Uptick in fighting threatens WFP’s food surge in hungry Sudan

Animal feed kept 40-year-old Nour and her family alive over three perilous months in Sudan’s famine-hit Zamzam displacement camp.  

“People here take this Ombaz, cook it with salt and eat it,” Nour says of the substance, made of crushed groundnut shells, which has helped to keep many camp residents from starving. “There’s a lot of hardship and suffering in this place.”

Nour spoke to the World Food Programme (WFP) hours after our first food aid convoy in months managed to reach Zamzam, located near North Darfur state’s besieged capital of El Fasher. Crossing into war-torn Sudan from Chad’s Adre border in mid-November, the fleet of 15 trucks carried 150 metric tonnes of emergency assistance such as cereals, pulses, oil and salt. 

The food is enough to feed 12,500 desperate people in Zamzam who have been facing famine. While it dwarfs the massive needs, its arrival still marks a critical first step in securing regular, safe passage for aid deliveries in one of the most volatile countries on earth.  

More broadly, it is part of a massive surge in WFP assistance to Sudan's most vulnerable communities. Overall, some 25,000 tons of food and nutritional supplies - enough to feed 2 million people for a month - are on the move from neighboring Chad and Port Sudan to some of the country's hungriest, and hardest-to-reach, hotspots. The surge will gradually grow the number of people receiving WFP's monthly assistance, currently estimated at 2 million families a month. 

“We’ve got the food, we’ve got the trucks, we’ve got the best people on the ground,” said WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain. “All we need is access - and we can put an end to this catastrophe.”

Now, however, renewed clashes are compromising our deliveries. That includes at Zamzam, which has come under fire in recent days, disrupting food voucher distributions. The unrest has also delayed the arrival of more life-saving assistance, with another WFP food aid convoy since redirected to a safer destination. 


 

“We've been pushing for months to get to these communities,” says WFP Sudan Deputy Country Director Alex Marianelli, adding, “the message is these convoys have to reach their final destination. We have to get to these populations safely and on a regular basis.”

A step from starvation

Surrounded by sand and hosting roughly half-a-million displaced people, Zamzam had been cut off for months by fighting and torrential rains, along with obstruction by warring parties. In August, a global hunger watchdog, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, confirmed famine at the camp - a first worldwide in 7 years.

WFP's trucks arriving in November were the first since that famine confirmation. As a stopgap in September and October, we drew on locally sourced supplies to get food into the hands of more than 100,000 people. 

For Zamzam’s residents, who fled conflict and death, life remains a step away from starvation. Their precarious shelters of cloth, sticks, straw and plastic bags dot a dusty and desolate desert.

Manabir, 18, lost her husband to war and her child to malnutrition. “We’re struggling,” she said softly.

“People are struggling from cold and food scarcity,” says Hamad Abdelnour Mohamed Ahmad, who works at Zamzam for WFP’s NGO partner Welthungerhilfe (WHH), a German nonprofit. 


“The challenge we are facing is all the country is displaced,” he added, “and we have to feed people who have been displaced for decades and also the newly uprooted.”

Zamzam is one extreme example of Sudan’s chilling hunger snapshot. Countrywide, nearly 1.7 million people face or risk famine. Nearly 26 million people overall are acutely food insecure. Nearly 4.7 million children and pregnant and nursing women are acutely malnourished.

Nour and her family are among many resorting to extreme measures to survive. Standing in front of her makeshift shelter, and wrapped in a flowing orange thawb, she described fleeing violence — and also the suffering of fellow camp residents.

“There are lots of wounded people here,” she says. “There are some people who lost their parents and many family members.”

Many others have found safety across Sudan’s borders, shaping what is now the world’s largest displacement crisis. In many cases, hunger has stalked them as well. 


“Every one of us is suffering and has lost family members,” says 33-year-old teacher Abdoul Rassoul, who fled his home in Kolbous, West Darfur state. Today, he and his family have found refuge in eastern Chad, where WFP provides food assistance. But it’s not enough.

“There’s not enough to eat or drink to stay healthy,” Abdou Rassoul says. “That’s the major problem we face.”

In Sudan, more WFP food trucks are on their way to hard-to reach areas where experts believe famine threatens. Among them: Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan state. But a fresh uptick in fighting along the way has again threatened access.



“We're asking everybody involved along those roads to allow us free passage," says WFP's Marianelli, "so we can assist these populations."

Learn more about WFP's work in Sudan