UN Headquarters, New York, USA, Tuesday, 17 November 2025 – His Excellency Dr. Julius Maada Bio, President of the Republic of Sierra Leone and Chair of the ECOWAS Authority, at this time presided over a high-level United Nations Security Council open debate on “Threats to International Peace and Security: Conflict-Related Food Insecurity” on the UN Headquarters in New York.
Addressing the Council for the second time in two years throughout Sierra Leone’s tenure, President Bio warned that starvation is more and more getting used as a weapon of warfare and referred to as for stronger international motion to forestall the deliberate hunger of civilians. He pressured that such acts are prohibited underneath worldwide legislation and represent warfare crimes.
The President highlighted that conflicts throughout areas—from Gaza and Sudan to Haiti, Ukraine, and the Sahel, proceed to devastate meals methods, destroy livelihoods, and deepen humanitarian crises. He described hunger as a “slow, silent, corrosive” type of violence that fuels instability, displacement, and renewed battle.
President Bio outlined three core messages saying hunger isn’t collateral harm however a criminal offense; meals insecurity is each a driver of battle and a peacebuilding crucial; and sustainable peace requires funding in agricultural resilience, markets, and human capital, particularly girls and youth.
He introduced Sierra Leone’s Feed Salone Initiative as a nationwide mannequin demonstrating that meals safety is integral to the peace and improvement nexus. The four-pillar programme, manufacturing, resilience, markets and worth chains, and human capital, goals to strengthen productiveness, scale back import dependence, and construct climate-smart methods that safe secure livelihoods.
At the regional degree, President Bio emphasised ECOWAS efforts to combine meals safety into peacebuilding, early warning, and commerce frameworks, together with the growth of the ECOWAS Food Security Reserve and the ECOWARN early warning community.
Proposing six concrete international actions, the President urged the Council to guard meals methods in battle zones, institutionalize early-warning mechanisms, safeguard humanitarian entry, advance accountability for hunger crimes, hyperlink peacebuilding finance to agriculture and livelihoods, and prioritize the empowerment of ladies and youth throughout agricultural worth chains.
He affirmed that Africa doesn’t search sympathy however partnership, noting that the continent holds nearly all of the world’s uncultivated arable land and important youth-driven progressive potential. Preventing future wars, he pressured, requires treating meals safety as central to peace and safety quite than a secondary humanitarian concern.
President Bio concluded by calling on the worldwide neighborhood 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 ethical conscience with worldwide legislation and collective motion.