CNN: Famine has been officially declared in at least one camp housing hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan’s Darfur region, food security organizations have announced, in a stark warning of the cost to the population after 15 months of civil war.
According to the UN-backed Famine Review Committee, famine has been ongoing in Zamzam camp near the city of El Fasher since June. The camp’s population has swelled to about half a million people since the start of the conflict.
Official declarations of famine are extremely rare. The TRC’s finding is only the third since the monitoring system was established 20 years ago, and the first in more than 7 years. These declarations are often made as a distress call for more funds from the international community to prevent further deaths.
Although this finding is limited to” Zamzam” camp, the report warned that “many other areas across Sudan remain at risk of famine as long as the conflict continues, and humanitarian access is limited.”
The war has turned Sudan into what the UN has described as “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory”. More than 10 million people have been internally displaced in the country, and more than 25 million people face acute hunger.
Although Thursday’s report marks the first official declaration of famine, the World Food Program warned in May that people in Darfur were forced to eat grass and peanut shells as hunger ravaged the region.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, to which the Food Security Coordination Centre belongs, defines famine as “severe food deprivation”, likely to lead to starvation, death, destitution and very severe levels of malnutrition. A famine is declared if two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people die every day due to outright starvation or a combination of malnutrition and disease.
In Sudan, once considered a regional breadbasket, Famine Watch Sudan emphasized that the main driver of the famine was not the weather, but “conflict and lack of humanitarian access, both of which could be corrected immediately with the necessary political will”.
Another monitoring group, the UN-supported Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), also issued a famine declaration on Thursday. Although this declaration was also limited to Zamzam camp, it warned that the famine could spread to the rest of El Fasher, which is home to an estimated 800,000 additional people.
The two organizations warned that the famine in Zamzam is likely to last at least until next October, and possibly much longer. To prevent this, MSF urged the warring parties to “ensure full-service delivery to mitigate the likelihood and severity of famine”.
“As conflict is the main factor leading to this famine, all means should be explored to minimize or comprehensively resolve the underlying conflict between the parties involved in Sudan,” it said.
