime against humanity which rarely faces significant international repercussions. It is not an isolated atrocity: the rise of the West and the United States was built on the massive hoarding of for-profit food resources and the deliberate use of famine to fly those who already live under oppression.
It is difficult to miss, both in international reports and in desperate publications of the social media of hungry Palestinians, begging for money, food and clean water, many being and their children reduced to emaciated bodies. This should make us shame everyone, but Westerners and their allies have all engaged in genocide, with many foods a few kilometers. A recent survey of the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute shows that 79% of Israeli Jews are “not so troubled” or “not disturbed” by reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Gaza, however, is hardly the only one to face mass famine in the context of a genocidal campaign, whether in 2025 or in the history of the recent world. What was too easy for the West to be missed are crises in the famine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan. In March, “a record of 27.7 million people was in the grip of acute hunger … in the middle of the continuous conflict linked to a massive movement and the rise in demand prices” in the DRC, according to the United Nations. The two-year conflict in Sudan, which killed around 150,000 people, many of whom were linked to famine, illness and famine, also left nearly 25 million people who need food aid, including nearly 740,000 in northern Darfur, El-Fasher, where the population is facing the fleeing during their series.
Admittedly, almost all the major powers of human history have attacked or retained the supply of food and water in the process of conquering other nation states and looting their resources at one time or another. But the West, as the world knows today, began its quest for world domination with the first crusade in the 19090s, and with it, perfected its tactics for the war of siege and the deliberate famine of the Muslim and Jewish populations in the Holy Land (present -day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), all to Catholicism. These first crusaders, short of food supplies themselves, also died by thousands of hunger or acts of mass cannibalism committed to survive.
Denying food and water in this world dominated by the West have always been a political and capitalist weapon of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism. The looting by Western Europe of the Western hemisphere has not only formed the foundation of capitalism and the endless pursuit of profits in the world, but it has also troubled the use of famine, malnutrition and deprivation as tools to control and exploit submissive peoples. From the 16th to the 19th century, the transatlantic slave trade in slaves, African slavery and the forced work of the indigenous peoples helped to fill the royal chests in Europe and to build great wealth for landowners through the Western hemisphere. The enslaved and constrained workers have denied adequate foods and waters, worked in the fields to cultivate cash crops such as sugar, coffee and tobacco, or extraction of gold and silver, and are frequently died of famine, illness and abuse. A recent study estimated that up to 56 million indigenous people died between only 1492 and 1,600. Apart from the possible United States, seven years were the average lifespan of 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 are hungry during the large starvation of Bengal in the 1770s because the Society of Eastern India prioritizes food collection for European ports and the taxation of punitive taxes to the South Asian peasants to save lives. This famine, like so many others under colonial domination, was not an accident of nature but the outcome of deliberate economic policies which treated human life as a consumable. Between 1904 and 1908, in what was now Namibia and Tanzania, the Germans in power “have directly killed or hungry” approximately “60,000 herero” and “10,000 nama” in Namibia, as well as “up to 250,000 NGONI, NGINDO, MATUMBI and members of other ethical groups” in the crisp colonial uprisings.
Perhaps the political and psychological impact of famine and bubonic plague in Europe in the 14th and 15th century helps to explain both the penchant of the West for colonization and its armament of food, and the refusal of access, as a punishment. As indicated in the results of the Famine experience of 1944-1945, with 36 white men, the participants “would dream and fantasize food” and “fatigue, irritability … and apathy”, including “significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypocondrie”. Imagine the psychological impact of generations of food insecurity and famine through a whole civilization, in particular that which believed itself religiously and morally superior because of its Christianity. The West was coherent in the refusal of populations everywhere the fundamental human law to eat.
As for the United States, the nation that started as the Jamestown colony in 1607 operated in the words of John Smith in the last 400 years: “The most part must be more industrial or hungry. Whoever will not work, will not eat. ” The colonial history of America and post-independence expansion also involved the theft of land of indigenous groups, burning crops and the insurance of famine and the massive indigenous population. Tas of cash crops such as tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar and cotton have left little land for black enslaved to cultivate food for themselves. Slaws often supplied slaves of lean rations such as corn corn and salty pork fat, barely enough to maintain life.
Even when the United States has become an agricultural mastodon, the song of “work or hungry” remained the same, its classist and racist message has only evolved over time. Over the past 40 years, the Presidents and the US Congress have promulgated several invoices requiring that the country’s poor work for a minimum of food services or have bored, including new work requirements for SNAP (Food Coupons) services promulgated under the major bill earlier this year. In 2015, the head of majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, summed up the thought of American business leaders and the Western world towards those who live with food precariousness: “They are too good with food coupons, social security and everything else.”
I can attest to the impact of malnutrition and work just to eat. From the end of 1981 until my university departure in 1987, a third of each month at home in Mount Vernon, New York, was spent with little or no food in my belly, often with massive intestinal pain in my abdomen. It didn’t matter that my mother worked full time for Mount Vernon hospital or that I was counting on the United States protection system for food aid. Once, I went from 83 to 76 kilograms on my frame of 188 centimeters within 18 days after finishing my first cycle diploma, while working for the Institute and the Western Pitt Psychiatric Clinic in 1991. I traveled the five kilometers on each path to and from work during these three weeks because I only had $ 30 to pass. Fantasies to hobby food and 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 it enough to feed more than 10 billion each year. However, the quest for profit and the agro-industries markets, and the continuous deliberate denial of access to food for vulnerable and marginalized populations, all to subjugate them for their land, their resources and even the very food that they cultivate, continues largely tirelessly. Hunger remains one of the most sustainable weapons of control and domination in the West. Geopolitically, there can be no peace in a world full of people that the West has deliberately hungry.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
