Nelson Mandela did not just use his poetic licence when he said that “freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them” (2011, p. 159). He was correcting a mistaken notion that liberty is a legal or political right: the right to vote, to speak, to move; a right that can be given on paper, and that this is all it is. The same sentiment was echoed in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s own obituary of Mandela, which noted that he understood that the hunger of millions was both unjust and unsustainable, and that no hungry man, woman or child could be considered truly free (FAO, 2013). Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years imprisoned for demanding political freedom, understood better than almost anyone that formal liberty without material security is a hollow inheritance. A person who has a right to select a government, but not what, or whether, to eat, is not fully free. This essay suggests that Mandela’s statement is a rephrasing of freedom as a state that must be cultivated, literally, before it can be enjoyed, and that the current global food crisis, from the famine-stricken areas of Sudan to the violence-torn farmlands of Nigeria, is a testament to the need for this reframing, which is still relevant today, nearly three decades after Mandela first uttered his words.

Freedom as a Material Condition, Not Just a Legal Status

The notion of freedom that has been passed on in the Western tradition from Enlightenment political philosophy usually focuses on negative liberty, which is freedom from state interference, censorship, and arbitrary arrest, among other constraints. Freedom also requires the physical and psychological capacity to act according to one’s choices. When people are deprived of adequate food, education, civic participation, and resistance to exploitation become far more difficult to pursue. This is in line with the definition of food security of the World Bank (n.d.) which emphasizes that food security can be defined as a state of physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food in four dimensions – Availability, Access, Utilization, and Stability. In particular, the fourth dimension – stability – is as important to the lived experience of freedom as political liberty is. It is a condition that can be undermined at a moment's notice during a drought, a currency collapse or an uprising, but it is not a right that people can count on. In many ways, Mandela understood intuitively what development economists have more formally formulated: that freedom, like food security, is not a state that can be attained once and for all, but is a kind of condition that needs to be constantly safeguarded from shocks.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and World Food Programme (2002) recorded this same observation when they referred to a “hunger trap” in which the lack of adequate nutrition means that individuals lack the physical and mental ability to leave the poverty cycle, which, in turn, keeps individuals in poverty across generations. They also identified something that is clearly exemplified in Mandela's life: that hunger and political unrest can only reinforce each other. The report highlighted that very few new conflicts break out in food-secure environments as people are more likely to put up a fight if they have nothing to lose. South Africa itself provided a powerful example— apartheid denied black South Africans voting rights and also deprived them of land and created rural poverty: hunger was a political tool. To Mandela, an end to apartheid without an attempt to rectify the material deprivation it had caused would have been a half measure.

The Hunger-Conflict Cycle in the Present Day

In Nigeria, where the people have full constitutional rights, but are now experiencing an unprecedented hunger emergency, the intertwining of freedom and food is more evident than anywhere else today. World Food Programme estimates that nearly 35 million Nigerians will be food insecure during the 2026 lean season, which is the highest recorded in the country (World Food Programme, 2025a). In the wider continental context, this is the worst food-insecurity situation ever recorded by the Cadre Harmonisé assessment in Borno State, Nigeria (World Food Programme, 2025b). This crisis is not just about drought or bad harvests; it’s about violence. Armed groups, such as the Islamic State West Africa Province, which has continued to expand, and the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM, which struck for the first time inside Nigeria in 2025, have grown in intensity throughout 2025, and conflict is now recognized as a key driver of the hunger emergency (World Food Programme, 2025a). Nigeria agricultural economics professor Anthony Onoja told The New York Times that people were living in fear; they were not travelling from one place to another (ASIS International, 2025). Nigerians have the constitutional right to farm their land, sell their crops and go to market, but they are not actually free to do so, as armed violence has made it deadly. This is Mandela’s wisdom in real time: legal freedom is side by side with a hunger crisis so acute that for millions of Nigerians, freedom is theoretical.

The trend is not confined to Nigeria. The World Bank’s latest Food and Nutrition Security Update (FNS Update), released in June 2026, provides a snapshot of the world in the same context. The report estimates that about 53 million people in West and Central Africa will be food insecure during the mid-2026 lean season, with more than half of these in Nigeria alone (World Bank, 2026). The same update also notes that active conflict has increased the likelihood of famine in some areas of Sudan, and that a new famine risk is developing in Somalia due to drought (World Bank, 2026). Haiti is the worst affected country in the Western Hemisphere, with over 5.8 million people (more than half of the population) unable to access sufficient food due to the violence, displacement, and market disruptions that have been ongoing since the earthquake (World Bank, 2026). In the Middle East, it refers to the fact that less than 20% of the population in Gaza has secure access to food, and less than one in five Syrians has secure access to food today (World Bank, 2026). These are not geographically or climatically connected crises, but rather ones in which conflict, displacement, and the failure of systems that enable freedom to be lived are common. In each instance, people have a legal right to their land, their labour and their mobility, but in practice these rights have been rendered virtually inoperative – the difference between legal freedom and lived freedom that Mandela described.

