On February 20, 2017, the United Nations formally declared famine in the northern-central parts of South Sudan. Days after the declaration of famine, the government raised the price of a business visa from $100 to $10,000 in U.S. dollars, seizing on the opportunity to boost state revenue from the expected influx of humanitarian aid workers. This, according to Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann’s book, is a quintessential food crime. These recent developments in South Sudan and the near-famine conditions in Nigeria, Yemen, and Somalia only add relevance to State Food Crimes. The pleonastic phrase “man-made famines” is often used when describing these recent crises. But all famines are man-made, and this book is a strong testament as to why.

Howard-Hassmann’s main argument is that famines ought to be considered crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, there is not yet any international legal regime that can call political leaders to account for violations of rights to food. The author presents four contemporary case studies of state food crimes, resulting in everything from major famine with hundreds of thousands of fatalities to smaller-scale instances of acute malnutrition with negligible increases in mortality. The case of North Korea in the 1990s is an example of the former. This case comes closest to the term faminogenesis, where famines are generated either deliberately as a means of committing genocide, or through the insistence of continuing flawed policies that only perpetuate starvation. The case of Venezuela during the 2000s, on the contrary, exemplifies the most trivial of food crimes. Here, President Hugo Chavez was merely guilty of incompetence, exacerbating food insecurity by wasting oil resources and implementing counterproductive price controls on staple foods. The case of Zimbabwe in the 2000s did not result in widespread famine, but the food crimes of President Robert Mugabe bore the hallmarks of intent, recklessness, and incompetence, leaving half the country in abject food insecurity. The last case describes the Israeli government’s policies toward the West Bank and Gaza as a food crime of indifference. The Israeli government continued to implement policies that impeded food imports and seized farmland, contributing to the increase in undernourishment rates among Palestinians from 18% in 1990 to 31% in 2012.

Howard-Hassmann pays particular attention to penal starvation, as well as violations of civil and political rights, as they pertain to food security. By focusing on civil and political rights, she sets out to augment Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s maxim about the merits of democracy for famine protection in two important aspects. First, the author argues that Sen’s focus on political rights is too narrow, and that his maxim needs to be expanded to include a broader set of human rights. Her analyses of the famine cases convincingly highlights the importance of such a broader scope of civil and political rights that includes the rule of law, property rights, mobility rights, the right to citizenship, the right to work, and so on. The challenge is to strike a balance between not including so many positive human rights as to turn the maxim into a tautology (honoring the right to food and work would make famine impossible per definition) and at the same time including more than just negative human rights, such as property rights and the rule of law. Sen showed that famines can indeed develop without these rights being violated, which made him famously conclude his 1981 book with the phrase “starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance” (Poverty and Famine, p. 166). Second, Howard-Hassmann provides evidence that the potential positive effects of democracy on famine incidence are dampened in situations of conquest and colonialism. She uses the British blockade of Germany during World War I, the Irish potato famine of 1845, the famine among aboriginals in the Canadian territories during the 1870s, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to show that democracies can cause, ignore, or tolerate famines and food insecurity in countries that they colonize. While these cases add further to a well-researched book on food crimes in all its forms, their contribution to Sen’s maxim is less clear. The empirical inspiration for Sen’s maxim on the merits of democracy was precisely India’s transition in 1947 from colonial rule to an independent democratic nation. Under British rule, the Indian continent was tormented by repeated famines (Sen analyzed the last major famine in 1943 in great detail), but following independence, democratic India has successfully combated major famines. Thus, Sen’s maxim already explicitly builds on a distinction between colonial pluralistic rule and sovereign pluralistic rule.

Howard-Hassmann proposes that there should be a new and distinct United Nations treaty to protect the right to food, including prohibiting penal starvation, revising international refugee law to include famine refugees, specifying when and how sanctions could be invoked against states committing food crimes, and stipulating new rules for the responsibility to protect victims of state-induced famine. She is under no illusion that criminalization is a magic bullet, and fully embraces the difficulties of effectively dealing with this type of human rights abuse. Her hope is primarily that treaties could have an educative effect and influence the behavior of some states, some of the time, in a positive direction. Faced with a growing consensus on the limits of criminal law in rendering justice for human rights violations, the expansion of international law and the reach of the International Criminal Court to prosecute food crimes might prove difficult. Assigning responsibility for causing famine and prosecuting the perpetrators will surely be a long, expensive, and ultimately politicized exercise. The political will for expanding the refugee concept to include famine is also difficult to glean, and by extension raises the question why it should not be expanded to include refugees of climate change, disasters, and other forms of extreme deprivation. In contrast, Howard-Hassmann’s detailed account of the widespread practice of penal starvation, the clear moral violation of starving people under one’s direct care, and the contained nature of the offense, together with a well-defined chain of command, appear to make the criminalization of penal starvation the most suitable candidate to spearhead a broader process of criminalization of food crimes.

Leaving aside questions of practical feasibility in criminalizing famines, an unintended consequence of this book might be that it narrows the understanding of famine. By implication, assigning individual criminal responsibility for famines means downplaying other potential underlying causes of famine, such as broader socioeconomic and systemic geopolitical factors. Applying the lens of food crimes to the unfolding food crises in Syria and Yemen, for example, appears to be too blunt an instrument to capture the dynamics of these crises with the myriad of underlying national and international factors that have compounded to generate the current volatile situation. I fully share the view that there is increased scope for criminalizing famine crimes. However, I also see an increased scope in general for greater attention to an understanding of the causes of these famines that continue to be an unwelcome companion of humankind well into the twenty-first century.

Against this backdrop, State Food Crimes is relevant not only for scholars of food security but also for scholars wishing to expand their perspective of human rights. Many books have been written on hunger and starvation; even more have been written on the topic of human rights and international criminal law. Yet few authors have managed to combine these topics as effectively as has Howard-Hassmann in this book.