World Food Safety Day in a world of insecurity.
Although the United Nations established World Food Safety Day as an event aimed at highlighting the importance of eating well, world news events, especially the most recent ones, are bringing attention to how food safety is far from guaranteed, a situation where much of the world struggles to focus its attention.
Gaza is a prime example, where the food crisis has reached catastrophic levels and is considered by international agencies to be one of the most serious nutritional emergencies in recent history. According to official data from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) and major United Nations agencies, such as the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF, over 80% of the population is in a state of acute food insecurity or facing a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. The prolonged blockade of trade perpetrated by the Zionist regime, the systematic destruction of the local agricultural fabric (which has rendered nearly 98% of arable land unusable), and the severe restrictions on humanitarian aid access have caused the complete collapse of the entire supply system.
United Nations experts, global non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have repeatedly denounced the deliberate use of starvation as a method of military subjugation and coercion, a practice explicitly prohibited by international humanitarian law and considered a war crime. According to reports by UN agencies, this strategy has involved the near-total blockade of border crossings, the cutting of water and electricity supplies necessary for food preservation, and the systematic bombing of bakeries, markets, and agricultural lands.
Therefore, on this special day, we must not limit ourselves to simply uttering and sharing empty, ineffective slogans, but demand concrete action from national and international organizations to globally denounce and eliminate the use of hunger as a method of subjugation and oppression. Days like this should serve as a beacon of light on those corners of the world where hunger has become a sad daily occurrence, so that the entire world can break away from abstract notions and embrace the bitter reality of contemporary history.