WFP funding for Sudan falls two-thirds as the agency begins scaling back displaced caseloads

In a field piece published on 22 September by Elizabeth Bryant and Gabriela Vivacqua, WFP said it is scaling back assistance to hundreds of thousands of conflict-displaced people across Sudan, Chad and South Sudan, and that nearly one million people uprooted in Tawila, North Darfur — reached across 75 kilometres of scrubland from El Fasher — are among those affected. The arithmetic behind the decision was set out by Acting Executive Director Carl Skau in a Reuters interview on 14 September: about $206 million received for Sudan so far in 2026 against $645 million in 2025, and just under $300 million outstanding to sustain current operations. Skau put 20 million people in acute hunger, about five million at emergency level and about 200,000 at catastrophic level, with 14 million displaced. “We cannot keep failing these people,” he said.

Two places convert a funding line into a mortality figure. Only 20,000 people in El Fasher currently receive life-saving food assistance, Skau told The National. In El Obeid, where about a million people have sought refuge since April 2023, WFP can now assist only those who arrived in the past several months: “We are providing, but less and less.” IOM Director General Amy Pope said the same week that “the entire humanitarian system could collapse within weeks if we don’t act now,” with shelter, sanitation and household goods expected to run out by end-September and the system funded only to December. The IPC’s current analysis puts nearly 19.5 million people, some 41 percent of the population, in Phase 3 or worse, with famine conditions confirmed in El Fasher and Kadugli.

Different agencies are not counting the same thing. WFP’s 20 million acute-hunger figure sits against the 24.6 million cited by Human Rights Watch in its World Report 2026, itself attributed to WFP but drawn from an earlier reference period, alongside 11.8 million displaced as of September 2025. The IPC’s Phase 5 caseload is projected to rise from 135,000 to about 200,000 for June–September 2026 across North Darfur, South Darfur, South Kordofan and West Kordofan, with Risk of Famine in 14 areas — and outcomes that could not be projected at all for roughly 841,000 people because conditions are too volatile to assess. An estimated 825,000 children under five are expected to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year, 25 percent above pre-conflict levels.

Assessment: The number to watch is not the deficit but the cut list, which WFP has not published. An agency that announces a scaling-back before naming caseloads is doing donor politics as well as logistics; the announcement is itself a fundraising instrument, and it may yet be reversed in part. Two dates converge. The IPC’s June–September projection window closes this month, and the next analysis will be the first to weigh a harvest against ration cuts pulling the other way. Reuters attributes the shortfall to US foreign-assistance cuts plus European donors citing defence budgets — a causal claim sourced to the agencies themselves, and one that suits them. Meanwhile El Obeid, a besieged city of half a million, produced no retrievable casualty report for three days. That gap is a finding about access, not about calm.