Sierra Leone’s President Bio Chairs United Nations (UN) Security Council Debate, Calls Starvation a “Crime” and Food Security a Global Peace Imperative

His Excellency Dr. Julius Maada Bio, President of the Republic of Sierra Leone and Chair of the ECOWAS Authority, today presided over a high-level United Nations Security Council open debate on “Threats to International Peace and Security: Conflict-Related Food Insecurity” at the UN Headquarters in New York.

Addressing the Council for the second time in two years during Sierra Leone’s tenure, President Bio warned that hunger is increasingly being used as a weapon of war and called for stronger global action to prevent the deliberate starvation of civilians. He stressed that such acts are prohibited under international law and constitute war crimes.

The President highlighted that conflicts across regions—from Gaza and Sudan to Haiti, Ukraine, and the Sahel, continue to devastate food systems, destroy livelihoods, and deepen humanitarian crises. He described starvation as a “slow, silent, corrosive” form of violence that fuels instability, displacement, and renewed conflict.

President Bio outlined three core messages saying starvation is not collateral damage but a crime; food insecurity is both a driver of conflict and a peacebuilding imperative; and sustainable peace requires investment in agricultural resilience, markets, and human capital, especially women and youth.

He presented Sierra Leone’s Feed Salone Initiative as a national model demonstrating that food security is integral to the peace and development nexus. The four-pillar programme, production, resilience, markets and value chains, and human capital, aims to strengthen productivity, reduce import dependence, and build climate-smart systems that secure stable livelihoods.

At the regional level, President Bio emphasized ECOWAS efforts to integrate food security into peacebuilding, early warning, and trade frameworks, including the expansion of the ECOWAS Food Security Reserve and the ECOWARN early warning network.

Proposing six concrete global actions, the President urged the Council to protect food systems in conflict zones, institutionalize early-warning mechanisms, safeguard humanitarian access, advance accountability for starvation crimes, link peacebuilding finance to agriculture and livelihoods, and prioritize the empowerment of women and youth across agricultural value chains.

He affirmed that Africa does not seek sympathy but partnership, noting that the continent holds the majority of the world’s uncultivated arable land and significant youth-driven innovative potential. Preventing future wars, he stressed, requires treating food security as central to peace and security rather than a secondary humanitarian concern.

President Bio concluded by calling on the global community to “ensure that no child is starved into submission, no harvest held hostage, and no community driven to violence by hunger,” urging nations to align moral conscience with international law and collective action.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of State House Sierra Leone.