Sudan’s two confirmed famines fell out of the comparable data, for want of access rather than hunger

The IPC’s special report covering February 2026 to January 2027 estimates that 825,000 children under five will suffer severe acute malnutrition in Sudan this year, seven per cent more than in 2025, and identifies a risk of famine in 14 areas across North Darfur, South Darfur and South Kordofan under a reasonable worst-case scenario. The methodological note matters as much as the numbers. For El Fasher and Kadugli towns — both classified in Famine, IPC Phase 5, as of September 2025 and expected to persist through January 2026 — the available data did not allow disaggregation at town level, so the results are not directly comparable with the November analysis. The two confirmed famines did not improve. They stopped being measurable. In February 2026 the IPC issued a separate alert on famine-level acute malnutrition detected in two further North Darfur localities, Um Baru and Kernoi.

The last 48 hours produced fragments rather than a revised national picture. Dabanga reported on 2 September, republished by allAfrica, that around 6,200 children are malnourished in Malha, North Darfur, and that a cholera outbreak is driving a health crisis in the Um Jak administrative area and Hamir Um Taqola village in West Kordofan. That count comes from the General Coordination of Displaced Persons and Refugees, a displacement-camp advocacy body rather than a clinical surveillance system, and should be read as such. Sudan Tribune’s front page on 3 September carried a UN-attributed line on cholera and displacement surging against a deep aid shortfall; the underlying OCHA briefing has not been retrieved. The baseline most copy still uses — 11.8 million displaced, from Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 — is a September 2025 figure.

The war economy behind this is now documented in two separate channels that Western reporting routinely merges. SWISSAID, drawing on UAE trade statistics filed to UN Comtrade, found the Emirates imported 29 tonnes of gold directly from Sudan in 2024, up from 17 tonnes in 2023 — data Comtrade told Swissinfo was being double-checked “due to out of trends data in 2024”, and which SWISSAID says was briefly posted before being withdrawn. The law firm Steptoe records, secondarily, that the SAF-backed government officially shipped $1.97 billion of gold ore to the UAE in 2024, close to half of Sudan’s recorded exports. That is the Port Sudan channel. The RSF’s Darfur-to-Chad-and-Libya route runs alongside it, and the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker estimates 50 to 80 per cent of national production is smuggled — a range whose width is an admission of low confidence.

Assessment: The absence of a number is the finding here. Access denial does not merely worsen a famine; it removes the famine from the series that triggers response, and the IPC’s own caveat says so plainly. Expect the 2026 analysis to be cited in coming months as though El Fasher and Kadugli had improved. They have not been assessed. On the gold, hold the two channels apart: an official SAF export flow to the UAE and an RSF smuggling flow to the same terminal market are different policy problems with different levers, and conflating them lets both sides claim the other is the real story.