On September 23, 1943, the English-language newspaper The Statesman in India published the following report: “In the week ending September 18, the number of deaths was 1,319… Since August 16, the city’s hospitals have admitted 4,338 famine victims, of whom 972 died. As for the corpses removed from the streets and hospitals by the police force and two unofficial agencies since the first of August, their number has reached 2,527.”
That month, Bengal was in the grip of a man-made famine claiming thousands of lives every week. India, then under British colonial rule, had been drawn into World War II in 1939 as a supplier of soldiers, raw materials, and credit, and as a strategic front in the Allied campaign against Japan.
In 1942, the colonial authorities imposed a modified “scorched earth” policy on the provinces of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and parts of Madras. The military was ordered to destroy or remove food stocks and disrupt land, sea, rail, and river transport routes.
The pretext was to deny resources to the Japanese, but the result left millions of civilians without food.
In London, over five thousand miles away, the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, appealed to Winston Churchill’s war government to send 500,000 tons of grain to save Bengal from famine. The government refused the request, allocating less than a quarter of that amount.
Amery later wrote that the government treated the matter as an “exaggeration on the part of India.” Over the following years, the death toll from the famine and subsequent epidemics rose to three million people.
Under strict censorship that prohibited the press from reporting on anything that might cause terror or panic, The Statesman defied orders and published its report.
The colonial authorities preferred stories focusing on relief efforts and promoting the idea of a chronic “beggar problem.” This narrative made hunger seem like a natural and inherent aspect of poverty, obscured the scale of the disaster, and portrayed British colonialism as a benevolent caretaker. Officials even went so far as to replace the words “hunger” or “famine” with the phrase “sick destitutes” in mortality reports, attempting to frame the catastrophe as an inevitable fate rather than the result of deliberate policies.
Yet, despite some newspapers defying orders to report the truth, this did not lead to any serious accountability for those responsible. The reason is that the very architects of post-war international law had themselves used blockade and starvation as weapons in their own wars and colonial endeavors, and had no desire to criminalize a tool they had so frequently employed.
As researchers Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk explain, Britain and France in the 20th century favored blockade as a “low-visibility, high-impact form of physical intervention and a combat strategy.”
This reluctance to confront famine as a weapon of war has left a deep and lasting imprint on international law to this day.
Starvation in International Law
International law explicitly prohibits the use of deliberate starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions banned the starvation of civilians. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) went even further, criminalizing starvation as a prosecutable war crime.
Despite the clarity of these texts, prosecuting this crime remains exceptionally difficult. Why?
Obstacles to Prosecution
Famine is different from bombs or massacres. It is slow, dispersed, and often hidden behind official policies. To prove the crime, prosecutors must demonstrate “intent”: that leaders deliberately deprived civilians of food, rather than merely mismanaging a crisis or failing to protect supply chains.
Blockades, sanctions, and embargoes are often presented as “legitimate” military measures, blurring the lines of criminality. Furthermore, attributing individual responsibility for structural and systemic violence is an immensely complex task.
Why Prosecution is Necessary Despite the Difficulties
The difficulty of prosecution is no excuse for inaction. Starvation causes devastation on a scale no less than conventional weapons, as the current reality in Gaza starkly illustrates. It dismantles societies and leaves profound, long-lasting physical, psychological, and economic scars.
Precisely because of its structural nature—its ability to operate slowly, in the shadows, under the cover of policy—the need for legal accountability becomes even more urgent.
For too long, starvation has been treated as an inevitable byproduct of war. In reality, it is a deliberate strategy, criminalised for decades, yet rarely enforced.
As long as courts and prosecutors fail to address starvation as a standalone crime, major powers will continue to use hunger as a weapon against civilians with impunity.
Naming it clearly is the first step. Prosecuting it is the next.
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