Food Security as National Security

Food insecurity is no longer merely a humanitarian concern — it is a vector of geopolitical instability, a tool of statecraft, and an accelerating dimension of the global security crisis. Drought and flooding destroy crops; scarcity drives displacement; and in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, hunger has been engineered as a weapon. CFR’s Food Security program is a sustained, multi-year initiative that repositions food security at the center of global security debates, bridges the longstanding divide between development and security communities, and generates rigorous policy-relevant analysis for governments, multilateral institutions, and the private sector.

The initiative rests on four interconnected pillars:

1. The nexus of food security, climate change, and human mobility as drivers of geopolitical transformation
2. The weaponization of food and agricultural systems as instruments of malign statecraft
3. The development of a multidimensional, twenty-first-century conception of security adequate to complex, cascading crises
4. Contributions toward a new multilateralism more solidly anchored in the Global South without abandoning the normative foundations established after World War II.

Flash Point Papers:

Rapid-response papers on emerging food security crises tracking the moments when hunger becomes a policy emergency.

In 2025, 266 million people across 47 countries faced acute food insecurity — nearly 23 percent of the population assessed, and more than double the level recorded a decade earlier. A further 645 million people experienced chronic hunger, and 2.1 billion were moderately or severely food insecure.

Why this is a security problem, not a development one. Conflict is the primary driver of acute food insecurity, and more than 80 percent of the people facing it live in protracted crisis contexts, where war compounds weather extremes and economic shocks. In 2025, for the first time in the ten-year history of the Global Report on Food Crises, two famines were confirmed in the same year — in parts of the Gaza Strip and in Sudan.

The two trend lines now run in opposite directions. Global hunger fell for a third consecutive year in 2025. But acute, conflict-driven food insecurity keeps rising and concentrating in fewer, more violent places. Drought, flooding, water scarcity, and failed crops set the conditions; war determines who starves. That divergence is the premise of CFR’s Food Security program: food insecurity is not a humanitarian footnote to conflict but one of its most reliable products — and, increasingly, one of its instruments.

The CFR Food Security Program examines how disruptions to global food systems drive political instability, conflict, and humanitarian crises.

Operating under the Wachenheim Center for Peace and Security, the program produces rapid-response analysis, convenes senior policymakers and practitioners, and builds the frameworks needed to treat food insecurity as a national security challenge — not a development afterthought.