News Article by AFP posted on December 21, 2000 at 15:24:12: EST (-5 GMT)
Drought threatens hundreds of thousands of Sudanese with starvation: UN
by Peter King
KHARTOUM, Dec 22 (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese
will
starve due to a severe drought in many parts of war-torn Sudan
if
sufficient food aid fails to reach them, the United Nations is
warning.
The earth is so dry it is cracking up, livestock are getting
thin and
people are searching for water in areas where famine killed
hundreds of
thousands in the eighties and nineties, UN officials
told AFP.
"The drought is here right now. It's a fact. Now we're just
waiting to see
the effects," said Maxwell Gaylard, chief of the
United Nations Office for
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(UN-OCHA) in Khartoum.
Starvation will set in by April when local food supplies run out
unless
aid reaches them, Gaylard said, adding that the amounts
pledged so far by
donor countries would not be enough to feed
everyone.
One reservoir that serves around 100 villages south of al-Fasher
in
western Sudan has run dry for the first time since 1972, Gumaa
Sayyed Gumaa
of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
told AFP after a visit
there.
The drought has already hit North Darfur in west Sudan, North
Kordofan in
the centre, as well as the southeastern states of East
Equitoria and Jonglei,
and Bahr al-Ghazal in the southwest, UN
missions have reported.
A total of 900,000 people will be affected by drought in those
areas,
400,000 of them severely, according to an internal UN
document. Gaylard
himself said more than one million will be
affected.
They face starvation, forced migration, loss of income and
clashes with
tribes competing over dwindling water and food.
Other UN sources said Sudan's 17-year-old civil war would make
it harder
to get food aid to rebel-held parts of Eastern Equitoria
state where the
government is refusing to give permission for UN
humanitarian flights to
land.
"If the situation is complicated by a resurgence of fighting
between the
SPLM (rebels) and the government, as we usually see at
this time of year,
it's going to get really sticky," said one UN
official who asked not to be
named.
rce.
The UN officials are asking donors to act swiftly to avoid a
repeat of the
famine that left around 250,000 people dead in 1985
and the devastating food
crisis that hit war-torn Bahr al-Ghazal in
1998.
Although the UN's humanitarian agencies say they are now better
prepared
to cope with drought and famine in Sudan, a slow or meagre
reaction from
international donors could still cause disaster.
"In early 1998 in Bahr al-Ghazal, the UN system was ready to act
but the
donor response was slow and somewhere around 200,000 people
died before food
got to them," Gaylard said.
Government recognition of the new crisis for the first time this
week
looked set to facilitate distribution of aid in the northern
states.
UN agencies were appealing for just under one hundred million
dollars, or
89,500 tonnes, of food aid in 2001 before the FAO/WFP
crop assesment was
completed, but have since revised that up to
107,500 tonnes, UN documents
said.
One western diplomat, however, accused UN humanitarian agencies
of being
alarmist with their drought and famine forecasts and
playing a "game" with
donors to secure more aid.
But Sudanese economist Mohammed Hashem Awad said the drought was
a reality
and warned that it will also have an indirect effect on
the whole country,
one of the poorest in Africa, due to rising
prices of staple foods caused by
low stocks, and increased pressure
on urban centres from migration.
Sorghum prices have already doubled and people have started
selling cattle
at less than half price, a World Food Programme
official told AFP.