I had big plans for this week’s newsletter, with lots of colourful photos and inspirational quotes from the folks I met at Slow Food’s Terra Madre Salone del Gusto. I also wanted to recount some personal highlights.
Then two things happened: two videos from the FAO fell into my lap, and my Lighthouse Reports colleagues published a blockbuster investigation into Israeli military checkpoints that have dominated everyday life in the West Bank for years.
So Terra Madre will appear next week instead, to lift the spirits from this week’s sobering issue.
Oh, and if you are interested in antitrust issues and corporate concentration, don’t miss this online workshop next week (Oct 8) with my awesome colleague Margot Gibbs.
This issue goes beyond food systems, but the more I cover why we eat what we eat and why we grow what we grow, the more I realise how intricately linked politics, food, and human rights are.
Many of us are fortunate not to have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, but that’s not the same for everyone: last year, 645 million people were chronically hungry and 266 million needed urgent help.
Political decisions play a key role in both of these numbers, but particularly the latter, whether it’s the deliberate use of food as a bargaining chip in conflict zones and disasters, or the choice to subsidise certain crops and farming practices and not others. Or, increasingly, who controls the data, movement, and narrative around who is fed and who isn’t.
Which is why I see threads between the situation in the West Bank (which isn’t talked about as often as Gaza these days), the early - and forced - departure of a senior official at the UN food and agriculture agency FAO, and the renewed partnership between the World Food Programme and Palantir.
It is all political, it raises serious questions about human rights, and it could have serious implications for the food security of vulnerable populations.
I know so many good and committed people at the Rome-based UN food agencies, and I truly support their mandates, which make it all the more challenging to witness what is happening there.
The Violence of Arbitrariness
Did you know that..
There are 942 Israeli military checkpoints, gates, and barriers across the occupied West Bank today?
Nearly a third of West Bank residents under 25 have never left their home district?
A journey between neighbouring towns that should take 10 minutes can take an hour?
Residents lose 30 years’ worth of collective time, every day (or 77 hours per person/year) as a result?
Some cities in the West Bank have effectively been turned into open-air enclosures?
Take Sinjil. There are six access roads for a city of 7,000 but only one entry point was passable at any point since 2023, and even that is closed at times.
“Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, closure times or when roads will be blocked off. Satellite data is almost non-existent and popular navigation apps, like Google maps, do not list checkpoints and are essentially unusable for Palestinians,” my Lighthouse Reports colleagues wrote in Chokepoints: Suffocating The West Bank.
“To navigate this reality, Palestinians have created an ad-hoc system using Telegram and other messaging services to update each other on congestion and checkpoint status, and share checkpoint updates like weather reports on the radio.”
Which, of course, made the mapping and analysis needed to understand the impacts of these checkpoints on people’s lives challenging. But not impossible.
My colleagues, together with journalists from Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED and Evident, built a novel dataset using UN OCHA maps, tens of thousands of Telegram messages, and 2.6 billion GPS pings of vehicles that travel across the West Bank. They also conducted polls of over 1000 people with the help of the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress.
“The result is the most comprehensive dataset to-date on the Israeli military’s system of movement restrictions, the first map with GPS coordinates of checkpoints and a set of findings that illuminate and quantify the violence of their unpredictability.” See more here on the methodology.
The WIRED piece, replete with maps and illustrations, is not to be missed, and these lines hit hard for me.
One illustrates vividly the physical impacts of these checkpoints on ordinary people.
“Ali Haj Ali has worked at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medicine factory east of Nablus city, for over a decade; now, at 37, he supervises the maintenance of the company’s production lines. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has stopped expecting to reach his home before 8:00 pm, even though it’s only 16 kilometers away.
“Some nights, he doesn’t get home at all. He sleeps at the factory, in an arrangement Sama built during Covid-19: Two offices hold a bed and a dozen mattresses for whoever can’t make the trip home.”
The other vividly illustrates the mental impact of the lack of official schedules, public maps, or functional navigation apps.
“Alexandra Rijke, a cultural geographer who spent years researching checkpoints in the West Bank, calls unpredictability one of the occupation’s core mechanisms. Not knowing whether you can go to work or school, or what will get you punished, has a huge impact on people’s lives. “Arbitrariness is incredibly violent,” she said.
Silencing from Within
A few days before the publication of Chokepoints, I stumbled upon a LinkedIn post from Vijay Prashad, Chief Editor at LeftWord Books - India.
It was a two-minute video clip of Benjamin Davis, a veteran FAO staffer who had been leading the agency’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP) since Aug 2020, speaking at a side event during a global FAO conference in Rome.
