UN’s hunger monitoring system finds ongoing famine in Zamzam camp and is likely to persist until October.
A woman and baby are seen at the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, Sudan [File: Mohamed Zakaria/Handout via Reuters].
The war in Sudan and restrictions on aid deliveries have caused famine in at least one camp for displaced people in Sudans’s North Darfur region, according to a report by the global authority on food security.
Thursday’s United Nations-backed report, linked to an internationally recognised standard known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), found that it is plausible that parts of North Darfur – especially the Zamzam camp – are experiencing “the worst form of hunger”, known as IPC Phase 5.
IPC Phase 5 is determined in areas where at least one in five people or households severely lack food and face starvation and destitution, which would ultimately lead to critical levels of acute malnutrition and death.
This marks just the third time a famine determination has been made since the system was set up 20 years ago.
The IPC partnership includes more than a dozen UN agencies, aid groups and governments that use the IPC as a global reference for analysis of food and nutrition crises.
The report shows how starvation and disease are taking a deadly toll in Sudan, where more than 15 months of war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have created the world’s biggest internal displacement crisis and left 25 million people – or half the population – in urgent need of humanitarian aid.
In its report, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) found that famine was ongoing in the Zamzam camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) and likely to persist there at least until October.
Zamzam has a population of 500,000. It is near the city of el-Fasher, home to 1.8 million people and the last significant holdout against the RSF across Darfur. The RSF has been besieging the area and no aid has reached the sprawling camp for months.
The FRC said it is plausible that similar conditions were affecting other areas in Darfur including the displaced persons camps of Abu Shouk and Al Salam.
On Thursday, Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym (MSF), decried what it called “repeated attacks on healthcare facilities” in el-Fashir.
“The organisation calls for all parties to respect healthcare facilities and the civilian population and to allow the urgent delivery of food and medicines to the area,” MSF said in a statement.
The group warned that children in the area are “at death’s door” due to restrictions on food and medical supplies.
The Reuters news agency reported that some Sudanese have been forced to eat leaves and soil, and that satellite imagery showed cemeteries expanding fast as starvation and disease spread.
A Reuters analysis of satellite images identified 14 burial grounds in Darfur that had expanded rapidly in recent months. One cemetery in Zamzam grew 50 percent faster in the period between March 28 and May 3 than in the preceding three-and-a-half months.
The analysis was used by the FRC as indirect evidence of increasing mortality.
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