In an effort to persuade the warring parties to stop obstructing relief, the United States pledged on Friday an additional $315 million for the starving people of Sudan. If immediate action is not taken, a famine of historic proportions may break out.
Food and water will be provided, along with emergency assessment and treatment for malnutrition in youngsters.
It comes at a time when estimates place the number of severely hungry people in Sudan at five million, and the number of food-insecure people who have fled their country with two million others is even higher.
“We need the world to wake up to the catastrophe happening before our very eyes,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters.
“We’ve seen mortality projections estimating that in excess of 2.5 million people — about 15 percent of the population — in Darfur and Kordofan, the hardest-hit regions, could die by the end of September,” she said.
“This is the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet, and yet somehow it threatens to get worse,” she said, pointing to expectations that the key border crossing will become unpassable with the rainy season.
Only 16 percent of the funds sought by the UN for humanitarian relief in Sudan have been raised; most of the world’s attention has been diverted to Gaza, where relief workers have also raised the possibility of famine.
The US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) administrator, Samantha Power, warned that Sudan would be in worse situation than Somalia in 2011, when approximately 250,000 people perished in that country after three seasons without enough rain and near-anarchy.
“The most worrying scenario would be that Sudan would become the deadliest famine since Ethiopia in the early 1980s,” when as many as 1.2 million people died, she said.
Sudan descended into war in April 2023 when the generals in charge of the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took up arms to seize control, rejecting a plan to integrate.
With the two sides battling for power across the country, Power said that deliveries of aid across the rival sides’ lines of control was “virtually non-existent.”
Power chastised both parties bitterly. She claimed that the RSF has been “systematically looting humanitarian warehouses, stealing food and livestock, destroying grain storage facilities and wells in the most vulnerable Sudanese communities.”
By preventing help from crossing the border with Chad into Darfur, the army, in turn, “completely contradicts its commitments and its responsibility” to the Sudanese people, she claimed.
“The really clear message here is that it is obstruction, not insufficient stocks of food, that is the driving force behind the historic and deadly levels of starvation in Sudan,” she said.
“That has to change immediately.”
