More than a quarter of humanity struggles to get enough food even though the world produces enough for everyone, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told the Committee on World Food Security in Rome on Monday. Global food supply now exceeds 3,000 calories per person per day, a historic high, yet hunger reduction has not kept pace. Too much of that abundance is swallowed up by injustice and the denial of human rights, he said, noting that households throw away more than one billion meals a day and that 1 percent of the world’s farms operate more than 70 percent of global farmland.
Conflict is the acute driver. Turk said conflict is driving acute hunger in 12 of the 13 current hunger hotspots, with restrictions on humanitarian aid and attacks on aid workers cutting off the last lifelines, and he called for the rules of war to be upheld so hunger is never used as a method of warfare. He proposed a human rights economy built on social protection, fair taxation, agricultural policies that reduce poverty, and equitable access to land, water and seeds.
The independent expert on the right to food, Sofia Monsalve Suarez, addressing the committee for the first time in that role, said the rapid increase in famine and the use of starvation as a weapon of war concerned her most. While chronic hunger declined in 2025, acute hunger has risen steadily since 2016: 1.4 million people in six countries now face catastrophic conditions, nine times more than in 2016, and 266 million people face acute hunger every day, in countries including Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Yemen, as well as in Gaza. She called the return of famine and the deliberate use of starvation a moral challenge that continues with impunity, and asked for stronger accountability and earlier warning coordination between the Security Council, the committee and food security monitors.