Funding shortfall threatens millions with hunger in Sudan, UN food chief warns

A shortage of steady and timely funding for food aid to Sudan risks increasing malnutrition among millions of people and threatens pacts to end conflicts in the South and in the western region of Darfur, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today.

“We aim to help 6.1 million people in Sudan in 2006, but we are falling short at times and in places,” WFP Executive Director James Morris said at the end of a five-day visit to the capital, Khartoum, the South, the East and Darfur.

“We must reach people in Darfur cut off from WFP rations this year because of insecurity. We must give everyone the minimum that they need. Not to do so is a terrible betrayal,” he told a news conference in Khartoum of his agency’s largest operation in the world. As of 5 June, the $746-million relief drive was less than 50 per cent funded.

He noted that he met people torn from their homes by violence in three different parts of Africa’s largest country: families in Darfur driven from their homes by violence since 2003; those displaced in the East the 1990s and as recently as 2000; and - “a huge cause for hope” - returnees to the South who are now flooding home after a peace accord last year ended 21 years of civil war.

“They fled different conflicts, at different times, in different areas,” Mr. Morris said. “But they all desperately need our help so that, as the returnees to the South are proving, one day they will finally get home and start rebuilding their lives. With our help, they can support themselves and build for the future,” he added.

In May, a critical shortage of funds forced WFP to take what Mr. Morris described at the time as “one of the hardest decisions of my life,” cutting rations to half in terms of energy content for 2 million people in Darfur and the East.

A series of new donations, including 20,000 metric tons of sorghum from the Government of Sudan, has allowed rations to be increased to 85 per cent of the full amount from June to September in the Darfur states, but the earliest full rations can be restored is October.

“We are extremely grateful to those donors who stepped in at the last minute,” Mr. Morris said. “But in Sudan it takes up to six months for a confirmed contribution to materialize as food in the hands of people in Sudan. We know this, and we must all plan ahead for it to end these breaks in the supply.”

To ensure a consistent supply of food for full rations throughout the year, the operation should have received nearly $600 million, or 80 per cent of the total required by the start of April. Mr. Morris said it was critical that contributions, preferably cash, be furnished now to ensure a consistent supply of food to the end of 2006, “and more importantly, to avoid a similar problem occurring in the early months of 2007.”

Yesterday, Mr. Morris visited the town of Habilah in Darfur where WFP feeds 11,500 displaced people and 5,500 original residents affected by the conflict. In all scores of thousands of people have died in Darfur and more than 2 million people displaced by three years of fighting between the Government, pro-Government militias and rebels.

On Sunday, he visited a returnee village near the town of Rumbek, southern Sudan, where he met ‘One O’clock,’ a three-year-old boy named after the time when he was found two years ago by a woman as he hid in tall grass following an attack by gunmen on returnees. His parents were never seen again so Noura Sawa Abu rescued him and raised him as one of her own.