Three International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) on Tuesday appealed to the International Community to expeditiously intervene in mitigating the starvation catastrophe in Sudan.
Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland, Danish Refugee Council Secretary General Charlotte Slente, and Mercy Corps Chief Executive Officer Tjada D’Oyen McKenna signed the joint statement and described the situation as dire, saying it has now reached historic proportions.
“As the heads of humanitarian organizations operating in Sudan, we urgently call on the international community to address the immense hunger crisis within the country. We cannot be clearer: Sudan is experiencing a starvation crisis of historic proportions. And yet, the silence is deafening. People are dying of hunger, every day, and yet the focus remains on semantic debates and legal definitions,” the statement reads in part. “Every opportunity to head off the worst of this situation has been missed, and now the people of Sudan face a crisis unmatched in decades. As the peak of the lean season approaches, widespread death and suffering are advancing across the county. Children are starving to death.”
“More than 25 million people – more than half the population – are suffering acute food insecurity and any families have for months been reduced to one meal a day and have been forced to eat leaves or insects,” it added.
The trio said that the people of Sudan have shown immense resilience and strength over the past 17 months: they now have nowhere left to turn.
“International attention and action have amounted to too little, too late. Currently, the Humanitarian Response Plan is only 41 percent funded, with much of this funding arriving too late to prevent deaths from starvation. Pressure must be applied to ensure that humanitarian aid can flow in and reach those who will otherwise pay with their lives,” the statement read. “Our teams in Sudan have spoken of the huge loss of life resulting from the extreme violence that has swept the country, and now tell us that famine will likely eclipse that death toll. The conflict significantly impacted food production, destroying agriculture and livestock sectors.”
According to the INGOs, their staff also witnessed the weaponization of food on a mass scale, in areas held by both sides of the conflict. In June alone, about 1.78 million people have had no access to critical humanitarian assistance due to logistics constraints, arbitrary denials, and bureaucratic obstruction.
“Even where aid is getting through, it is in such scarce supply that meager individual rations are being divided between groups of people. In some places, ten-person households have received 2kg of millet to last an entire month – this is not enough even for three days,” the statement said. “Such is the situation for many in “fortunate” areas where some aid is getting through. The level of suffering endured by the Sudanese people in recent months is impossible to express with words alone.”
The INGOs stressed that the endurance and resilience of the suffering Sudanese people will be in vain if the world continues to look the other way and emphasized that the indifference must end.