In a world that produces more food than it needs to feed every living person, mass hunger is not a natural disaster. It is a political verdict and the state that renders it bears a responsibility it cannot, in conscience or in law, disclaim.
The child who goes to school without eating does not go to school in any meaningful sense. She sits in a classroom, but the classroom is elsewhere. Beyond the fog of hunger that muffles sound, flattens concentration, and reduces the distance between her and the future to a single, consuming biological emergency. She is present and she is absent simultaneously, and this particular form of absence which is invisible to the register, unrecorded in any official ledger of deprivation will compound into the adult she becomes. She is likely to become the worker whose productivity is structurally compromised, the mother whose children inherit a nutritional debt she was never equipped to repay, the citizen whose relationship with the state was formed, at its earliest and most formative moment, in the experience of abandonment.
Hunger does this. Not famine in its dramatic, photogenic, emergency-declared form (even though that too is a concern) but the quieter, more pervasive hunger in the life of ordinary citizens in states that have chosen, through the aggregate of their budgetary decisions and policy orientations and political priorities, not to ensure that their people eat. This is the hunger that does not make the headline but makes history. The chronic undernourishment that the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates affects more than 730 million people globally. In a world that produces, by the same organization’s calculations, enough food to feed ten billion. The arithmetic of sufficiency is not in question. What is in question is the political will to distribute that sufficiency justly and the governance structures adequate to translating that will, where it exists, into the reality of the filled plate.
My arguments are straightforward, even though its implications are not. Hunger, at the scale at which it persists in the twenty-first century, is not a natural condition. It is a governance choice. And the state, that irreducible institution through which human communities have, since at least the emergence of the Westphalian order, organized the collective management of their affairs, bears a responsibility for that choice that is simultaneously moral and political. To name that responsibility clearly, to examine what it demands in practice, and to resist the comfortable evasions through which states have historically disclaimed it, is the work this article sets out to do.
The Legal Cartography of State Responsibility
The right to food is not a recent invention of advocacy movements or rhetorics in the preambles of aspirational declarations. It is a legally grounded, treaty-embedded obligation of international standing. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, establishes food as a component of the standard of living adequate for health and well-being to which every person is entitled. Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which entered into force in 1976 and has been ratified by 171 states, recognizes the right of every person to adequate food and obliges state parties to take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of that right. General Comment 12 of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, issued in 1999, gives this obligation its operational content. States must respect the right to food by not taking measures that prevent people’s access to food; they must protect it by ensuring that third parties do not deprive people of access; and they must fulfil it by proactively building the legal, institutional, and programmatic architecture through which food security becomes a reality rather than a promise.
These are not soft obligations. They do not admit of the familiar sovereign equivocation that frames human rights commitments as aspirational targets to be pursued as resources permit, on timelines of the state’s own choosing. The progressive realization standard that governs economic and social rights does permit flexibility in the pace of achievement, but it is inseparable from a requirement of maximum available resource deployment and a prohibition on deliberate retrogression. This is specifically on the adoption of policies that worsen food security without justification. A government that reduces its agricultural extension budget during a food price crisis, or that implements subsidy removals without compensatory social protection mechanisms, or that allocates less than two percent of its national budget to agriculture while ratifying treaties that commit it to food security, is not a government navigating the honest difficulties of resource constraint. It is a government in breach of a legal obligation it has freely assumed.
The hungry citizen is not a victim of nature. She is a creditor of the state, one whose debt is encoded in law, denominated in dignity, and long, unconscionably overdue.
The Political Economy of Produced Hunger
If the legal case for state responsibility is relatively clear, the political economy of how hunger is produced and sustained is considerably more complex, and considerably more damning. Hunger, in most of its chronic contemporary forms, is not produced by the absence of food. It is produced by the organization of economic and political power in ways that systematically exclude the most vulnerable from access to the food that exists. Amartya Sen’s foundational insight that famines do not occur in functioning democracies, and that hunger is a function of entitlement failure rather than production failure. This remains more than four decades after he articulated it, the most analytically precise account of why people go hungry in a world of agricultural surplus.
Entitlement failure is a governance product. It is produced by land tenure systems that dispossess smallholder farmers of the productive assets on which their food security depends. It is produced by trade policies that expose domestic food markets to international price volatility without the buffer mechanisms that would protect the most vulnerable consumers. It is produced by social protection systems that are too narrow, too bureaucratically inaccessible, and too chronically underfunded to reach the households whose need is greatest. It is produced by public investment patterns that concentrate agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation, rural roads, storage facilities, and extension services in regions and among populations whose political weight makes their claims on state resources more legible to power. And it is produced by the corruption that diverts food security budgets from their intended beneficiaries to the intermediaries we have in procurement officials, distribution contractors, and party operatives whose political utility to those in power exceeds that of the hungry.