Structural and Economic Forces Compound the Crisis

In addition to direct violence, structural economic forces are quietly undermining food security globally, thus adding a second dimension to Mandela’s warning. Part of the story is input markets: in early 2026, the price of fertilizers rose by more than one-third compared to the previous year, and the price of diammonium phosphate, a key input for cereal production, increased by more than threefold in six months, according to the World Bank (2026). Smallholder farmers in low-income countries are the least likely to be able to withstand shocks such as these, as they often have little savings or credit to fall back on when input prices rise. There is also an additional layer of risk in climate forecasting: the same report estimates the likelihood of a major El Niño event developing and lasting through 2027 to be more than 40%—a pattern that has historically been linked to poor harvests in Southern Africa, Central America, the Sahel and much of South and Southeast Asia (World Bank, 2026). These are not abstract, distant dangers, but ways in which economic and environmental insecurity can take away people’s freedom without their doing anything wrong and without initiating any conflict. When fertilizer prices triple in Malawi or when it doesn’t rain in the Philippines, a farmer or a rice grower does not lose his or her legal rights, but the ability to feed his or her family, and much of the meaning of freedom in daily life.

This is the “twin-track” challenge that was identified more than 20 years ago by the FAO, IFAD and WFP (2002): hunger can only be tackled on two fronts – through emergency assistance and through investment in agricultural resilience – and both are needed. Their report revealed that investment in agriculture in the world’s hungriest countries was far behind that in food-secure countries, with the average public expenditure per agricultural worker in the high-hunger countries being a small fraction of that in the low-hunger countries (FAO et al., 2002). Twenty years later, the trend continues, with humanitarian funding being reduced while needs are increasing. The World Food Programme (2025b) has expressed concern that the reduction in international assistance, combined with the escalating violence, could put millions of Nigerians at risk of losing their safety nets at a time when they need them the most. The result is a growing disconnect between the freedoms that nations claim to offer their citizens and the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy.

What

“Nourishing the Future” Requires

If Mandela is right, that food security is essential to freedom, then efforts must be directed toward global food security not as a humanitarian sideline but as an enabler of freedom. There are a number of practical consequences. First, conflict resolution and food security policy come together, as increasingly, conflict is recognised as one of the major drivers of food security crises from the Sahel to the Middle East (World Bank, 2026). In a literal sense, peace-building is agricultural policy. Second, and most importantly, humanitarian funds should not be jeopardized by the political upheavals that have led in recent years to significantly lower humanitarian funding, as it is sometimes the only line of defence between vulnerable populations and famine. Third, long-term investments in resilient, climate-adapted agriculture are needed, especially in El Niño-affected areas, to ensure that environmental stresses are not equated with human catastrophe. Lastly, food security policy needs to be inclusive of all four pillars food security frameworks have identified: having enough food available in the world; being able to access the food at an affordable price; being able to consume the food for nutritional purposes; and being able to access it even in the face of political and environmental instability.

Mandela’s own journey from formal to substantive freedom was along this path. He did not view the end of apartheid as the end of his work, but rather an act of justice, as he told the crowd in Trafalgar Square in London in 2005, “overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice” (as cited in Oxfam GB, 2026). The same applies to the current global food crisis. The 35 million Nigerians living in severe hunger, the families in Sudan in famine conditions and the smallholder farmers who are unable to afford fertilizers are not short of legal freedoms, but rather they are short of the material basis on which freedom can be exercised. Nourishing the future, then, is recognizing that the struggle for food security is not separate from the struggle for freedom, but the struggle for freedom continues in another form. Mandela knew this in his heart from the cell on Robben Island, and now it’s time to create a world where no one has to learn that lesson from hunger.

References

ASIS International. (2025, November 26). Armed conflicts and shrinking humanitarian aid drive acute food instability in key hotspots. https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/latest-news/today-in-security/2025/november/armed-conflict-food-insecurity/

Food and Agriculture Organization. (2013, December 6). FAO lauds Nelson Mandela as champion of right to food. https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/209581/icode/

Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, & World Food Programme. (2002). Reducing poverty and hunger: The critical role of financing for food, agriculture and rural development. FAO. https://www.fao.org/4/y6265e/y6265e.pdf

Mandela, N. (2011). Nelson Mandela by himself: The authorised book of quotations. Pan Macmillan.

Mandela, N. (2005, February 3). Address to the Make Poverty History rally [Speech transcript]. As reproduced in Oxfam GB (2026), Looking back at Make Poverty History. https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/oxfam-blog/make-poverty-history-reflection/

Oxfam GB. (2026, June 12). Looking back at Make Poverty History. https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/oxfam-blog/make-poverty-history-reflection/

World Bank. (2026, June 22). Food and nutrition security update (Edition 123). https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/40ebbf38f5a6b68bfc11e5273e1405d4-0090012022/related/Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Update-edition-123-June-2026.pdf

World Bank. (n.d.). What is food security? There are four dimensions. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update/what-is-food-security

World Food Programme. (2025a, November 25). Increased insurgent attacks in Nigeria threaten regional stability and drive sharp spike in hunger. https://www.wfp.org/news/increased-insurgent-attacks-nigeria-threaten-regional-stability-and-drive-sharp-spike-hunger

World Food Programme. (2025b, December 8). Northern Nigeria's toxic mix of violence and hunger. https://www.wfp.org/stories/northern-nigerias-toxic-mix-violence-and-hunger