Starving in the Sudan

By Jihan El-Alaily *

The UN aid agencies have warned that the ongoing civil war there is hampering efforts to deliver food assistance to the starving population. Catherine Bertini, the executive director of WFP, recently called upon the international community to step in to put an end to the fighting. "Millions of people are caught in the crossfire...What is clear is that the numbers of the hungry are almost certainly going to rise," she said in a statement issued in Geneva.

Bertini called on the donor community to fund urgently needed assistance of 100,000 tons of food, to war-and drought-affected populations in southern Sudan. She put the cost at $137.6 million, adding that WFP is still short of $78.9 million of the required cash.

WFP is the largest UN food agency working in Sudan. One of its most urgent requirements is to cover what it calls the "hunger gap" or the "lean season" in southern Sudan, between June, when the crops from the previous year have been consumed, and August/September, when new harvests are expected.

With the ongoing drought and intermittent rains, it looks almost certain that the people of southern Sudan will face their third consecutive year of poor harvest. The drought, the worst to hit the country in many years, has affected the south across an L-shape covering northern Bahr Al-Ghazal, parts of Upper Nile, all the way down to Eastern Equatoria and spreading east to the Ethiopian border.

With the food situation looking bleak, WFP warns that the people of southern Sudan will remain dependent on food assistance for the rest of this year and at least for the first half of 1999.

Sitting in his busy office in the remote Kenyan town of Lokichoggio, Claude Jibidar, the WFP field coordinator for southern Sudan, has to make sure twice a day through radio contact with 40 stations in the region that all Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) staff are safe. He also has to sort out the logistical problems that the stations encounter.

OLS is the UN umbrella which groups all UN agencies and other non-governmental organisations working in northern and southern Sudan.

The headquarters for the relief operations to the south are in Nairobi, but the action on the ground is based in Lokichoggio on the border with southern Sudan.

On the food situation, he says, "It is very desperate. The rains are late, war is not over, and if we can't get the population settled, there is going to be a bigger crisis. Already, we are seeing the highest death rates since 1994."

There are no official figures on the numbers of the dead, but the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), and other non- governmental organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontièr (MSF) have reported very severe malnutrition among children and adults and an increase in the number of people dying each week at the feeding centres.

UNICEF said a nutritional survey recently conducted among 4,000 children under age five in Bahr Al-Ghazal showed that 50 per cent were malnourished. Spokesman Patrick McCormick said that UNICEF, which is feeding 15,000 children in Bahr Al-Ghazal, needs to reach a total of 66,000 malnourished children in the rebel-held areas of

southern Sudan. "We plan to open 18 more feeding centres over the next two to three weeks, security permitting," he told a news briefing in Geneva recently.

The WFP has called on the international donor community to act now before it is too late. "We know it's going to get worse, so don't wait until we come up with triple zero figures [for the number of the dead] to react," warned Jibidar.

Meanwhile, the insecurity resulting from the 15-year-old civil war in the south rages on. With Col. John Garang, the leader of the main rebel group Sudan's People Liberation Army (SPLA), rejecting the peace agreement that the regime in Khartoum signed last year with six rebel

factions there are only dim prospects for peace.

There remain many pockets of insecurity, particularly in

northern Bahr Al-Ghazal and the western Upper Nile state.

Towards the end of January, the rebel leader Carbino Kwanyeng Bor attacked around Gogrial county in Bahr Al-Ghazal, after he abandoned his coalition with the government. This has left 100,000 people displaced in neighbouring counties.

Carbino's scorched earth policy had made Gogrial county a high risk area from 1994 until 1997, when he was still fighting on the government side. "Back then, we couldn't have any of our staff working in food distribution stay on the ground for more than five days at any location in Bahr Al-Ghazal," said WFP's Jibidar.

But Gogrial county has been relatively quiet since February and many people who had originally fled the fighting have returned to their deserted villages.

However, insecurity still remains one of the major constraints hampering food distribution. "Over the past four years, all of our field staff have been involved in security evacuation," said Jibidar. "At one time I had four teams running into the bush on the same day."

In response to the scale of the disaster which has hit southern Sudan, WFP has trebled its food distribution capacity since January. It is projected as of July to reach 9,500 metric tons per month for 1.2 million people in southern Sudan. Up to three quarters of this will be directed to Bahr Al-Ghazal, the worst hit of the southern states.

Food deliveries are mostly done by air drops as the roads, railways and barges in the south remain inaccessible or insecure.

Although WFP, working under OLS, has vastly expanded its means for delivering food, the biggest headache for OLS is the Sudanese government's frequent denial of access to relief flights to Southern Sudan. Last February, there was no access at all for any of the 35 food distribution sites in Bahr Al- Ghazal. In March access was permitted to only four sites.

Aid workers blame the regime for denying humanitarian access for two months, thus making many more people vulnerable to hunger.

By having enough food and ensuring access to as many starving people as possible, WFP hopes to reverse the scale of the disaster in southern Sudan. But their best efforts can never cannot be sufficient as long as the regime in Khartoum and the rebels have not put an end to their vicious war.