The 15-month war in Sudan and the enormous difficulties in financing and distributing humanitarian aid have led more than half of the population, some 25.6 million people, to suffer the worst hunger crisis ever recorded in this country, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the international system that measures hunger in the world. Among them, some 755,000 Sudanese are already facing the catastrophe phase, with extreme food shortages, while another 8.5 million are in the so-called emergency situation, with very high rates of acute malnutrition and mortality. «We are deeply concerned by the very serious situation affecting millions of Sudanese,» said Samy Guessabi, director of Action Against Hunger (ACH) in Sudan. «This situation is especially critical for populations trapped in conflict zones and without access to protection.» But it is not only “the worst hunger crisis in the world”, as the executive director of the World Food Programme, Cindy McCain, has stated, but it has also caused the largest exodus in the world, with 12.3 million people displaced from their homes, of whom two million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. Many of them come from Darfur, where international organisations warn of ethnic killings. The recent IPC report puts figures on the brutal growth of hunger in Sudan in the last year due to the war: some 25.6 million Sudanese are facing acute food insecurity since last June and until September, which also coincides with the annual period of scarcity due to the harvest cycle. The previous report, dated December, identified 17.7 million people in this situation. The IPC also identifies 14 areas at risk of famine, of which five are cities and nine are camps for displaced people located in the regions of Darfur, Kordofan, Al Jazirah and parts of Khartoum, the capital. The possibility of a declaration of famine is increasingly close, as has happened twice this century. In 2011, the United Nations Food Agency (FAO) declared this situation in parts of southern Somalia and in several settlements for internally displaced people in Afgoye and Mogadishu. In total, 490,000 people were affected by extreme food shortages due to the war. In 2017, the same occurred in South Sudan, where three years of civil conflict had ruined the population's meager livelihoods: 80,000 people suffered extremely high levels of acute malnutrition. Paradoxically, this country is now hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from its northern neighbor. But the Sudanese crisis could be much worse. Productive activity is devastated. The conflict has led to widespread destruction or abandonment of agricultural fields, disruption of supply chains and markets, the overnight disappearance of the entire informal sector on which millions of Sudanese depended, and the virtual collapse of the education and health system in most of the country. This has led to rampant inflation, with price increases of up to 300% for some basic products, and a heavy dependence on humanitarian aid for half the population. However, even this is not flowing smoothly due to the volatility of the war fronts and the constant obstacles to the movement of convoys by both belligerents.
Humanitarian aid
“Will the world react before it is too late?” asked the then UN Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, British diplomat Martin Griffiths, last April. If the conflict does not stop, and it does not seem likely to happen at least in the short term, the famine threatening Sudan will be similar to that suffered by Ethiopia 40 years ago. “We need the world to wake up to the catastrophe that is happening before our very eyes,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, told reporters. Of the 2.7 billion dollars needed to care for the population this year, only 473 million have been received, or 18%, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “It is a terrible war,” Guessabi sums up. “Many think that it is only about two sides in conflict, but it is much more. There are armed groups, different ethnic groups. Sudan is a very complex country.” For the head of ACH, the global attention on other crises, such as those in Ukraine and Gaza, and the paralysis resulting from decisive electoral processes in the North, such as those recently held in Great Britain and France or in the United States, have a very negative impact on Sudan. “It is true that in April we only had 4% of the necessary money and now we are at 18%, but it is insufficient. The response capacity of humanitarian actors is greatly reduced by a funding problem,” he stresses. The conflict broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Army commanded by General Abdelfatah Al Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Both had been close collaborators of dictator Al Bashir, who was overthrown by a popular uprising followed by a coup in 2019. All attempts to bring the two together at a dialogue table have been in vain so far and the evolution of the conflict itself, with recent advances by the RSF, raises fears of the worst. “We will not negotiate with an enemy that attacks us and occupies our lands,” said Al Burhan. Follow all the information on Economy and Business on Facebook and Twitter. Xor in our weekly newsletter