The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is calling for immediate, unimpeded and safe access to conflict-hit areas of Sudan to provide food to millions of displaced people facing acute hunger, amid warnings that this “forgotten war” has potential implications for regional stability. The UN agency says more than nine months of conflict have taken an unimaginable toll on civilians. WFP calls the situation beyond dire, noting that almost 18 million people are facing acute hunger.
“This conflict cannot be forgotten. The people of Sudan are not invisible. This conflict has wide-reaching implications, especially as we have seen 1.7 million people flee to neighboring countries like Chad, South Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia,” WFP Sudan spokesperson Leni Kinzli said Friday.
Speaking from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, Kinzli urged the international community to “wake up” to the threats posed by the escalating conflict in Sudan and its potential for destabilizing the East Africa region. She said the world must act “before this crisis spins further out of control.”
Despite herculean efforts, the WFP said it has managed to provide food assistance to only 6.5 million people across the country since April 15. That is when a power grab between two rival generals of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) plunged the country into war.
The conflict in Sudan broke out in April last year between the national army, led by General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo of the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF has specifically been accused of mass killings and use of rape as a weapon of war, especially in the Darfur region. Both parties to the conflict have been accused of war crimes.
Kinzli noted the WFP repeatedly has warned of a looming hunger catastrophe. She said millions of civilians trapped in conflict zones must receive aid immediately to prevent Sudan’s hunger crisis from becoming a hunger catastrophe.
“Shockingly, the number of hungry has more than doubled from a year ago, and an estimated 5 million people are experiencing emergency levels of hunger or IPC phase 4 on the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) scale. Especially affected are conflict areas such as Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan,” she said.
Some 3.6 million children under the age of five are suffering from acute malnutrition, but the lack of access to the most affected areas makes having exact numbers of hungry children impossible.
“Every single one of our trucks need to be on the road each and every day, delivering food to the Sudanese people who are traumatized and overwhelmed after over nine months of horrifying conflict. Yet, life-saving assistance is not reaching those who need it the most, and we are already receiving reports of people dying of starvation,” she said.
Sudan’s hunger crisis is made worse by a health crisis. The World Health Organization (WHO) says Sudan’s health system, which already was overstretched before the war, now “is at a breaking point,” noting that 70 to 80 percent of hospitals in conflict-affected states are not working.
“People are dying from a lack of access to basic and essential health care and medication. Critical services, including maternal and child health care, the management of severe acute malnutrition, and treatment of patients with chronic conditions, have been discontinued in many areas,” the UN organization said.
Sudan currently is suffering from an outbreak of cholera, with 11 of 18 states reporting more than 10,270 cases and 280 deaths. Oral cholera vaccination campaigns it conducted in Al Jazirah, Gedaref and Khartoum states late last year, protected more than 2.2 million people.
Since the Rapid Support Forces seized Wad Madani, the capital of Al Jazirah state, in mid-December, the WHO has temporarily halted its operations there due to security reasons.
In December, fighting reached Al Jazirah state, a region south of Khartoum. In the past few weeks alone, more than 600,000 people have been displaced by attacks in the town of Wad Madani and parts of Al Jazirah state. Many of them have been displaced for at least the second time, after they fled to Wad Madani to escape the violence in Khartoum and now have to flee again.
“Overall, increasing violence, mass displacement, spread of diseases such as cholera, impeded access, insecurity and looting of supplies are undermining the efforts of humanitarian partners to save lives,” the WHO said.
In addition, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), says fighting has disrupted trade and agricultural activities in Al Jazirah state, known as Sudan’s breadbasket, “posing a significant threat to national food availability.”
WFP spokeswoman Kinzli said Al Jazirah was a vital humanitarian hub that previously supported upwards of 800,000 people a month before “it was engulfed by fighting in December and a key WFP warehouse was looted.”
“WFP is trying to obtain security guarantees to resume operations in the area to reach vulnerable families who are now trapped and in urgent need of food assistance,” she said.
If the warring parties do not allow aid organizations to operate, Kinzli warned: “We anticipate that this hunger crisis will only deepen in the coming months.”
Starvation would increase beginning in May of this year, when the lean season began and crops became less available. She also noted that people were reportedly dying of starvation, but these reports needed to be confirmed.
Next week, OCHA and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will jointly launch the Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) and the Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRP) for 2024 to provide assistance to nearly 15 million people targeted inside Sudan and nearly 2.7 million refugees and people in host communities in five neighboring countries.
The agencies say support for the humanitarian response is crucial, noting that “10 months of conflict have come at an intolerably high price for the Sudanese people.”
Some 25 million people - 14 million of them children - urgently need humanitarian assistance.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), at least 13,000 people have been killed since mid-April; another 26,000 have been injured, according to the Sudanese Federal Ministry of Health.
But the actual death toll is likely to be much higher. According to an unpublished UN report, up to 15,000 people were killed in ethnic violence in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, alone between April and June last year.
More than nine months after the war erupted between the SAF and the RSF in the capital Khartoum, about 7.8 million people have been forced to flee their homes, taking refuge inside and outside Sudan. More than 6.2 million of those displaced are within Sudan, while nearly 1.6 million others have fled across borders into neighboring South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Central African Republic and Libya. Children represent about half of all people forced to flee.
In total, some 10.7 million people are now displaced by conflicts in Sudan, with 9 million within the country, making Sudan the largest internal displacement crisis in the world. OCHA reported Sunday that Chad hosts the majority of new arrivals at 37 percent, with South Sudan at 30 percent, Egypt at 24 percent, while Ethiopia, Libya and the Central African Republic host the remaining.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: WFP calls for urgent, safe access to feed millions in Sudan as fighting rages across the country, WFP press release, published February 2, 2024
https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-calls-urgent-safe-access-feed-millions-sudan-fighting-rages-across-country