In the clip, Ben said he was retiring because his contract wasn’t extended. He added:
“I was told that I violated the standards of conduct of international civil service, specifically those paragraphs related to impartiality and leadership, and I was told this was due to my participation in the moments of silence and the technical work that has been carried out about the situation of starvation and famine in Gaza.
“I’m not embarrassed by telling you this. In fact… I’m incredibly proud of my commitment and that of many of my colleagues throughout the organisation to the values and principles of the United Nations and the FAO,” citing “fundamental human rights, social justice, the dignity and worth of the human person, and respect for the equal rights of men and women and of nations great and small” as the aforementioned values.
I had not met Ben until Thursday, Oct 1, his first day unemployed after 26 years at the FAO, but we spoke at length about what happened to him and why he is speaking out.
Essentially, what was supposed to be a routine contract renewal was truncated to six-month extensions, and when he enquired what was happening, he was accused of being an “activist” and causing the organisation to “lose legitimacy.”
Two specific examples were given, he said.
One was participating in weekly, staff-coordinated, security-approved, internal moments of silence that Ben said was to show “solidarity with the people who were literally being starved, and the famine that was evolving right at that time (in Gaza)”.
The other was a technical brief his division published on the hunger implications of Israel’s food blockade, which was taken down from the FAO website soon after but remains available on ReliefWeb.
You can read more in this Q&A I did for The New Humanitarian. This Devex piece also has a lot of details and context, many of which I have independently verified through multiple sources, like the confrontation with the Israeli diplomat during one of the silence vigils.
The silencing of people like Ben is not just about Gaza, either, sources familiar with the FAO told me.
His division’s work is broad and critical if we really care about transforming our food systems, because it covers youth, gender, land tenure, and the right to food. These issues are also where human-rights-focused technical work is essential.
“There’s a bigger picture issue beyond the (Human Resources) stuff around the future of Ben’s division,” said one source.
For example, the creation of a new Office of Youth and Women was a step in de-fanging ESP’s reach as a robust technical division looking at issues of gender, inclusion, social protection and rural poverty and as home of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, I was told.
“Their budget has slowly decreased over the past two FAO cycles, and they haven’t been able to recruit for vacant positions.”
The Game of Human Rights
The second video turned up in my inbox on Tuesday. It was a speech by FAO’s director-general, Qu Dongyu, while welcoming delegates at a U.N. forestry conference, where he pivoted from thanking the attendees for their leadership to saying FAO does not allow its senior members to “play the game… of human rights”.
“Of course, human rights is very important, but we have this human rights agency in Geneva. If we want to, take care, go there. That’s why some senior members, they play the political game. I fire him.” (Around 5.20 minutes into the video)
The FAO has not responded to media requests, including mine, as of the publication of this newsletter/
Still, the speech, despite not mentioning Ben by name, brought into the open the tensions within the organisation.
Full disclosure: I flinch - both physically and mentally - whenever someone dismisses human rights as unimportant. It never fails to bring back memories of my meeting with Ko Ko Gyi, a former student leader and political prisoner in Burma/Myanmar whom I used to admire. Until one afternoon in March 2013.
My colleagues and I, including the bureau chief for Reuters in Thailand, had just driven back from Meikhtila, a town in central Myanmar. A few days earlier, a Buddhist mob had run amok in the town, burning down homes, killing Muslim residents and students, and leaving neighbourhoods charred and communities traumatised.
I had walked among some of those ruins and spoken to victims who not only became homeless overnight but now also feared for their lives.
Soon after we sat down, Ko Ko Gyi lobbed us a loaded question: “Which is more important: human rights or citizens’ rights?” The bureau chief responded, calmly, that human rights are inalienable so surely that settles it?
For the next 90 minutes or so, I sat, with increasing heaviness in my heart, as he lectured us on why citizens’ rights should trump human rights. Since then, I’ve had a slightly jaundiced view of anyone who dismisses human rights as separate from humanity.
I also agree with Ben, who challenged the management narrative that FAO is a purely “technical agency” detached from politics. He argued that technical work on food security cannot exist in a vacuum when starvation is actively used as a weapon of war.
Is There a Humanitarian-Surveillance Complex?
Let’s move on to another Rome-based food agency…. and from physical checkpoints in the West Bank to concerns about digital tracking and data harvesting of aid recipients in Gaza (and elsewhere).
In 2020, the World Food Programme (WFP) won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work combating hunger and the use of hunger as a weapon of war. Six years later, it is under fire for a renewed five-year partnership with Palantir, the data analytics firm and military contractor that has worked with both the Israeli army and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Beyond what some call the technofascist leanings of Palantir’s leadership, civil society groups have real concerns about the “unholy marriage”, as one critic put it in a recent webinar, between a key humanitarian agency serving some of the world’s most vulnerable populations and a company that has openly collaborated with actors that are attempting to control and/or constrain civilians’ daily lives.
