In an interview with the bbc’s Hardtalk program on Monday, South Sudanese President Salva Kiir identified the chief cause of famine in the world’s newest nation: human conflict.

“It is a man-made disaster,” acknowledged Kiir, “and that is why we want the war to stop, [to] allow humanitarian access to the country.”

When South Sudan seceded from Sudan at the behest of the West in 2011, a glimmer of hope arose for the eradication of conflict and strife, which at that time had primarily been religious war between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Now, the predominantly Christian south is engulfed in an ethnic war between Kiir’s Dinka tribe and former Vice President Riek Machar’s Nuer tribe. Since it began last December, this civil war has recruited over 9,000 child soldiers, killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million residents. And with it all has come the blight of famine.

According to the humanitarian agency Oxfam, about 3.7 million South Sudanese need urgent humanitarian assistance. Of those figures, more than 200,000 are children suffering severe acute malnutrition. An estimated 7 million people out of the nation’s 10.8 million population could face starvation in the next few months.

As President Kiir said, “[T]he civilian population is going to face one of the worst famines that has ever been witnessed in South Sudan.” And it’s all “man-made.”

In 2005, the Trumpet published an article on the “hunger myth.” “The greatest fundamental cause of world hunger,” we explained, “far outstripping weather or any other single cause, is internal political and social unrest and conflict.” Agricultural economist Peter Rosset co-authored World Hunger: Twelve Myths, in which he noted, “The true source of world hunger is not scarcity but policy; not inevitability but politics.” At a 2002 Senate hearing on the case of hunger in North Korea, Sen. Sam Brownback said that “every famine is complicated by politics. … Politics is killing people, literally.”

Read “The Hunger Myth.” It explains, as President Salva Kiir acknowledged, that hunger and famine are mostly man-made. Understanding this is vital to comprehending the ultimate solution to famine that the world desperately needs.