Independent expert report: Famine is spreading in Sudan – 600,000 affected

Famine is spreading in the civil war-torn country of Sudan. As the World Food Program (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) announced, independent experts demonstrated the criteria for famine in at least five areas of the country.

In addition to the SamSam refugee camp, where famine was first reported in August, three other camps in North Darfur are affected. More than 600,000 people there suffer from catastrophic hunger.

“These findings mark an alarming escalation in hunger and malnutrition – at what is normally harvest time, when food availability should be at its highest,” said the joint press release from the UN agencies.

Famine is expected to occur in five other areas of North Darfur, including the city of El Fasher, by May 2025. There may also be a famine in parts of the capital Khartoum and the city of Al Jazeera, which cannot be confirmed due to a lack of current data.

Strict criteria for determining famine

A famine is the worst – and rare – form of hunger crisis. It corresponds to the highest level on the scale from one to five of the so-called Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The IPC levels are a globally recognized method to assess levels of food insecurity.

At level five, at least a fifth of all households experience extreme food shortages and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 people die every day from acute malnutrition.

More than half of the population is affected by hunger

According to reports, at least 638,000 people in Sudan are now living under famine conditions. A further 8.1 million are therefore in acute distress (IPC level four). In total, more than 24.6 million people – more than half of the Sudanese population – are affected by acute food insecurity (IPC level 3 or higher).

Expert: Starving people become weaker and weaker and die

“A protracted famine is taking hold in Sudan,” said WFP expert Jean-Martin Bauer. “People are getting weaker and weaker and dying because they have had little or no access to food for months.”

According to experts, the civil war and the associated displacement of people as well as the severely restricted access for humanitarian aid are the main causes of the worsening hunger crisis.

In Sudan in northeast Africa, a bloody power struggle has been raging between de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo since April 2023, which has developed into a regional proxy war. Daglo’s RSF militia, which experts say is backed by the United Arab Emirates, controls most of the western province of Darfur. More than eleven million people have fled the nationwide fighting, around half of them are children and young people.