By Maggie Michael, Lena Masri, Ryan McNeill and Deborah Nelson
CAIRO (Reuters) – The war in Sudan and restrictions on aid deliveries have caused famine in at least one site in North Darfur, and have likely led to famine conditions in other parts of the conflict region, a committee of food security experts said in a report on Thursday.
The finding, linked to an internationally recognised standard known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), is just the third time a famine determination has been made since the system was set up 20 years ago.
It shows how starvation and disease are taking a deadly toll in Sudan, where more than 15 months of war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have created the world’s biggest internal displacement crisis and left 25 million people – or half the population – in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
Experts and U.N. officials say a famine classification could trigger a U.N. Security Council resolution empowering agencies to deliver relief across borders to the most needy.
In its report, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) found that famine, confirmed when acute malnutrition and mortality criteria are met, was ongoing in North Darfur’s Zamzam camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and likely to persist there at least until October.
Zamzam has a population of 500,000. It is near the city of al-Fashir, home to 1.8 million people and the last significant holdout from the RSF across Darfur. The RSF has been besieging the area and no aid has reached the sprawling camp for months.
The primary causes of famine in Zamzam camp are conflict and severely restricted humanitarian access, the FRC said.
It said it was plausible that similar conditions were affecting other areas in Darfur including the displaced persons camps of Abu Shouk and Al Salam.
In late June, an IPC process led by the Sudanese government found that 14 areas in the country, including parts of El Gezira, Kordofan and Khartoum states, were at risk of famine.
Reuters has reported that some Sudanese have been forced to eat leaves and soil, and that satellite imagery showed cemeteries expanding fast as starvation and disease spread.
A Reuters analysis of satellite images identified 14 burial grounds in Darfur that had expanded rapidly in recent months. One cemetery in Zamzam grew 50% faster in the period between March 28 and May 3 than in the preceding three-and-a-half months. The analysis was used by the famine review committee as indirect evidence of increasing mortality.
LEAN SEASON
The FRC finding comes during Sudan’s lean season, when food availability is lowest. Experts fear that even when harvest season comes in October, crops will be scarce because war prevented farmers from planting.
Sudan’s war erupted in mid-April last year from a power struggle between Sudan’s army and the RSF ahead of an internationally backed political transition towards civilian rule.
The factions had shared power uneasily after staging a coup in 2021 that derailed a previous transition following the overthrow of autocrat Omar al-Bashir two years earlier.
Since the war began, aid workers say international relief has been blocked by the army and looted by the RSF. Both sides deny impeding aid.
Even where markets have supplies, many Sudanese cannot buy food because of soaring prices and a lack of cash.
In February, the military-backed government prohibited aid deliveries from Chad to Darfur through the Adre border crossing, one of the shortest routes to the hunger-stricken region. Government officials have claimed that the crossing is used by the RSF to move weapons.
The alternative Tine border crossing is currently inaccessible because of heavy rain, according to the U.N. humanitarian agency, OCHA.
The FRC called for a ceasefire and “unhindered access” into Darfur.
‘ILL-WISHERS’
Sudan’s government, which is aligned with the army, has signalled its opposition to any famine declaration.
Al-Harith Idriss, Sudan’s envoy at the U.N., said in late June that a famine “dictated from above” could lead “ill-wishers to intervene in Sudan”.
Nicholas Haan, a member of the FRC and cofounder of the IPC, said he hoped the finding would “shake people, the power brokers, to respond as they need to”.
“And that means humanitarian access, that means funding at the level that needs to be funded … and it means all due political pressure to end the conflict.”
The IPC is an initiative of more than a dozen U.N. agencies, regional bodies and aid groups and is the main global system for measuring food crises. Its most extreme warning is Phase 5, which has two levels, catastrophe and famine.
The conditions for classifying an area to be in famine are that at least 20% of the population must be suffering extreme food shortages, with 30% of children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or from malnutrition and disease.
In Zamzam, the FRC said data from Médecins Sans Frontières on acute malnutrition from January 2024 revealed rates exceeding the IPC famine threshold, while the mortality rate reached 1.9 deaths in every 10,000 people per day.
Since the IPC process began, famine has been declared in parts of Somalia in 2011 and in parts of South Sudan in 2017.
(Reporting by Maggie Michael, Deborah Nelson, Lena Masri and Ryan McNeill; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Peter Hirschberg and Giles Elgood)
Comments