The Darfur region of western Sudan is one of the world’s largest humanitarian operation and is also on the verge of famine. With an extraordinary annual budget, and almost four years of large scale presence, the Darfur relief operation will enter the coming rainy season witnessing many numbers of malnourished civilians, particularly children. Much of the evidence showing that this was going to happen has been available for some time, but the brutal regime in Khartoum has used its bureaucratic powers and threats of humanitarian expulsion to intimidate both UN and international nongovernmental relief organizations (INGO’s). The most culpable silence is that of the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, lead agency for reporting on malnutrition in Darfur. This is the organization that has calculated it is better to allow critical humanitarian truths to be concealed than to risk offending a genocidal regime that has the perverse power to control humanitarian access.
Malnutrition rates, especially for children under five, already exceed emergency thresholds in much of Darfur, as they did more than half a year ago when UNICEF last oversaw a published malnutrition study. This is not surprising, given a range of reports and anecdotal evidence going back to the beginning of the year. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) has already significantly cut rations for many recipients, inevitably accelerating malnutrition. At any one moment, WFP now has only half the food tonnage required on the road corridor from Port Sudan to Darfur, over 1,000 kilometers to the west. This has led WFP to announce recently that rations will be cut more severely in a matter of days---to 50% of the kilo-calories required to sustain human life. Insecurity is responsible for this dramatic decline in transport capacity; and Khartoum’s refusal to facilitate deployment of a UN-authorized protection force is the primary reason this and other critical humanitarian corridors can’t be secured. WFP also lacks funds for its vital air service, the primary means for aid workers to travel to program sites amidst the desperate insecurity of Darfur.
Last fall’s harvests were disastrous, particularly in North and South Darfur (three-quarters of the region’s population), and there is little evidence that next fall’s harvests will be better. Khartoum’s brutal Arab militia, the Janjaweed, keep African farmers from cultivating their lands through violent threats, and increasingly destroy crops before harvest. Growing numbers of Darfuri civilians have given up trying to fashion a living in such threatening circumstances and have migrated to camps for displaced persons that are already overcrowded, putting yet greater demands on an insufficient food supply. Even so, at any one time there may be hundreds of thousands of people beyond the reach of WFP. More than 3 million people are dependent to varying degrees on food assistance. The gains in addressing malnutrition achieved since major humanitarian efforts began in 2004 are all being lost.
Causes of famine
Most famines are caused by a combination of political, economic, and biological factors. In some modern cases, it is political strife, poverty, and violence that disrupt the agricultural and food distribution processes. Modern famines have often occurred in nations that, as a whole, were not initially suffering a shortage of food.
The failure of a harvest or the change in conditions, such as drought, can create a situation whereby large numbers of people live where the carrying capacity of the land has temporarily dropped radically. Famine is often associated with subsistence agriculture, that is, where most farming is aimed at producing enough food energy to survive. The total absence of agriculture in an economically strong area does not cause famine; Arizona and other wealthy regions import the vast majority of their food, since such regions produce sufficient economic goods for trade.
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