Orlando DSA

Gaza to Gainesville, How the US Uses Starvation as a Weapon For Political Interest

By Trevor S.

I work at a local food pantry in Winter Park where my role is to simply organize the bags of groceries and hand them out to clients. Our small operation does a lot of work to feed communities near and far. We’ve had clients come from as far as Sanford and Lakeland for a free bag of groceries. We feed everyone, from those without kitchens, to workers showing up after their shifts sometimes in company vehicles. Our policy is that if you walk through our doors we’ll make sure you leave with at least a bag of food. 

Recently, we heard of the federal government halting a shipment as large as 20 semi-trucks full of food (Cuglietta, 2025). This food was to be delivered to Florida food banks through Second Harvest. Second Harvest functions like a warehouse/wholesale supplier to many regional food banks. The food came from a government program called The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). This program not only provides food to individuals in need, but it also subsidizes the farmers who grow the crops and/or raising the animals.  

At our pantry, TEFAP is supplemental to the food we purchase through Second Harvest. The food TEFAP provides makes up about 15-20% of the portions we give to our clients. In other smaller pantries, it can make up the entirety of portions that they’re able to give out. These pantries are your local churches, smaller charities, etc., and all get food to provide to the public through TEFAP. 

Our government, regardless of which party is in charge, cuts food supplies to countries in need. They’ll use food as a political weapon to stop countries like Ethiopia from “falling into the hands of the communists” during the Cold War (Newton & Delaney, 2025). Using the lack of access to food caused by natural disasters to leverage a stop to land reform policies. The United States then continued to undermine The Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia (PMGSE) by first providing $500,000 aid to a rival group, the liberal-democratic Ethiopian People’s Democratic Alliance through the CIA. (Brooke, 1987). Only when public outcry got too much to ignore did the United States begin to send meaningful aid to the region. But still continued to be selective of where the aid should go, favoring rebel groups and NGOs (POSTER, 2012).  

There are some more modern examples of how the U.S. continues to use food as a soft power for global hegemony. In 2021, The United Nations conducted a vote to establish access to food as a human right. This would allow the global organization to begin a meaningful process into researching and mobilizing against world hunger and food insecurities caused naturally or man made. But, the United States vetoed that resolution to keep “the markets free and open” (Sofija, 2021). They vetoed this bill, in a year when global hunger was reaching 828 million people (UN, 2021). Are those free markets solving world hunger? 

The United States expressed a lot of reluctance to supply Socialist Ethiopia with food aid in the time of their greatest need because they were receiving military supplies from the USSR. They couldn’t allow the access of food as a human right because they need to keep using food as a weapon. This can be seen especially in Gaza, as food aid gets denied entry and there are thousands on the brink of starvation  (Bennet, 2025) . The excuse, that they deny food to the people in Gaza, because Hamas wills “steal” the food, is an all too convenient trope for America and Israel to use. 

We’ve seen how the U.S. foreign policies  have used its soft power to deny or withhold aid to foreign countries in need. But now, Americans are the subjects of those same policies. This is the imperial boomerang. “a term for the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression” (Woodman, 2020). Using data from 2023, a report released this year by Feeding America estimated that 15% of the nation’s population experience food-insecurity. Which is roughly 47 million people. The same report mentioned that counties in the south, and rural counties experience the most food insecurities (Feeding America, 2025). Access to food has been a continuing issue across America, despite this, we continue to pump most of our tax budget into the Military. A current example is under this administration’s new proposal to increase the budget to 1 trillion-dollars with billions being sent overseas to fund Isreal’s Genocide. (Shane, 2025). So U.S. residents struggle to feed themselves and their families as the war machine prevails.

As the United States gears up to cause the most amount of harm in foreign lands and domestic territories, we should begin to take preparations to bolster our community for what is to come. If you’re in need of emergency food assistance, our food pantries still currently have plenty of food to give. Find one that is local and make sure to recommend those to others. We can take examples of how to distribute food to our communities from past groups like the Black Panthers and their free breakfast program. Programs like that build up self-determination by allowing the community to come together and feed those in need. They open up opportunities for engaging with neighbors, opening a dialogue to educate and mobilize them. 

Talk to your neighbors to make a plan, and share resources if you need to. You can host a simple potluck together to feed the community, talk to them about creating a neighborhood pantry, and possibly growing local community gardens. 

Our food comes from the hands of private, monopolistic corporations who only create food to generate a profit. Because in our current system there is so much food that gets grown and made. But it doesn’t reach those who could use it. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), approximately a third of all food that is made goes to waste (USDA, 2025) What’s the point of having a surplus of food, when there are many Americans who can not obtain food to feed themselves and families?

In the long term, work needs to be done so we can take ownership of our food sources. To wrest them out of the private sector. An exciting example of this, comes from New York City. NY-DSA’s mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani has proposed the creation of municipally-owned grocery stores with mandatory low prices. This could be a great step to “food sovereignty” a concept originated by the work of La Via Campesina in 1996: the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right to define their own agriculture systems.  A local organization in Central Florida promoting this is the Farmworkers Association of Florida, Inc. They represent those who do the incredibly important work that goes into maintaining and harvesting the crops. Fighting for better working conditions and wages. 

Because ultimately, if food is made to produce a profit, then poverty and high prices will continue to ensure people starve. If we can treat food as a public good and human right, we can eliminate hunger for good.

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