WFP says $700m needed before March in order to prevent the world’s worst hunger and displacement crisis from worsening.
Food aid to war-torn Sudan could run out within months unless hundreds of millions of additional dollars are pledged, the United Nations has warned.
Marking more than 1,000 days of the country’s civil war, the UN’s World Food Programme on Thursday issued a plea for $700m to fund its work in Sudan. The money is needed to prevent what it says is already the world’s worst hunger and displacement crisis from getting worse.
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Three years of brutal war between the military government and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 14 million.
Repeated attempts to broker a peace deal have failed to bring the fighting to an end. Meanwhile, aid efforts are challenged by a sharp drop in funding – led by an ideological drive by President Donald Trump in the United States – and competing demands from numerous other conflicts across the world.
“WFP has been forced to reduce rations to the absolute minimum for survival. By the end of March, we will have depleted our food stocks in Sudan,” Ross Smith, director of emergency preparedness and response, said in a statement.
“Without immediate additional funding, millions of people will be left without vital food assistance within weeks,” he added.
The $700m in funding that the programme is requesting would keep its operations in Sudan going through June.
The WFP says more than 21 million people in Sudan, nearly half of the population, face acute hunger. Famine has been confirmed in areas where months of fighting have made access for aid workers largely impossible.
While visiting northern Sudan on Thursday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called for an “all-out effort” by the international community to help aid groups “provide the much-needed humanitarian assistance that is required under the circumstances”.
Efforts led by the US and regional mediators – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, known as the Quad – to secure a ceasefire have failed as the government and RSF continue to wrestle for territory. Both have been accused of war crimes.
The RSF is suspected of atrocities, including indiscriminate killing and mass rape, over recent months, as it razed a trail of destruction through the western state of Darfur and central Kordofan region following its retreat from the capital, Khartoum.
A meeting on Wednesday in Cairo brought together officials from the Quad countries as well as the UN, European Union and regional organisations to try to revive peace efforts.
The bid to broker a ceasefire has struggled, with the government accusing the UAE of supporting its enemy. The UAE has denied that it is giving the paramilitary RSF weapons and financing.
