Over half of Sudanese face ‘acute food insecurity’: UN-backed report

Kathmandu: Some 25.6 million people, or more than half of Sudan’s population, are facing high levels of “acute food insecurity”, a report cited by the United Nations said Thursday.

That figure includes 755,000 people who are facing famine, while 8.5 million face “emergency” conditions, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said. Sudan has been gripped by war since April 2023, when fighting erupted between the regular military led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

‘Fourteen months into the conflict, Sudan is facing the worst levels of acute food insecurity ever recorded by the IPC in the country,’ the report said. It pointed to “a stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” compared with the previous figures published in December, with a 45 percent increase in people facing high levels of acute food insecurity.

‘The conflict has not only triggered mass displacement and disruption of supply routes… it has also severely limited access to essential humanitarian assistance, exacerbating an already dire situation,’ the IPC said.

It further cited “highly dysfunctional health services, water contamination and poor sanitation and hygiene conditions”. People trapped in conflict areas and those who fled the fighting, whether internally or abroad, are especially vulnerable to food insecurity, the report said.

The IPC report comes a day after United Nations experts charged that both sides of the conflict were using starvation as a weapon of war. Four independent UN rights experts on Wednesday said foreign governments providing military support to both the army and the RSF were “complicit” in war crimes.