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Thank you very much. And thank you, Liz, for for inviting me.

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And it's it's great to be back in Oxford.

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So let me dive straight into my to my issues, which are really that the the the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the world in many ways,

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very few of them for the better, as some massive secondary impacts are unfolding around the world,

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many of which we are only just beginning to get our arms around.

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We haven't yet fully grasp what they mean, but it's also intensified a whole lot of things which were already there,

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but perhaps not quite as apparent as in focus as they might be.

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And what I'm going to focus on is, is,

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is the the world food crisis and and use that a little bit as a lens into some of the issues that Ben Freeman has has just raised and also

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touched very slightly upon some of the a couple of the issues that that Dr. Robyn Williams raised earlier on in that extraordinary introduction.

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So last June the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited figures of 276 million

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people worldwide who he called were food insecure and he warned of global famine,

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multiple famines, he said, around the world.

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And his solution was to that in that particular presentation at the UN was to stabilise global food markets.

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The figure of the food insecure is still has risen in the last year.

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It's now about 345 million according to the UN.

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Those are the people who essentially cannot obtain the the essential food items for for for a healthy life.

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Now, one of the reasons for this, of course, as we all know, with the spike in food prices,

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a new food supply bottlenecks because Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted food supplies not only from Ukraine,

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but also from southern Russia and the UN's World Food Program,

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before the invasion was already facing a 44% increase in costs because food prices were already going up and fuel prices were going up.

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In response to this Guiterrez with the Turkish President,

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Recep Erdogan launched what they called the Black Sea Grain Initiative to enable grain ships to sail safely out of Ukrainian harvest.

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There needed to be not only demining and escorts and so on,

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but as well as an agreement from both sides in the war and also from southern Russian ports.

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He called it the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and he said it was the greatest achievement of his time as UN Secretary-General.

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It was an achievement, but it's not going to solve the world food crisis.

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In fact, it's hardly going to make a dent in it. That situation is a lot more complicated.

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Let me just make a couple of of of definitional points and then and then I'll play what I'm going to say.

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The first is it's important to distinguish between food insecurity, chronic hunger, inability of people to obtain enough food and famines,

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which are those fortunately rare, exceptional episodes of mass starvation, which are also episodes invariably of societal collapse.

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And there are various definitions which we could go into, but I won't tell you with those now,

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in the spirit of a procession of, of, of threefold approaches, there are three component parts to famine and food security.

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And that's how I'm going to frame my remarks. The first first is food availability,

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which is what policymakers invariably focus upon food availability and supply through through logistical bottlenecks.

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The second is, is what my former professor here, who was here, Amartya Sen, called called food entitlement, the ability of people,

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especially the poor and marginalised, to obtain enough food through that the fruits of their own labour or welfare handouts or whatever.

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And the third is what I call starvation crimes.

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And the the core definition here is the war crime of starvation as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,

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which is the deprivation of objects indispensable to survival for a civilian population.

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And of course, war and objects. And this starvation in this legal sense is not just food.

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It is objects indispensable to survival, which include water, medical care, shelter.

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They could include electricity, communications, maternal care for children.

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We don't know exactly how far this concept goes.

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It has not yet been tested in court, but there is. It's an issue of of increasing legal academic scholarship in the last few years.

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One of the interesting things about the the Rome Statute definition is that under pressure from the United States and the Greek and the U.K. as well,

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the maritime powers, sanctions and blockades were not included in the prohibition.

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And that's a point about which we might which we might return to.

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So food availability is very quickly dealt with.

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Scholars of famine have shown time and time over the decades that a food availability decline is neither necessary nor sufficient for famine.

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But commentators and policymakers have a reflex, a rudimentary error.

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They shout famine whenever there is a disruption. Yes, you can.

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It creates hardship. A food supply disruption, a drought, an interruption to supplies does create hardship.

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But it is a political decision where and on whom that hardship will fall and it doesn't have to fall.

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So the disruption in the Black Sea grain supply, some 20% of the world's internationally traded grain was a major disruption to world wheat supply.

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Whether or not it caused acute food insecurity and famine, that was a political decision.

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And it's interesting that the best indicator of food availability is food prices.

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And staple food prices around the world have been rising over the last three and a half years.

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And shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they hit a level of 171% above the standard from earlier, from about ten, 15 years ago.

