The situation in Sudan, which was once called the world's food basket, is similar to that of Tantalus in Greek mythology, who was cursed to eternal misery by being forced to stand in a basin of water beneath a low-branched fruit tree, the fruit eluding his grasp and the water draining before he could drink.
Sudan is currently facing the worst period of acute food insecurity in its history, with more than 25.6 million people suffering from acute hunger.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a system that was established by The Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2004 to assess food security emergencies, more than 8.5 million people in Sudan are in Phase IV (IPC 4), known as an emergency. It is the penultimate stage in the severity of the famine according to this classification, while the case of more than 755,000 people in Sudan reached level V (IPC 5), the most catastrophic famine rating.
The World Food Program recently announced that at least one million people are facing severe levels of hunger in the capital Khartoum alone. According to a report by the Dutch Clingendael Institute, the number of deaths from hunger is expected to reach 2.5 million, with 15% of the population of the states of Darfur and Kordofan, which are likely to be the most affected, expected to die of hunger and disease by September 2024.
Sudan has become the world's largest humanitarian disaster in terms of displacement, food insecurity, and child suffering in contemporary history.
This gloomy situation has been exacerbated by the increasing numbers of internally displaced persons and refugees. The number of internally displaced persons reached nearly 11 million displaced within Sudan, while the number of Sudanese refugees in neighboring countries and around the world exceeded 2 million and a half. The majority of those displaced (55%) are children under the age of eighteen, according to statistics from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). More than 151,750 people, or around 30,350 households, were forced from their homes between June 27, 2024, and July 11, 2024, as a result of attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sinnar State, according to the same sources.
Sudan has become the world's largest humanitarian disaster in terms of displacement, food insecurity, and child suffering in contemporary history. This cataclysmic disaster and epic suffering have not emerged by mere chance or fate. They are not a result of natural conditions, drought, or land plagues. Rather, they are the direct consequences of the deliberate actions of identifiable actors whose heinous crimes have wrought all this devastation upon the innocent people of Sudan. As Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN under-Secretary-General for political Affairs, described it as "wholly man-made".
Despite this catastrophic situation, funding available this year from the international community for the Sudan Humanitarian Relief Plan by the end of July 2024 covers only about one-third of the required budget estimated by UN agencies to address the largest humanitarian crisis of our time (available funding is $850 million while the required budget is $2.7bn). The international community has been culpably indifferent to the escalating humanitarian crisis in Sudan. By prioritizing theoretical debates over tangible action, they have transformed a dire situation into mere rhetoric. The reality on the ground is far more grim: Sudan is experiencing a deliberate process of starvation, not simply famine.
Justifying this human suffering as a natural product of the war of April 15, 2023, alone is an incomplete analysis: especially that modern-day war has laws and rules governing the behavior of warring parties to limit the impact of fighting on civilian citizens.
The international community has been culpably indifferent to the escalating humanitarian crisis in Sudan.
However, since the start of this war between the Sudanese army and the RSF militia, RSF has pursued a Starvation Siege Strategy aimed at pressuring citizens to submit or force them to join its ranks. At the beginning of the war, the militia besieged areas crowded with hundreds of thousands of people, such as Tutti island and neighborhoods such as Bant, al-Abbasiya, Fatehab and Muhandisin in Khartoum state during the period of RSF control of the city of Omdurman, and blocked citizens from leaving the besieged regions and from accessing food and supplies, resulting in a number of fatalities of civilians due to starvation and thirst in those places. the militia also laid a similar siege to the areas it controlled in Jazira State, and food and other supplies were used as a weapon to force young people to recruit and join its ranks.
News reports have documented at least 750 people, including at least 65 children under the age of eighteen, who were forced to join and recruit into the RSF ranks using hunger and threats of cutting off food supplies from their communities in Al Jazeera state between January and March 2024. More recently, on July 14, 2024, a convoy of local merchants en route from the villages of Western Fanqoua and Umm Heglija to the weekly market in Um Sumaima, situated 75 kilometers north of Um Rawaba in North Kordofan state to get supplies for the citizens, was ambushed and attacked by the RSF militia. Militia forces indiscriminately opened fire upon the merchants, resulting in the immediate killing of twenty-three individuals and injuries to dozens others. This attack consequently disrupted essential supply routes to the region.
During this ongoing conflict, a recurring modus operandi has become evident: whenever Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters gain control over civilian areas, they systematically confiscate food supplies, and aim to intentionally deprive civilians of access to essential sustenance.
The Starvation Siege Strategy stretched beyond that. It also included active looting of food aid and supplies. From the early days of the war, the RSF militia began attacking and looting World Food Program warehouses. On the second day of the outbreak of the war, April 16, 2023, WFP's warehouses in the city of Nyala, the capital city of South Darfur, were looted, resulting in the loss of up to 4000 metric tons of food supplies. Within two months, between the outbreak of war in April 2023 and June 2023, at least 162 aid trucks, 61 offices and 57 warehouses were looted in Darfur alone. In June 2023, the militia looted the World Food Program in El-Obeid, the capital city of North Kordofan, which contained food aid intended for 4.4 million civilians in the states of North, West and South Kordofan as well as the neighboring states of Darfur. The size of losses recorded for WFP alone was estimated at more than US$60 million by the date of the attack.