In an open letter, the groups working across data justice and food sovereignty, said “Palantir is a poor fit to hold the data backbone of the world’s largest humanitarian agency whose mandate is based on international human rights and humanitarian law frameworks”.
They called on WFP to withdraw from its contract, commission an independent, public review of the partnership and all its tech company partnerships, and set a “concrete, time-bound plan to transition away from Palantir”.
The WFP has defended the deal and said Palantir has no access to beneficiary data, but critics say the opaqueness and silence still raise questions.
“The WFP has treated transparency about this partnership as optional. Without access to the actual contract – disclosing what permissions the WFP has granted (or conceded to) Palantir – no entity outside the WFP can fully assess the risk or hold the organization to account,” the letter said.
When does humanitarian relief unwittingly cross over into military intelligence? When do digital systems intended to deliver aid inadvertently become surveillance infrastructure? What are the guardrails to prevent those? Are there any?
Currently, we don’t know. That’s precisely the issue.
Beyond the specificities of the WFP-Palantir deal though, there is a wider issue - an even more worrying trend - of the increased politicisation of technical data essential to save lives.
Example 1: The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)
A critical system to monitor hunger crises for the past 40 years, FEWS NET has been battered by the political mood swings in the U.S..
It went dark in early 2025 when the Trump Administration wielded its axe on foreign assistance programmes, came back online later in the year, decided in August to stop monitoring Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen (“three of the world’s most hunger-stricken nations”, according to Devex) before reversing less than two weeks later.
It is now on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of funding, Devex again reported. There is a campaign underway to halt this.
Example 2: The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)
IPC is “widely recognised as the main global system for measuring the severity of hunger crises”, according to Reuters.
Its work and findings have come under repeated attacks by both Israel and Sudan, two countries party to two of the worst conflicts raging currently.
Could We, Should We… be Neutral?
What does it mean to be neutral and objective at a time like this?
As I pondered this question, I was reminded of the first issue I wrote for 2026, when I rejected purism but called for - and accepted - responsibility.
It also brings to mind a recurring argument I’ve run into since my days as a journalism student until now: that journalists should be neutral, impartial, and objective. But what does it mean to be objective when we know - with absolute certainty - the causes of climate change, our worsening health outcomes, ecosystem destruction, and the civil war in my country?
I’m not talking about binary choices or leaving no room for nuance. I’m talking about equating “neutrality” with pretending both sides are equal and deserve equal attention, or when “impartiality” becomes being complicit with the aggressors.
I reject both, in the same way I reject purism.
I started this issue meaning to write about hope at Terra Madre. I’ll get there next week, but I want to end today’s piece with a quote from Ben.
“Any step, any activity, anything, no matter how small, is important, just to feel as though you’re doing something to stand up for your beliefs and your principles.”
Thin’s Pickings
A senior FAO official on the price he paid for speaking out on Gaza - The New Humanitarian
My Q&A with Benjamin Davis on the first day of his forced departure from the FAO. Do pair it with Colum Lynch’s piece in Devex which has a lot of details.
Investor Groups Backed by $8T in AUM Press Food & Bev Companies to Halt Litigation Delaying Public Health Laws - The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and ShareAction
Following the publication of our investigation, Big Food vs. The People, two responsible investment organizations coordinating large coalitions of investors, are calling on food and beverage corporations to end their litigious response to public health policies. Read the full statement here.
How (not) to write about health equity - PLOS Global Public Health
Wonderfully sarcastic opinion piece. Thanks Stuart for drawing my attention to it.
“Begin by declaring that we must “leave no one behind”. Do not specify who is doing the leaving, who benefits from it, or who has the power to stop it. Speak about health equity as though some groups living shorter, sicker lives than others is a tragedy without authors, a wound without weapons, a crisis without beneficiaries.”
Hunger on the Horizon: The New Black Sea Grain Crisis - Council on Foreign Relations
Geoeconomic analyst Sam Henry Lazarus sounds the alarm bell on how a combination of super El Niño, escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, and continuing instability in the Middle East could undo years of progress on reducing hunger levels.
Data Center Silence - Lighthouse Reports
Another big investigation from colleagues in the tech and accountability team, who, having exhausted all lawful means to understand the scale and environmental impact of data centres in Europe, turned to the Aarhus Convention, a binding international treaty that safeguards the public’s ability to participate in decisions relating to environmental matters.
You can read our full complaint here and the Politico article about it here.
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