‘Super El Niño’ deepens hunger crisis in South Sudan – WFP

Key points

• South Sudan’s 7.8 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity.
• El Niño is already threatening agricultural yields.
• The war in Sudan is driving more refugees and returnees to South Sudan.
• Funding shortages and access constraints threaten life-saving food aid.

“Conflict, displacement, economic hardship, climate shocks and the situation in neighboring Sudan are all pushing millions of people deeper into vulnerability” as humanitarian resources begin to run out, said Matthew Hollingworth. WFP Assistant Executive Director of Program Operations.

Some 7.8 million people, or more than half the country’s population, struggle to get enough food every day, while 2.2 million children and 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding mothers need urgent nutritional support, he told journalists in Geneva.

Deadline is October

Millions of other vulnerable people will lose access to life-saving food and nutrition assistance in October without additional resources.

After returning from a visit to the country last week, Hollingworth confirmed that the impact of the “super El Niño” was already clearly visible in South Sudan; even the most fertile agricultural areas were affected, with crop failures and low yields due to drought.

In addition to South Sudan, the regional impact of extreme weather is also being felt in neighboring Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, causing “a greater impact on food security across the region”, WFP officials warned.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern that usually occurs every two to seven years, when waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific become unusually warm, impacting rainfall and temperature patterns thousands of miles away. This year, El Niño developed because ocean temperatures were already very warm. Earlier this month, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the phenomenon was “getting bigger before our eyes.”

War in Sudan

On the Sudanese border, the location of what the UN humanitarian agency calls the world’s worst hunger and displacement crisis makes this dire situation even worse.

Every week, the country sees an influx of 3,000 South Sudanese refugees and former refugees in Sudan, “looking for safety, looking for food, looking for water, looking for shelter,” said Hollingworth.

The WFP official spoke of meeting with women, children and elderly people in Renk, Upper Nile State, South Sudan, last week, who “traveled for days, sometimes weeks on foot” to escape fighting between government and opposition forces, arriving exhausted and hungry “in communities that were already struggling significantly to feed and fend for themselves.”

Access challenges continue to exacerbate this crisis. Commercial aid and food transported along the Nile River “encountered illegal checkpoints and illegal taxes imposed by soldiers throughout their journey,” which increased operational costs and slowed aid deliveries.

Illegal levies

In Upper Nile State’s capital, Malakal, Hollingworth notes, “if a family eats anything other than locally grown tomatoes, okra, chilies and onions, the other food they eat is flown to Malakal” because it is too expensive to transport it by road or barge, including because of illegal taxes that must be paid along the way.

“This is starting to not only increase costs, but is starting to cost people’s lives,” he concluded.