Ilektra A. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Oregon–
Amidst the mass death and suffering the various imperialist powers are currently inflicting on the world’s most vulnerable people, a critically underestimated consequence of this exploitative violence is the increasingly widespread food insecurity and risk of outright famine faced by many of its victims.
From Sudan to the Gaza Strip, the capitalist class’s unquenchable thirst for profits drives it to employ a combination of both blatant acts of open warfare and military aggression, and more subversive and sinister forms of imperialist meddling, in order to facilitate unhindered and unchecked resource extraction. This synthesizes into a particularly deadly concoction of political and economic instability brought about by internally and externally driven bloodshed and environmental degradation, directly leading to heightened risk of starvation for millions.
According to this year’s Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), famine was confirmed in two places in 2025: Gaza and Sudan, both of which are experiencing violent armed conflict and genocide of their populations. In fact, across 47 countries and territories currently undergoing food crises, 22.9% of their populations, or about 266 million people, are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity. Roughly 147 million of those people, or 55.7%, are experiencing said food insecurity due to armed conflict and war, with another third of the total due to climate change, and the remaining 11.3% brought about by economic shocks, without a doubt caused by the previous two issues.
The portion of the population of these countries experiencing acute hunger has doubled over the past decade, from 11.3% in 2016, to 22.9% in 2025. This is due in large part to the intensification of regional conflict, the inter-imperialist scramble for unexploited resources, and increasingly-apparent climate collapse.
Economic interests in a given region lead the imperialist countries to devise methods of effectively facilitating rapid, unimpeded extraction of natural resources, one of which is by means of clandestinely providing material support to different factions in proxy conflicts. In the case of Sudan, foreign capital has set its sights on three main exports: gold, oil, and agricultural products, primarily in the form of livestock, oily seeds like sesame, and gum arabic. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a U.S.-Israeli client state which, as of late, has come into its own as a regional imperialist power, owns a stake in practically all of Sudan’s vast gold wealth, amounting to roughly $1 billion worth of gold exports annually. The ongoing genocidal civil war in the central African nation is in large part fueled by this very gold trade, with the two warring factions, the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and the Chinese-backed Sudanese government, competing for control of this vast mineral wealth, with the civilian population of the country unfortunately being caught in the crossfire. As if the conflict were not convoluted enough, recent investigative reports have shown that guided bombs and howitzers manufactured by Norinco, a Chinese state-owned defense corporation which China sold to the UAE, and then the UAE subsequently supplied to the RSF, were used in the mass killing of Sudanese civilians.
While the above-mentioned competition between imperialist powers of all sizes for the redivision of the world’s economic spoils often takes the form of proxy conflicts and subterfuge, as is the case in Sudan, it unfortunately also manifests as outright military aggression directly perpetrated by the imperialists themselves.
In the case of Gaza, the state of Israel, armed to the teeth and funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars by the United States, has been engaged in the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people for the past two and half years, deliberately targeting civilians and preventing desperately-needed food aid and fuel from entering the besieged enclave.
While on the surface, Israel’s fascist Zionist ideology does call for the dehumanization and extermination of Palestinians, there are also direct economic interests at play. A 2019 report put out by the UN Conference on Trade and Development details the discovery of some 1.7 billion barrels of oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Levant Basin off the coast of Gaza, which would undoubtedly be a lucrative investment opportunity for corporations from around the world.
This frenzied scramble for the remaining unexploited fuel and mineral resources of the world is pursued either through open militaristic jingoism (as in Gaza and now Iran), or through more “diplomatic,” subtle means in the form of economic partnerships, trade deals, and indirect proxy conflicts (as in Sudan).
Either method winds up facilitating the same unfortunate consequence: massive environmental destruction. A scientific study published in May 2025 reveals that more carbon was emitted in the first fifteen months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza than the annual greenhouse gas output of more than a hundred different individual countries, like Costa Rica and Estonia. Gold mining in Sudan, though typically performed by small-scale, artisanal mining operations (as opposed to larger, industrialized ones), poses dire health risks to the population and biosphere, as mercury contamination, deforestation, and soil erosion are prevalent in mining areas. These problems are only worsening as the global demand for gold increases.
This widespread destruction of the environment, whether by carbon emissions or the spread of toxic chemicals, directly leads to crop failures and poor harvests, while global temperatures rise and average yearly rainfall plummets, contributing to more severe droughts and lower agricultural production.
The imperialist countries’ never-ending hunger for still-larger pieces of the rapidly-shrinking pie leads them to employ an assortment of tactics ranging from covert operations and the stoking of existing social tensions, to open acts of military aggression and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, all in a deliberate attempt at destabilizing and overwhelming targeted nations.
This frantic and panicked pursuit of more profits attained through total control and unhindered extraction of quickly-dwindling deposits of unutilized natural resources directly causes massive environmental damage, speeding up the warming of the planet, leading to the increased risk of food shortages and famine we see today.
If the entire capitalist-imperialist system is not dismantled, we as a species are facing a bleak, inhospitable future, where starvation and malnutrition are the norm instead of the exception. In order to avoid this catastrophic fate, the global working class must stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with one another and fight to create a better, more equitable world. Our societies must run on the basis of working-class democracy, sustainable development, and planned production for the needs of the many, not the profits of the few.