NEW YORK CITY: A “triple chokepoint crisis” spanning the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Black Sea is driving up food and fuel costs worldwide and threatening to push tens of millions more people into hunger, senior UN officials told the Security Council on Tuesday.
Sudan, Yemen, Gaza and Lebanon are among the places most exposed to the crisis, they warned.
The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, and the World Food Programme’s acting executive director, Carl Skau, both told the Council that conflict-driven hunger had reached record levels, as the effects of distant wars now ripple across borders through choked shipping lanes and collapsing trade routes.
Guterres said the Strait of Hormuz alone usually carries around a fifth of global oil supplies and a third of global fertilizer trade, but restrictions there since the conflict between the US and Iran began in late February have driven up commodity prices and slashed availability.
Attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea were further threatening food-supply chains, he added, directly increasing the cost of farming and imperiling harvests for import-dependent countries already struggling with high levels of debt.
Skau told council members that disruptions to maritime trade were spreading the consequences of conflict “thousands of miles through interconnected economies” and added: “An oil tanker anchored in the Strait of Hormuz can mean one less meal a day for a child in Sudan.”
Basic food costs in Sudan have risen by almost 40 percent since February, he said, as increased fuel costs push up the prices of flour, rice and vegetables.
In addition, disruptions to fertilizer exports affected this year’s planting season across Africa and Asia, he noted, and the WFP itself has had to absorb 20 percent higher shipping costs and 35 percent higher fuel costs for its airdrops and humanitarian flights.
Attacks by the Houthis in Yemen on commercial vessels in Bab Al-Mandeb Strait have further choked trade passing through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, Skau said, in the process hitting Yemen itself, a country that imports 90 percent of its food.
He added that 73 UN staff in Yemen, including 38 from the WFP, remain detained by Houthi authorities, and that operations in the north of the country have been suspended amid what he described as an untenable security environment for humanitarian workers.
Escalating Russian and Ukrainian hostilities in the Black Sea, meanwhile, have cut grain shipments through the Bosphorus Strait by 40 percent year-on-year, Skau said. He warned that the two countries together account for a third of the global wheat supply, and import-dependent countries, such as Somalia, which sources 90 percent of its cereal from abroad, were highly exposed to shortages.
Guterres told the council that not only did 2025 feature the highest number of armed conflicts since the Second World War, it also recorded a level of global acute hunger that was among the highest on record, with at least 266 million people facing acute food insecurity.
He said last year also marked the first time this century that two famines were confirmed simultaneously, in Sudan and Gaza, a situation he described as “a shameful milestone.”
The UN’s latest “Hunger Hotspots” report found conflict and violence to be the primary driver in 12 of the 13 areas of greatest concern worldwide, Guterres added.
Regarding Sudan, Skau described his visit in April to the Tawila camp in Darfur, where he said 700,000 people who fled atrocities in El-Fasher were living in “a super city of grass huts,” dependent on a trickle of aid.
The international community, including the Security Council, had failed to act on warnings before the assault on El-Fasher, he said, and described the lack of intervention ahead of a famine declaration as “a total failure of duty.”
Skau visited Gaza in July last year, around the time famine was declared in the territory, and he described a scene of “obliterated rubble” and children searching for food amid what he called “a dystopian film set.”
He said that when he returned to the territory in January — following the ceasefire agreement last October and the adoption by the Security Council of Resolution 2803 in November, which endorsed a US-backed peace plan for Gaza — he found that food security had improved and famine had been reversed, though the recovery remained fragile.
Recalling a visit to Lebanon in March, Skau said he met families sheltering in a Beirut hotel as Israeli missiles fell, whose only reason to leave the building was to collect hot meals provided by the WFP.
“Their world had shrunk to the size of that small hotel room,” he added.
He also detailed a deepening crisis in Somalia, where nearly 2 million children were acutely malnourished and a third of the population, 6 million people, faced acute hunger or worse, driven by two consecutive droughts, insurgent activity and a “Super El Nino” flooding event expected in November.
Globally, Skau said, the number of people who are acutely food insecure has tripled in the eight years since the Security Council adopted Resolution 2417 in 2018, even as funding for humanitarian operations has collapsed. The resolution, which recognized the cyclical relationship between conflict and hunger, followed a landmark letter of warning from the secretary-general the previous year.
Guterres urged the Council to strengthen enforcement of Resolution 2417 through: the full implementation of its obligations not to deprive civilians of food, crops, livestock or water during conflicts, and to spare farms, mills, water systems and transport hubs from attack; comprehensive protection of food systems, including farms, markets, storage facilities, ports and supply routes; and stronger protection for humanitarian workers, including consideration of sanctions against those who unlawfully deny humanitarian access.
He also called for more preemptive action: “We cannot wait for famine or catastrophic conditions to be formally confirmed. I call on this council to act when the warning lights are flashing.”
Skau said: “We all risk becoming bystanders as parents, children and babies starve.”
The debate, titled “Food Under Fire: The Security Council’s Role in Mitigating Global and Local Food Crises,” was convened by Denmark, which holds the rotating presidency of the council this month.
