How humanitarians can better prevent weaponization of food aid

Six years after the international community united to adopt United Nations Resolution 2417, which condemns the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access, both practices seem to have made an alarming return. The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, and Ethiopia have revealed their devastating human toll. During a Devex event Wednesday held alongside the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York, experts discussed how donors and humanitarian players can more effectively prevent the weaponization of aid. They also emphasized the importance of moral leadership and accountability when prevention efforts fall short. Famine or the high risk of it spread through much of Gaza this year, according to an independent group of U.N. experts, as Israel blocked most aid trucks from entering the territory. In Sudan, famine has been declared in one displaced persons camp in Darfur but starvation is widespread as the warring parties block humanitarian aid. Last month, the U.N. warned that famine once again looms in Yemen. Meanwhile, recent scandals involving the diversion and theft of food aid in conflict-ridden countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia have exposed critical gaps in the ability of the international community and humanitarian agencies to manage and prevent such crises. “The World Food Programme is an amazing organization. They have some of the best global logistics capacity of any institution in the world,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. “But they’re not perfect, and I think they could do with a more robust internal oversight culture. That was something that struck me when I was a U.S. government official. … We could get much deeper oversight of our NGO partners and of our U.N. partners,” said Konyndyk, a former director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance. At the same time, there is never zero risk of fraud or the misuse of aid. Investigations like those into diversions of WFP aid can be a positive sign that internal systems are functioning, said Leslie Archambeault, managing director of humanitarian policy for Save the Children USA. “We cannot put all of the money in one U.N. actor and expect them to be able to manage the risk appropriately, right? We need to diversify funding. We need to diversify it with other INGOs, but also with local organizations,” Archambeault said. In addition to encouraging better oversight, the international community also has a responsibility to challenge groups or countries that are weaponizing food aid or enabling it to be weaponized. And this is true even if such a challenge comes with political costs, the panelists said. “We cannot be neutral. … Our neutrality does not work in settings where vulnerable people or vulnerable groups will face a lot of issues, so we will have to side with the vulnerable, and we need to push,” said Abdulwasea Mohammed, the advocacy, campaigns and media manager for Oxfam Yemen. Konyndyk pointed to the Obama administration’s success in pushing the Saudi government to allow aid into Yemen. The administration prevented Saudi Arabia from blocking assistance under security pretenses by creating a U.N. inspection mechanism. “It was imperfect, but we were willing to push a partner of the United States on that. We’re not seemingly willing to do that now in regard to Gaza,” Konyndyk said. “The UAE president met with President Biden on Monday, and reading the readout from the meeting, it was like a dispatch from another planet.” “The UAE, which, on the one hand, is trying to lead the fight for humanitarian access in Gaza, here in New York, while in Sudan, shipping arms to a genocidal paramilitary group in Darfur,” he added. “You can’t do both those things and say this is about principles, or this is about norms, this is just purely, then, about geopolitics.” Beyond merely standing up to potential bad players, the panelists said the international community must persist in trying to hold those who weaponize food to account, even if justice on this front moves slowly. “Guterres … has said that famines are man-made. Now, the corollary of that is there are men who make them and men who can unmake them,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and a leading expert on famine. “We know that if Israel wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow, it would happen. They’ve shown it. The fact that it does not happen means that we need to point the finger at those individuals who are not making that decision and hold them culpable,” said de Waal.