Lowest rains in three decades push Sudan toward famine as WFP funding halves

Reuters published a Darfur and Kordofan drought file on Friday 23 October, built on UN officials, aid experts and interviews with more than two dozen farmers. Rainfall in the July–September peak season was the lowest in more than three decades nationwide, according to US Geological Survey data cited in the file; in North Darfur it was the lowest since 1984, the year of the famine that devastated Sudan and Ethiopia. The World Food Programme had $276 million for its Sudan operation as of 17 October, less than half of last year’s budget, and says it needs a further $134 million to address drought-driven hunger. It is concentrating on the five million most needy people, says it cannot reach all of them, and has cut rations for those it does reach. Carl Skau, the WFP’s acting executive director, speaking to Reuters in Cairo after a trip to Darfur, called the simultaneous decline of aid and harvests a “recipe for disaster.”

The underlying document is an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification alert of 12 October, which said “an El Niño-induced drought, affecting roughly half of the country, is compounding the impacts of conflict and displacement, reducing food availability, driving up prices and affecting livelihoods.” The IPC’s Famine Review Committee stated there is not enough survey data for a full analysis, but that the evidence points in that direction: this is an alert, not a famine classification. Poor vegetation growth affects nearly two-thirds of cropland in North Darfur and about half in South Darfur, West Kordofan and South Kordofan. The International Rescue Committee, citing the alert, put displacement in Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan at more than 300,000 since October. Sudan’s agriculture minister, Esmat Qureshi, told a Khartoum news conference on 8 October the harvest would be lower but “not significantly less than last year’s.”

On Friday 23 October Britain and other Western governments called for an escalated humanitarian response to prevent famine, and on Saturday the Emergency Lawyers group, a Sudanese civilian monitoring body, proposed establishing relief centres, Sudan Tribune reported. The text of the British statement and the list of co-signatories were not available. Mohamed Abdelrahman, a farmer with about 420 hectares near Um Rawaba who also trades sesame and finances smallholders, told Reuters he expected roughly 40 percent of land in the area to produce no harvest at all.

Assessment: The useful discipline here is to hold the IPC alert at what it is. No famine has been classified; the Famine Review Committee says the survey data does not exist to classify one, which in Sudan is itself a finding — access, not hunger, is what is missing. Expect that gap to be worked from both directions: Khartoum’s agriculture ministry already has a harvest line that contradicts the satellite record, and donors have an incentive to let an unclassified alert do the fundraising work of a declaration. The $134 million gap is the number to watch, because it is the only one in this file that anybody can close.