In a statement dated 28 December 2023, the World Food Program announced that the Rapid Support Forces had looted its warehouses in Al Jazeera state during their invasion of Wad Madani. Reports of the incident revealed that the looting occurred despite RSF being provided with the accurate coordinates of the location of the warehouses and the World Food Program receiving assurances that it would not be looted. In that attack, the RSF pillaged over 2500 metric tons of food aid, including supplies of pulses, sorghum, vegetable oils, and nutritional supplements. These supplies were adequate to meet the nutritional requirements of 1.5 million Sudanese people for a month.
Additionally, they looted specialized nutritious supplies intended to prevent and treat malnutrition in over twenty thousand children, and pregnant, and lactating women. The RSF's documented looting included also relief trucks and vehicles bringing humanitarian goods to Sudanese populations in regions under their control.
According to a recent internal United Nations report, the RSF militia looted more than 4100 liters of fuel from relief trucks of humanitarian organization vehicles, in addition to royalties and fees imposed by the militia on citizens and humanitarian organizations passing through its areas of control.
The UN's inexplicable silence on the militia's rampant fuel theft is disgraceful. Such flagrant disregard for the magnitude of these criminal acts not only grants RSF institutional impunity to persist in its violations but also contributes to the fabrication of an illusory narrative surrounding the true suffering in Sudan, hindering the pursuit of practical solutions.
It also raises significant questions about the organization's impartiality and effectiveness in tackling the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. In addition, the RSF have not hesitated to loot and stop aid trucks, even in areas that had -at time- escaped the active fighting, such as North Darfur. In March 2024, RSF reportedly looted relief trucks carrying life-saving aid for malnourished children in North Darfur state.
On a more severe level, attacks, and hostilities by the RSF militia have significantly disrupted agricultural activity in the country. The militia's invasion of Al Jazeera state in December 2023 disrupted the cultivation of more than 2.4 million acres of fertile agricultural land that could have contributed to addressing the food crisis in the country significantly.
The Al Jazeera Agricultural Project, the world's largest naturally irrigated Project, has been the victim of the RSF's barbarism and starvation strategy. A joint study by the United Nations Development Program and the International Food Policy Research Institute indicated that about 60% of agricultural activities in Sinnar and West Kordofan states have ceased, while the amount of agricultural land losses in Khartoum state amounted to 68% of arable land. As a result, 59% of rural households in Sudan now face moderate to severe levels of food insecurity.
What is happening in Sudan is not just hunger or famine, but a crime of deliberate starvation by the RSF militia.
What is happening in Sudan is not just a food crisis, but an ugly picture of humanity's incapacity in the face of the dance of death with his bloody harvest sickle on the streets of this country. This wretched scene is not just a metaphor, it is a cruel reality, in which the disastrous statistics of death and suffering escalate in a frightening geometrical sequence.
It is not a coincidence, a mere unfortunate event or the result of a natural disaster, but a premediated crime. What is happening in Sudan is not just hunger or famine, but a crime of deliberate starvation by the RSF militia. The suffering and souls of innocent Sudanese cannot be hidden under the veils of lies and courtesy. The heinous crimes committed by the Rapid Support Forces cast a dark pall over the skies of Sudan, a shadow so immense that only willful blindness can prevent one from seeing it.
And beyond the suffering of the immediate victims, the impact of these crimes is echoed through mass terrorization of the people, the disruption of essential supplies, social services and the work of humanitarian organization, the exacerbation of hunger and the impact of the siege imposed on civilians.
Impunity should not be tolerated under the guise of the RSF's diplomatic narratives and compliments on humanitarian aid to civilians that are not mirrored on the ground. RSF's atrocities contradict their fraudulent claims.
The international community's continued acceptance of these fictitious narratives and the militia's fraudulent rhetoric enables it to continue committing its crimes, adding additional suffering to what is already endured by Sudanese civilian victims of the war.
Amgad Fareid El-Tayeb, Executive Director of Fikra for Studies and Development, previously served as the Assistant Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of Sudan; Dr. Abdalla Hamdok during the transitional period following the toppling of the Islamic dictatorship in Sudan. He has also served as a political advisor to the United Nations Special Political Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
He made a prominent political and social contribution to the liberation movement to overthrow Bashir's Islamic regime before and during the December 2018 revolution. He served as the head of the foreign relations committee of the Sudanese Professional Association and Spokesperson of it during the revolution. Founder of the Nafeer Initiative in 2013 and contributed significantly to the establishment of the Girifna and Sudan Change Now movements. He has also written extensively on cases of violations of migrants' rights, democratization, and issues of military and civil institutional reforms in Sudan.
He can be contacted by email at: amjedfarid@gmail.com, Amgad@fikrasd.com Twitter: @amjedfarid.