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But it's interesting and they've since dropped back. The things like the Russia,

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like the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the availability of wheat harvests in the southern hemisphere pushed that level down.

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But it's notable that even with those with the current spike,

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about 130% of what it was 10 to 15 years ago, the spike in food prices is still foodstuffs.

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Foodstuffs, basic foodstuffs today are still cheaper than almost any time in the 20th century.

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So this isn't to say that the Ukraine war is irrelevant to the world hunger question.

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Quite the contrary. The links, however, are rather more complicated.

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So the second part, which I will expand upon a bit more, is food entitlement, the ability of poor people to buy food.

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And with economic crises rippling around the world already happening with the COVID and

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the COVID lockdowns and the disruptions in global supply chains and so on due to COVID.

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Unemployment is up. Wages are down. And that's a direct product of how economies are organised.

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And what we are seeing is, is, as I'm sure everyone is familiar with the globalisation and security driven deep globalisation,

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which is accelerating the problems of food entitlements around the world,

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accelerating the problems of unemployment, of precarious employment, of, of, of access to sufficient food.

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So there are many reasons why we might want to pursue globalisation was not an unalloyed good

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but to do to globalise in such a way as to build what are selectively war economies is I think,

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the worst possible reason. Now the term war economy was used during the first and Second World Wars to denote the the the redesign of a

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market or capitalistic economy under central control in order to provide for the enormous economic costs of war.

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And that invariably, in the first part of the 20th century,

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involved major increases in taxation, state direction of essential activities and rationing.

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Now, what we've seen in war economies in Western nations over the last 20 something years with the global war on terror,

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the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is a different kind of war economy.

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And a war economy in which there are burdens,

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but the burdens are not allocated by taxation or ration or in the central direction of, of, of, of how market economies work.

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The in fact, taxes are being reduced. In fact, the very opposite of rationing is being pursued.

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And the way in which the the the the burden is being allocated is almost entirely

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through monetary policy and most recently through interest rate rate hikes.

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And one of the most striking things about this is that while central banks back in the aftermath of World War Two,

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in the era of Keynesianism, was specifically designed not only to control monetary policy,

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but in order to prevent exactly the sorts of crises that were generated by austerity and mass unemployment in the interwar period,

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which were recognised as a major factor in World War Two.

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And indeed the Federal Reserve in the United States has expanded in its terms of reference,

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actually includes reference to the point that has been forgotten.

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It is entirely now managed through through interest rates and through the bond market and stock market management.

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And that shifts the but it shifts the burden domestically.

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And whenever we hear a policymaker, an economist, celebrating the fact that wages have been kept down because that keeps down inflation,

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anyone who's familiar with basic principles of food economy knows that means poor people don't have enough to eat.

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And is that to be celebrated? I suspect not.

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And of course, internationally, what that means when as interest rates go up, all those countries in across the global south,

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which that have borrowed in dollars, are facing increasingly unsustainable debt and greater austerity.

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Now, this is happening in the context of of of an emerging geostrategic rivalry which was already in

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place before the Russia the Russia Ukraine war erupted before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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Sort of put the spark to this. And those countries led by China in the Global East, including many in the Middle East,

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they don't have the exorbitant privilege of having their own currency as the global reserve currency.

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So they don't have the privilege of being able to manage their monetary policy in such a way that boom or bust,

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they get the benefit of, of, of, of capital flows in their favour.

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And so the way the Chinese are doing this is rather different is through what one might call commodity encumbered by trying to take control,

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direct control of primary commodities like oil, like key minerals, like like farmland and so on.

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And China has its own debt traps to finance massive infrastructure investment around that south.

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And countries find themselves getting into debt with China. And then the debt trap closes and they find themselves losing key parts of that,

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their national infrastructural endowment to the economy, to Chinese ownership on very unfavourable terms.

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And meanwhile, they're still integrated into global supply chains.

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They continue to dominate the global market in most manufactured goods.

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And the combination of China's vast industrial capacity and the fact that for developing countries

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so coal to get on the lower ranks of development now needs such technological proficiency,

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unlike, say, 20 or 30 years ago, that it's extraordinarily hard to do so.

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What we are finding is that more and more countries in the global south find themselves unable to get on the escalator.

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And indeed, due to these other factors, including population growth and so on, they are on the down.

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And in this during the neoliberal era, there was, I think, a well-presented fiction.

