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STARVATION IN SUDAN  
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Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
July 30, 2024
LA Progressive
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_ Sudan is home to the world’s largest hunger crisis, as the war
continues to devastate lives and livelihoods. As in Gaza, the
deprivation is deliberate. _

,

 

For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about
the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war
that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not
knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly
never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the
missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it
soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late.

After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed
Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts
in food insecurity estimate
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almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than
half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by
September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face
acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present
path, millions
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die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in
our world may even notice).

By now, those warring armies have driven Sudan to the brink of all-out
famine, partly by displacing more than a fifth of the population from
their homes, livelihoods, and farms, while preventing the delivery of
food to the places most in need. And you undoubtedly won’t be
surprised to learn that, with their foreign-policy eyes focused on
Gaza and Ukraine, our country’s government and others around the
world have paid remarkably little attention to the growing crisis in
Sudan, making at best only half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) gestures
toward helping negotiate a cease-fire between the SAF and RSF, while
contributing only a small fraction of the aid Sudan needs to head off
a famine of historic magnitude.

From Emergency to Catastrophe

In late June, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase
Classification (IPC) system, which monitors regions at risk of
starvation, reported
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stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” in
Sudan. It noted that the number of people suffering hunger severe
enough to qualify, in IPC terms, as Phase 3 (“Crisis”) or Phase 4
(“Emergency”) has ballooned 45%
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the end of last year. In December 2023, no Sudanese had yet made it to
Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”), a condition characteristic of famines.
Now, more than three-quarters of a million people are in that final
phase of starving to death. Indeed, if the conflict continues to
escalate, large parts of Sudan may spiral into full-blown famine, a
state that exists, according to the IPC, when at least 20%
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an area’s population is suffering Phase-5 hunger.

Until recently, the worst conflict and hunger were concentrated in
western Sudan and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. Now,
however, they’ve spread to the east and south as well. Worse yet,
the war in Sudan has by now displaced an astounding 10 million
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from their homes, more than four million of them children — a figure
that looks like but isn’t a misprint. Many have had to
move multiple
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and two million Sudanese have taken refuge in neighboring countries.
Worse yet, with so many people forced off their land and away from
their workplaces, the capacity of farmers to till the soil and other
kinds of workers to hold down a paycheck and so buy food for their
families has been severely disrupted.

Not surprisingly, 15 months of brutal war have played havoc with crop
production. Cereal grain harvests in 2023 were far smaller
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previous years and stocks of grain (which typically supply 80% of
Sudanese caloric intake) have already been fully consumed, with months
to go before the next harvest, a stretch of time known, even in good
years, as the “lean season
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raging, anything but a bumper crop is expected this year. Indeed, just
as planting season got underway, fierce fighting spilled over
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Gezira, one of Sudan’s 18 “states” and renowned as the
nation’s breadbasket.

Sudan desperately needs food aid and it’s simply not getting enough.
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees has received less than 20%
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the funds necessary to help feed the Sudanese this year and has had to
“drastically cut
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food rations. As Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of the aid nonprofit
Mercy Corps, told the _New York Times_, “World leaders continue to
go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis. Yet
they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”

Worse yet, in the swirling chaos, even the food aid that does make it
to Sudan is largely failing to reach starving populations in anything
approaching adequate quantities — and when available, it’s usually
unaffordable. Famished people are reportedly boiling leaves
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as well as eating grass, peanut shells, and even dirt.

Starvation: “A Cheap and Very Effective Weapon”

For many families, the one thing keeping starvation at bay may be a
local free soup kitchen. In a report
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in May, Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International
Relations noted, “Sudan has a long tradition of sharing food. After
the war broke out and hunger spread, community-level initiatives for
sharing food sprang up across the country. These ‘soup kitchen’
initiatives are often informal but can be very well organized.”

Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many
gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction,
displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at
current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger
and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other
words, a shocking 10-20% of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas
could die — mortality rates similar
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ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969,
Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.

By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through
soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a
still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the
existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international
organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides
in the war. Six international experts writing for the U.N. Office of
the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused
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“using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found
that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local
volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people
at further risk of starvation.”

We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with
whom we’d spoken
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after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16th email to us, she wrote
that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an
attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with
neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army
is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be
tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a
raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the
locations _hours before_ the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those
now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their
attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting
to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”

Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF
paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine
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through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.”
They even bombed and looted the last hospital
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functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the
government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in
areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De
Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and
very effective weapon.”

Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away

Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?

* Families displaced multiple times
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with war following hot on their heels.
* Food aid falling desperately short
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what’s needed.
* Humanitarian aid intercepted
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soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.
* Soup kitchens attacked
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* Aid workers targeted
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death.
* Hospitals
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invaded, and shut down.
* Crop production capacity sabotaged
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a hunger emergency.
* Washington doing
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or nothing to stop the horror.

Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a
thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of
Egypt?

Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being
waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would
nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza
for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of
those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should
be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the
other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in
Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the
imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have
received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their
respective conflicts.

Efforts by the U.S. and other countries to push for cease-fires in
both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost
cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been
especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF
brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce
the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too
expectably broke down
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In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring
parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome
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the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a
meaningless communique.

Collective Courage

Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote
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then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese
living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You
really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited
resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up
to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s
just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the
sectarian fighting continues.

With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have
little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and
mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their
country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the
war on Gaza’s civilians: the coordinated service, heroism, and
sacrifice
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by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare
professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.

Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world
media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people
are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of
collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in
the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve.
They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the
victim.

The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens
is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called
“resistance committees
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that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab
Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and
provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated
throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together
forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.

The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests
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the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to
democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the
current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned
on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the
Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to
their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential
lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their
communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human
rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct
democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and
more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are
also mobilizing
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communities for self-defense.

Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested
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that the resistance committees, “because of their support among
youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international
community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part
of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those
ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or
later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to
move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example,
that “the international community… increase punitive measures,
including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of
the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline
religious groups.”

While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our
attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues,
it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on
the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose
punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while
pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions
who desperately need it.

Sudan should simply no longer be callously ignored.

_PRITI GULATI COX (@PritiGCox [[link removed]]) is an
artist and local [[link removed]] organizer for
CODEPINK Sidewalk Gallery of Congress, a community street art space.
Please go here
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see her current project It’s Time._

_STAN COX is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond
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Path to a Livable Future
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Forging a New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next
Pandemic, both from City Lights Books. He is a senior researcher at
the Land Institute._

* Sudan
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* starvation
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* armed conflict
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