Food Insecurity in the Russo-Ukrainian War and World War II: Reading the Present Through History

Hannah Boller

I recently found myself conversing with someone who believed it was their job to point out that the topic for my master’s thesis was totally useless. “Food is not worth studying, and history even less valuable. I’m not sure why you would go to school to study that.” Most people eat three times a day, maybe have a couple of snacks, go out for drinks on the weekend, and plan birthday dinners weeks in advance; if you are privileged to live in the Global North, food and food culture are assumed rights. 

And yet, in 2025, there is a global food crisis. Statistics Canada reports that in 2023 an average of 25.5% of Canadians were experiencing food insecurity, with families living in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut presenting disproportionate rates of 34.2% and 58.1% respectively. As of February 2025, the World Food Programme reported that 5 million Ukrainians are experiencing food insecurity, with severity increasing as the distance to the frontlines decreases. In a time of climate change, sustained conflict, and economic uncertainty, much of the global population is experiencing food insecurity and in 2025 there were two confirmed famines in Gaza and Sudan. 

In the mid-20th century, a similar set of variables—war, political and ideological starvation tactics, and the resulting loss of labour and land—led to food insecurity on the European continent and agricultural food production experienced significant upheaval. Twenty million people died of starvation or food-related disease during the Second World War.^[1] However, less recognized was the impact of widespread and persistent food insecurity after the conflict. The Allies, while not legally ‘duty bound’ to provide aid as the victors of the war, quickly realized the extent of the damage and the need for intervention. In 1948, US President Truman signed the Marshall Plan into place, providing aid to Europe.  

Field-Marshall Montgomery, the head of the British occupied zone, had seen first-hand the effect of rigid adherence to directives after the Great War and instead called for help fighting the 1945/1946 “Battle of the Winter,” which centred around the pervasive starvation and disease he saw once he had boots on the ground. He felt that Britain was responsible for providing aid, in particular food and medicine, to break the cycle of rigid reparations and forced shame imposed on Germany after the First World War. Aid largely came from Canada and the United States. 

France too experienced food insecurity and starvation in the years after the war. Holland had suffered through the Dutch Famine in the last year of the war. Fields in continental Europe had been a battle ground and food supply chains reflected the breakdown in food production that occurred as a result of the war. So, not only is food worth studying, but we can learn a lot from looking at food in the historical context of war and post-war recovery, even informing policy as we do so. With war ongoing in 40 countries globally, the stakes are high. 

Take the plight of Ukraine, where conflict started in 2014 with the invasion and annexation of Crimea before intensifying with the 2022 Russian invasion and the outbreak, properly speaking, of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Nicknamed the ‘bread basket’ of Europe, Ukraine has long been a leading producer of agricultural resources. Just before the war began, Ukraine’s food and grain exports were feeding 400 million people. But during the 2022-2023 season, total grain production in Ukraine dropped by 29%. Countries of the Global South have borne the brunt of the resulting trade uncertainty, especially during the supply chain disruption of the 2022 Black Sea Blockade, which disproportionately hit nations in Africa and Asia that have traditionally received 92% of Ukrainian grain. While less research is available for the 2023-2024 and the 2024-2025 seasons, an article published in 2024 exploited satellite data to estimate yields and discuss the impact of trade disruption on the global economy.^[2] The authors concluded that reduced agricultural production in Ukraine would likely continue to affect poorer countries within the established Ukrainian trade network and the “Grain from Ukraine” program. But does this trend follow the same patterns as agriculture and trade in World War II?  

