ROME (AP) — The World Food Program needs better access to people at risk of starvation in Sudan and more money from the crisis-weary West to more than 2.5 million people face faminethe UN agency’s director said on Thursday.
“Sudan is almost a forgotten crisis right now,” WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain told The Associated Press.
“There are so many crises going on that people are just finding it too much and their eyes are glazing over,” she added.
Sudan descended into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between military and paramilitary leaders erupted in the capital Khartoum and spread to Darfur and other regions. Some 10 million people have been internally displaced and the country is in a humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands have died in the fighting.
Although WFP has identified access points to provide aid to the hungry, the onset of the rainy season is making it difficult for trucks to reach Zamzam camp, home to more than 400,000 displaced people and declared in February this year that the camp had crossed the famine threshold.
“It took our trucks almost two weeks to get there,” McCain explained, “Bridges are washed out. Roads are washed out. It’s really a combination of really tragic situations.”
“We need to act on a massive scale,” McCain said, “and we need to make sure the world understands the urgency and what’s at stake if we don’t.”
WFP is struggling with a lack of funding due to donor fatigue after the pandemic. The organization is trying to compensate by developing new technologies for weather forecasting and providing food in emergencies.
“We need to do more with less. We need to be more efficient and effective. We need to predict the things that we need to predict, climate change impacts and things that are very necessary now,” she said.
