Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278

We would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape, and people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water, and, um, some of them couldn't swim. And so, we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice. We could film someone drown in front of us or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water.

The following is a conversation with Skye Fitzgerald, a two-time Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen, Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations off the coast of Libya, and 50 Feet from Syria, about the war in Syria. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Skye Fitzgerald. Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today, and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries. How do you feel? How do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger and famine in the world today?

I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex. I mean, I think, um, it's deeply disturbing to me that, as a global community, we've allowed this number of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists and the resources to feed them exists. I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures is that many of those who are starving today or going hungry today, um, are- are the net result of war and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations, and that's the most deeply disturbing part to me. Um, you- you know your history, um, and we all know that, you know, deeply embedded in the Geneva Conventions post World War II, the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war, uh, because of what Hitler did during World War II. That's been reiterated multiple times over the years in international humanitarian law, including in 2018 because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen, and yet to this day, starvation as a weapon of war continues to be used in Ethiopia, obviously in Ukraine right now, and in Yemen with the blockade over the country. And that- that disgusts me, that the law is in place but it won't be enforced by the international bodies and the nation states that are- that make up the international community.

So, when the starvation is a result of human actions, human decisions, that's especially painful to make sense of?

For me personally, yeah. I- I think that if you and I sitting here didn't eat for three days, um, and had to, you know, lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights, I think we would take, you know, hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously. And I think that's f- for some reason, that's missing at this moment in history, tragically, and I think until that we can generate enough empathy, um, that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry, I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal the- the global co- community to solve it.