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But the Global South would get on with sense that the austerity was a time limited suffering,

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a time limited precarity before some form of gainful employment would spread across the developing world.

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I think as we see a return to a sort of I think, if you like, a rival war, a kind of economy driven by a spirit of mercantilism.

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This the burden. Is being shifted to the global south and that opportunity perhaps of usury in the past,

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but at least no illusion is that at least we now have the candour and the fact that no such illusions are being peddled.

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Those countries are simply be hung out to dry. So the third element is starvation crimes in the Global South.

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Starvation as political or military decision.

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As military decision, which was and has been the major cause of food insecurity globally, but of famine specifically over the years.

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Whereas, in the peace conference, Oxfam was founded in the 1940s, as in response to a war famine in Greece,

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which was imposed and in fact in a collusive manner by the Germans and the allies.

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And war famines historically have been the norm.

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If we look at the pattern of of of famines as they have unfolded, the great majority of modern famines are caused by violations,

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by acts of starvation in the course of war, or indeed by military dictatorships who have no interest in the welfare of that people.

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But leaders who pursue policies either deliberately to starve people or recklessly to do so.

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Aware that pillage, obstruction of relief and a host of other military actions will reduce people to starvation.

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We've seen starvation crimes in the Ukraine. The war crime of starvation, as I said, is depriving civilians of objects indispensable to survival.

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And we saw that most particularly in Mariupol.

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And that's sadly indicative of war tactics that we've seen resurgent around the world in many places Myanmar, Yemen, Nigeria.

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But the key point I want to make is that the environment of this with this global geostrategic rivalry, this competition for political will,

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political dominance in the context of Ukraine is creating an environment in which there is impunity for starvation crimes.

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And I want to give two examples. The first is Ethiopia.

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Starting in November of 2020, the Ethiopian government inflicted a campaign of starvation with it,

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using an unparalleled in my and my experience array of weapons of war intended to try to starve the people into submission.

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There's a very interesting echo in the Ethiopian war with what Williams was talking about in Russia.

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It's a former Orthodox Christian Orthodox empire with both pretensions to imperial domination over its own subordinate nations and nationalities,

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but also a deeply held view that it is a victim and that its people.

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It is perfectly correct for its citizenry to to volunteer,

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to be martyred in huge numbers in the course of the crisis, in the survival and indeed the greatness of the country.

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But the and this led to two to a sort of competing victimology on both sides of of of this war.

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But there's no doubt that the principal victims should, purely in terms of numbers and the extent of atrocities,

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where the people of Tigray, whose whose plight was shut off,

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shut off from the eyes of the world by a complete blockade of information, including,

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I may say, shamefully, the United Nations collected very little information.

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And what little information it did collected did not publish to the extent that the the

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the normal procedures of diagnosing famine by collecting indicators about malnutrition,

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mortality and food supply were not undertake, even though the United Nations Security Council had in 2018 passed them.

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What we at the time we hoped was a landmark Resolution 2417 on conflict and food security,

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obliging the UN Secretary General to alert the Council whenever a conflict threatened to cause food insecurity.

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The UN Security Council was not elected. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres failed in that obligation to the one member state of the security.

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Representative, the Security Council, Ireland that really tried to raise this didn't get anywhere.

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It wasn't Gutierrez's fault, at least not his sole fault.

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I believe he could have done a lot more. But it was indicative of the way in which a conflict elsewhere in the world was paralysed.

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International action to address it was paralysed by what?

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The broader context of of of rivalry and the specific context of of of the conflict over Ukraine.

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I think I think there is a moral failing of the UN leadership there,

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but a wider principle of of the subordination of of multilateral norms and principles to transactional diplomacy.

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And Sudan, the country on which I have been working now for 39 years, is an even more egregious example.

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We are seeing in the last ten days, two weeks,

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the emptying of a capital city of some 7 to 10 million people and the imminent threat of of of mass starvation

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not pursued deliberately as a policy by either of the two men whom I characterised just recently as as mobsters.

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This is really a gangland shootout among kleptocrats.

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But we've no interest. No, no, no civilian interest at all.

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But the implications of of of a city, 7 to 10 million people who are residents of a city, of course,

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entirely dependent upon modern infrastructure and imported food,

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evacuating that city and the city, that that is more than half of the economy of the country.

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The humanitarian consequences are going to be absolutely calamitous.

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Now, Bennett earlier mentioned divestment overture for some 20 years ago.

