Is there a famine in Gaza? Not according to the strict official definition—and that may be slowing much-needed aid.
After months of bombing and displacement, the destruction of infrastructure, and meager food deliveries, an increasing number of people in Gaza are starving. Many children are acutely malnourished, which, if it doesn’t kill them, can have irreversible cognitive and physiological impacts. Many people are dying of hunger-related causes, such as infectious diseases, a big killer of the malnourished.
Yet the global partnership of 19 organizations that assesses acute food crises, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), concluded in a 25 June report that, despite widespread “catastrophic” food insecurity, Gaza had not yet met the criteria for a famine. Nor is it 100% certain that a famine is underway in war-torn Sudan, even though more than half the population faces “high levels of acute food insecurity,” IPC says.
This is not just an academic debate, because governments, donors, and humanitarian agencies often wait to act until a famine is officially declared. “For all the good will of humanitarians and donors, the fact is they don’t want to use taxpayer dollars until the shit really hits the fan,” says famine researcher Nicholas Haan of Singularity University, who created IPC’s classification system while at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2004. By that point people will have died or fallen into destitution, and social systems have often collapsed, says Andrew Seal of University College London. “Decision-makers should never allow famine to happen. It is a political and humanitarian failure.”
IPC was born out of frustration with the fuzzy terminology used to describe food crises. The term “famine” essentially meant something very, very bad was happening and many people were dying of starvation, but was open to multiple interpretations. Donors and technical agencies needed a common, data-driven language to express the extent and severity of food crises and help set priorities, Haan says. But in a way, that scientific rigor has come back to haunt them.
In the system Haan devised, which has gone through numerous iterations, a geographic area is in “Famine”—phase 5 on a five-level food insecurity scale—when at least 20% of households suffer from an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children are acutely malnourished, and at least two people per 10,000 are dying each day from outright starvation or malnutrition and disease. (IPC applies a similar five-scale system to individual households, except phase 5 is called Catastrophe instead of Famine.)
Because exact data can be very challenging to collect in conflict zones, where most large food crises occur, IPC has come up with a hedge: “likely Famine,” or “Famine with reasonable evidence,” when data are available on only two of the three criteria. Gaza has not yet reached that stage, IPC said in its 25 June report.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1985 to forecast food crises, has disagreed. It concluded on 31 May that famine “with reasonable evidence” had occurred in the northern governorates of Gaza in April and would likely continue through July. Vanessa Roy and Tim Hoffine, who work on FEWS NET’s early warning team, say they had evidence that at least two of the three IPC thresholds had been crossed: food shortages and acute malnutrition in children.
When activated to review the data, IPC’s five-member Famine Review Committee said on 4 June it did not find the FEWS NET data plausible. But Haan says IPC’s warning on 18 March that famine was “imminent” in northern Gaza helped ease the suffering there. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor U.S. President Joe Biden wanted famine to occur on their watch, some scientists say. The Israeli government allowed in more food aid and commercial imports, and programs to treat acutely malnourished children were scaled up. “The [IPC] system seemed to work,” Haan says. “It is quite likely famine was averted” at least between mid-March and May. But, “Famine averted … doesn’t necessarily mean averted once and for all,” Hoffine says.
Indeed, in its 25 June report, IPC warned that the entire strip is in Phase 4 Emergency conditions and that a “high risk of famine persists across Gaza as long as the conflict continues, and humanitarian access is restricted.” By September, it projects that 96% of Gaza’s population will be in the Crisis phase of food insecurity or worse, and about half a million people, nearly one-quarter of the population, are expected to be facing catastrophic food insecurity, when starvation, death, and destitution are apparent (see graphic, above). IPC and FEWS NET agree that “the situation is beyond bad enough that it warrants an immediate response,” Hoffine says.
IPC’s original intent was that governments and other organizations would act at Phase 3—when some households have high levels of malnutrition and others are forced to sell assets to buy food—and certainly by Phase 4, Emergency, characterized by extreme food shortages and high rates of acute malnutrition and disease. “People don’t start dying when famine is declared,” Seal says. “People die in Phase 4 or even Phase 3. Potentially, it can be worse to be in a prolonged Phase 4 than in a brief famine.” Indeed, Roy says, “You get a doubling or tripling of mortality during Phase 4.”
The 2011–12 famine in Somalia, with roughly 250,000 deaths the worst so far this century, is a case in point. Despite warnings from both FEWS NET and IPC, a sharp increase in humanitarian aid arrived only after famine was officially declared in July 2011. By then, many people had already perished, Seal says, often outside the geographic areas where famine was declared. Haan calls it a “failure of the entire humanitarian community.”
Longtime food security expert Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation fears the same is about to happen in Sudan, where the Sudanese Armed Forces have been fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since April 2023. The warring parties are using starvation as a weapon, he says. “Sudan is facing the worst levels of acute insecurity ever recorded by the IPC in the country,” IPC said in a 28 June analysis. More than half the population, 25.6 million people, face Phase 3 or higher conditions. “Hundreds of thousands of people will die from hunger-related causes over the next few months,” de Waal predicts. Yet humanitarian access is severely restricted, and very little aid has reached those most at risk in the greater Darfur area.
Famine declarations can be delayed by government resistance, de Waal says. That happened in Ethiopia after clashes erupted between the army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in November 2020. Huge numbers of people in the Tigray region were displaced, deprived of their livelihoods, and out of reach of humanitarian assistance. In July 2021, the Famine Review Committee warned of likely famine in the region over the next few months. In response, the Ethiopian government dismantled the IPC system in the country and prevented any further data collection. “The crime of mass starvation was perpetuated with impunity,” de Waal says. He worries that in Sudan, too, information is being suppressed.
Most scientists say the food insecurity scale itself is not the problem; it’s the fact that it’s not acted on. But neither IPC nor FEWS NET has the power to trigger global action in the stages that precede an official famine. “The famine prevention system is broken, not just broke,” Anastasia Moran of the International Rescue Committee concluded in a recent position paper. She calls on the key players—including big donors, various U.N. agencies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and nongovernmental organizations—to coordinate their efforts to raise attention and resources early on, before it is too late.
For Haan and others, the lack of urgency is disheartening. “We are getting better and better at predicting crises,” Haan says. “Our pain point is getting timely action at the scale needed. We haven’t got the world to align with the notion that you need to activate at Phase 3. It is an absolute tragedy if you get to Phase 5.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/high-bar-famine-declaration-can-delay-aid-scientists-say