While it is common knowledge that the Holocaust was a genocide and that significant crimes against humanity occurred during World War II, much less well-known is the extent to which these actions were justified on the grounds of food sovereignty and how much they had to do with the collision between food and ideology. Gesine Gerhard’s book, Nazi Hunger Politics: A History of Food in the Third Reich, argues that the initial aims of the Nazi’s policies and actions were to become food sovereign and require only resources from their own land.^[3] Gerhard shows that the Nazi pastoral dream required the taking of land to the east so that Germans could farm and produce self-sustainably.^[4]

Does Russia today share these aims? Vladimir Putin has identified his motivation for the current war as a desire to“demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine. While this framing does not allude to any explicit food-based economic or territorial goals, Russia has and continues to benefit financially from the Black Sea Blockade. The yo-yo effect of their coming and going support for the Black Sea Grain Initiative undermined Ukraine’s ability to transport grain by sea and threw the supply chain into chaos. As a result of controlling and, thereby, reducing Ukrainian exports, Russia has gained from increasing its own grain exports in recent years. Their “loot[ing]..of agricultural products and liquid metal products but also agricultural machinery and…factories” further suggests that there is a food-related economic element at play. Indeed, in 2014 Russia implemented an import substitution policy as a first step in a plan for complete food sovereignty. By implementing these regulations, Russia required typically imported goods to be replaced with items made or grown in the boundaries of their nation. The policy has not succeeded so far and, in the past few years, Russia has continued to import $35 billion worth of foodstuffs from strategic partners, specifically those who have not imposed sanctions (China, Turkey, and India among others). 

Further analysis of the parallels between Putin’s Russia and Nazi Germany on this front can, and likely will be, undertaken by scholars. However, the influence of food-sovereign aims in spurring and shaping wars like the one in Ukraine are worth identifying now. As a result of deeply intertwined supply chains, any one event is felt by other nations keenly. If we were to experience the widespread food shortages that Germany experienced in the aftermath of WWII there would likely be unprecedented strain on the greater food resource system. The food crisis and insecurity in Germany persisted for nearly a decade, which illustrates the magnitude of intervention needed after conflict.^[5] Both the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (1945) and subsequent World Food Programme (1961) were born out of the post-war devastation. Consistently, for 80 years, these organizations have inserted themselves and provided aid in countries that are on the brink of starvation. Both agencies report that they are already bracing for poor harvests and greater need in 2026. Where does this leave us? 

Alice Weinreb, in her article on German hunger after World War II, explains that neither the Allied “military nor medical strategists plann[ed]…to aid Germans…” because of their assumption that Germany had not reported a “food problem” during the course of the war.^[6] But at the close of the war, she argues, there was in fact a “global hunger-landscape.”^[7] While World War II was, as its name suggests, a far more all-encompassing conflict, it is not unreasonable to worry that the established effects of the present war on Ukrainian agriculture, associated supply chain disruption, and the currently reported food insecurity are indicators for the possibility of greater issues in the future. While alleviating acute famine in war zones is front of mind now, post-conflict aid and infrastructure support in Ukraine and elsewhere should also be a point of focus. While it may seem morally backwards to compare the post-war situation in Germany to that of Ukraine—“weren’t those Germans in the wrong anyway?”—and that sending food aid to Ukraine would be far more righteous and automatic, this is largely a moot point. Once the conflict has come to a close, as indicated in the spirit of the Rome Statutes, it must be our preeminent focus to rebuild food systems to disallow suffering. Food and its history can allow us to better anticipate and react, rather than waiting for the crisis to be upon us. There is no need for people to starve. 

^[1]  E. M.  Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food, A. Lane, 2011, 1.

^[2]  Nan Jia,Zilong Xia, Yinshuai Li, et al, “The Russia-Ukraine War Reduced Food Production and Exports with a Disparate Geographical Impact Worldwide,” Communications Earth & Environment 5, no. 1 (2024): 765. 

^[3]  Gesine Gerhard, Nazi Hunger Politics: A History of Food in the Third Reich. 1st ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.

^[4]  Gerhard, Nazi Hunger Politics, passim.

^[5] Bryan McDonald, “Learning from Failure: Postwar Efforts to Establish a World Food Reserve,” Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 4 (2018): 1–15.

^[6]  Alice Weinreb, “‘For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party’: Debates over German Hunger after World War II,” Central European History 45, no. 1 (2012): 51.

^[7]  Alice Weinreb, “‘For the Hungry Have No Past,” 52.

Hannah Boller is a graduate student at the University of Calgary working on her master’s thesis, “‘Food Will Win the War,’ but the Recovery will Leave you Hungry,” research for which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.