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There's a sequel to that, which is, I think, very significant,

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which is some four years ago when there was a long awaited democratic transition, this beautiful, exemplary,

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non-violent uprising by the civilian population,

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led by many women that decorated the walls around the Ministry of Defence with these

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wonderful murals celebrating freedom and that the regime of Omar al-Bashir fell,

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it collapsed, something that the United States had been wanting since 1990,

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when this man supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq and then subsequently invited Osama bin Laden as an honoured guest,

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as well as these other atrocities such as those in Darfur. Now,

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one of the features of of the economy of of the political economy that grew up

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in the shadow world of sanctions and divestment was a kleptocratic economy.

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It was an economy run, as I said, by rival mobsters, military men who controlled the economy, crony capitalist, illicit activities.

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General Hemmati, the head of the paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces,

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is a major gold trader, illicit gold trade to Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

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Russia also has investments on the other side is not just a one sided thing.

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When these men were controlling not only that the are the guns, but they were controlled in money.

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And shortly after the overthrow of of of of the that kleptocratic military regime with the junior kleptocrats still in charge.

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My old friend, senior economist at the United Nations, Abdalla Hamdok, was named to the position of of of prime minister, civilian prime minister.

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And I discussed with him the prospects of what he could do.

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And in that discussion, we agreed that one likely scenario was that he would end up as the cashier in a corner grocery corner

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grocery store selling soap and matches while the mobsters cut their joint deals in the back room.

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And that's pretty much what happened.

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And one of the reasons it happened was, I'm afraid the Trump administration decided that it would rather deal with the mobsters in the backroom.

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It says it had delegated its policy for the whole of the Middle East and North Africa to its friends and allies in the Middle East.

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That was Tijani and that was Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Trump's and I quote favourite dictator.

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That was Benjamin Netanyahu, who decided that, yes, it would be appropriate for the US to lift its sanctions on Sudan.

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But first there had to be recognition of Israel and he dealt directly with general help from the other mobster in charge now.

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And the other two were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

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Now all these four countries. Had one thing in common. They didn't like democracy.

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And so poor old Abdalla Hamdok was run, hung out to dry.

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He was given no debt relief, no sanctions relief.

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And at the end of the day, he was precisely the man sort of painting the signs on on the cornerstone.

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While it's run by the mobsters who then took over, they launched a correction months ago.

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Now they're fighting among themselves. And sadly, what we see now is, is a rush by some of those in power.

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I mean, Finance Secretary Anthony Blinken has woken up to this and he says he's doing the right thing,

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but that there is an enthusiasm for for cutting a deal between the warlords.

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The Saudis are in there doing in an immediate sense, the right thing.

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But one of the suggestions has been that the former director of the World Food Program,

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David Beasley, be the the the mediator, David Beasley just so the 24th of February.

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So just a few months ago, I can't say wined and dined because they didn't drink alcohol, but he met with these two kleptocrats.

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He was seen and he was given an award by them. And his his his approach to humanitarian diplomacy has been to deal with the power brokers.

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What we see in Sudan today is actually real humanitarian action, such as it is,

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is in the hands of those local resistance committees that actually staged the revolution some 40 years ago.

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The ones who are keeping, to the extent the power, the water,

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the communications safety of civilians has been kept on ISS by these civilian commissions.

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It is those people with whom we should be working, so we shouldn't give in to the reflex of this transaction from politics.

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But I fear that what we are seeing in this current post invasion of Ukraine world is exactly that reflex.

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We must deal, of course, we have to deal with those who have power, but we should not do so in just a second.

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Jettisoning Principle. So my concluding remark is that we must be candid about this.

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If you listen to world leaders speech about global hunger and famine, I can give you the script in 2 to 3 lines.

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It starts off by talking about all these factors about armed conflict and hunger,

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about the criminality of those who inflict starvation, about poor people not having enough food.

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But when they get onto action, it is they just get craned on ships.

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That's the easy part we need. And then when they get to the question of access, it is let us negotiate humanitarian access with the powers that be,

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even though we know these people are dishonest and will defraud you.

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We need to get into that hard task of dealing really with humanitarian action.

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Can working too. And it can only work if it is run on an inclusive and consultative and essentially democratic principle.

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And it can only work if we recognise at the highest levels of multilateralism that there has to be

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a right to food and the right to be protected from the deprivation of these starvation criminals.

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You.