Nigeria’s experience is, in this respect, is representative. A country of extraordinary agricultural endowment, with arable land exceeding 70 million hectares, a river system of immense irrigation potential, and a climate range that supports almost every food crop of nutritional significance, Nigeria entered 2024 with food inflation above forty percent, a hunger crisis affecting an estimated 26 million people, and a national agricultural budget allocation that, in real terms, represented one of the lowest in a generation. The land did not fail. The climate, for all its accelerating unpredictability, did not account for the scale of the deficit. What failed was the institutional and political architecture of state responsibility. The chain of decisions, from budget allocation to programme implementation to market regulation to social protection, that determines whether the endowment of a nation translates into the nourishment of its people.
What State Responsibility Actually Demands
To acknowledge that hunger is a governance choice is not to demand something outrageous, ridiculous, overzealous or impossible. It is to demand the deliberate, consistent, institutionally grounded, and politically protected pursuit of the specific governance functions whose exercise is the difference between a state that feeds its people and one that does not. These functions have been documented across enough comparative national experiences to constitute something close to an evidence base for what responsible food governance actually looks like in practice.
It begins with fiscal seriousness. The protection of agricultural and social protection budget lines from the raiding that treats them as residual discretionary items when other fiscal pressures mount. The Maputo Declaration’s ten percent agricultural budget threshold was not arbitrary. It reflected the investment levels demonstrated by states that had successfully reduced hunger through agricultural productivity growth. Meeting it requires political will of the kind that resists the permanent temptation to redirect long-term investment toward short-term visibility. But it also requires something more foundational, a governance culture in which the hunger of the most vulnerable citizen is treated as a fiscal emergency of the same order of urgency as the economic anxieties of the most politically organized.
The budget is a legible record of whose suffering the state has decided to take seriously.
It demands further, the design and sustained funding of social protection systems that reach the most vulnerable households not as a gesture of governmental largesse but as a matter of legal obligation. Conditional cash transfer programmes, school feeding schemes, emergency food reserves, and nutrition-sensitive agricultural extension services have each, in different national contexts, demonstrated the capacity to reduce chronic hunger measurably and durably. They are not expensive experiments. They are, in many cases, among the highest-return public investments available to developing-country governments because the costs of hunger, measured in lost cognitive development, reduced labour productivity, increased healthcare expenditure, and the intergenerational transmission of nutritional poverty, dwarf the costs of the interventions that prevent it.
And finally, it demands the kind of accountability architecture that makes the state’s food security commitments something more than annual declarations. It must be one that creates real consequences for the gap between what is promised and what is delivered. Independent food security monitoring systems, parliamentary oversight of agricultural and nutrition budgets, community-level feedback mechanisms that give hungry households a voice in the assessment of the programmes that claim to serve them. These are the structural conditions under which state responsibility for hunger becomes operational rather than rhetorical.
The Dignity Imperative
Behind every argument about budgets and policies and institutional architectures, there is a human being. There is a woman who wakes before dawn to join a food queue, whose pride is quietly dismantled by the experience, who returns home with less than she went for, to children who have learned, with the adaptability of the young, to expect less. There is an elder who remembers when the land provided more than it does now. Not because the land has changed, but because the systems that should have supported its productivity were starved of investment in the years when the investment would have mattered. There is a child, somewhere in the arithmetic of the 730 million, sitting in a classroom that is elsewhere.
The dignity of these lives is very much a sentimental concern. However, it is also the foundational justification for the entire edifice of state authority. Governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed and that consent is extended, always, on the premise that the state will, at minimum, not leave its citizens to starve in a world of plenty. When states breach this premise and they choose, through the accumulation of their political priorities and budgetary decisions, to produce and sustain the conditions of hunger, they fail a technical governance test and commit, in the most precise sense available, a violation of the human dignity they exist to protect.
Hunger cannot be boxed into the categories of misfortune, development challenge, unfortunate incident of resource-constrained environments. It is a violation, with perpetrators and victims and remedies available in law.
Naming this as a violation is precision. And it is the beginning of the political seriousness that ending hunger, wherever the political will exists to do so, actually requires. The choice to hunger was made by governance. The choice to end it must be made there too.
Very informative and easy to follow. Looking forward to more like this.