A “hunger crisis” is approaching in South Sudan, where some 300,000 people have arrived in the last five months fleeing the war in neighboring Sudan, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) warned on Tuesday.
The majority of people who fled the fighting and crossed the border into South Sudan are South Sudanese who “are returning to a country already facing unprecedented humanitarian needs,” the WFP highlighted in a statement released this Tuesday.
“We are seeing families exchange one catastrophe for another, fleeing danger in Sudan to find desperation in South Sudan,” says Mary-Ellen McGroarty, director of the WFP in South Sudan, quoted in the text.
A WFP food security assessment reveals that 90% of families returning to South Sudan experience moderate or severe food insecurity, while data collected at the border reveals that almost 20% of children under five and more than a quarter of pregnant and lactating women are malnourished.
PAM does not have “resources to provide vital assistance to those who need it most,” warns its manager.
Across South Sudan, WFP has a funding gap of $536 million for the next six months and has only managed to reach 40% of food-insecure people with food assistance by 2023.
South Sudanese “cross the border with only the clothes on their back” and some are also victims of robberies and violence during the journey, according to the WFP, which also fears epidemics during the rainy season.
After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan was plunged into a civil war that left almost 400,000 dead and millions displaced between 2013 and 2018.
A peace agreement signed in 2018 provided for the principle of power sharing between rivals Salva Kiir and Riek Machar within the framework of a national unity government.
But tensions and violence continue to plague the world’s youngest country, rich in oil but where the vast majority of the population lives below the poverty line.
The war in Sudan, which began on April 15 between the army, led by the head of the Sovereign Transitional Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (FAR) of his former deputy in the body that secures power Since the 2019 coup, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has killed about 7,500 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, and has displaced more than five million people, 2.8 million of whom They fled the capital, Khartoum, the scene of an incessant war. air strikes, artillery fire and street fighting.
Source: TSF
