UN warns some 2.5 million Sudanese risk famine without more donations

The World Food Program needs better access to people at risk of starvation in Sudan and more money from the crisis-weary West to feed more than 2.5 million people facing famine, the U.N. agency's director said Thursday.

“Sudan’s nearly a forgotten crisis right now,” WFP director Cindy McCain told The Associated Press.

“There are so many crises going on that people kind of just, you know, it’s just too much and their eyes glaze over,'' she added.

Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital, Khartoum, and spread to Darfur and other regions. Some 10 million have been internally displaced and the country is engulfed in a humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of people have died in fighting.

While WFP has designated points of entry to bring aid to the hungry, the onset of the rainy season means trucks have difficulty reaching the Zamzam camp, home to more than 400,000 displaced people, that was declared to have crossed the famine thresholds last February.

“It’s taken our trucks almost two weeks to get in there,” McCain explained, “Bridges are washed out. Roads are washed out. It’s a really it’s a combination of really tragic situations.”

“We need to get in there at scale,” McCain said, “And we need to make sure that the world understands the need and what is at stake if we don’t.”

WFP has been coping with a lack of funding as donor fatigue set in after the pandemic. The organization is trying to compensate by developing new technologies for predicting weather and providing food in emergencies.

“We have to we have to do more with less. We have to be more efficient, more effective. We have our predict the things that we have to predict, climate change effects and things are very necessary now,'' she said.