100,000 South Sudanese facing starvation
About 100,000 people are facing starvation in parts of South
Sudan, the United Nations warned on Monday.
A formal declaration of famine means people have already
began dying of hunger, the UN said.
Monday's declaration was the first issued by the UN since it
announced in 2011 that famine was underway in parts of Somalia.
The total number of food insecure people is expected to rise
to 5.5 million at the height of the lean season in July if nothing was done to
curb the severity and spread of the food crisis, said a joint statement by FAO,
Unicef and WFP.
Humanitarian partners
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase
Classification (IPC) update released on Monday by the government, the three
agencies and other humanitarian partners, 4.9 million people – more than 40 per
cent of South Sudan’s population – were in need of urgent food, agriculture and
nutrition assistance.
Unimpeded humanitarian access to everyone facing famine, or
at risk of famine, was urgently needed to reverse the escalating catastrophe,
the UN agencies urged.
"Famine has become a tragic reality in parts of South
Sudan and our worst fears have been realised,” said Mr Serge Tissot, the FAO
representative in the country.
“Many families have exhausted every means they have to
survive," Mr Tissot noted, saying the three-year-long civil war had
severely disrupted agriculture.
Poor diet
“Insecurity, displacement, poor access to services, extremely
poor diet (in terms of both quality and quantity), low coverage of sanitation
facilities and deplorable hygiene practices are underlying the high levels of
acute malnutrition,” the update noted.
"This famine is man-made,” declared Ms Joyce Luma, the
South Sudan director for WFP.
Aid organisations have been conducting a massive relief
operation in South Sudan, Ms Luma noted, but she added: “there is only so much
that humanitarian assistance can achieve in the absence of meaningful peace and
security, both for relief workers and the crisis-affected people they serve.”
Civil war
At least 57 aid workers have been killed in South Sudan
since the outbreak of civil war, the UN said last August.
Failure to halt the fighting in South Sudan has pushed the
country to an economic breakdown.
An annual inflation rate of 800 per cent has reduced access
to food for many South Sudanese reliant on market purchases, the UN said.
Severely malnourished
The Unicef representative for South Sudan, Mr Jeremy
Hopkins, also raised an alarm over malnutrition saying it was a major public
health emergency that was exacerbated by the widespread fighting, displacement,
poor access to health services and low coverage of sanitation facilities.
“More than one million children are currently estimated to
be acutely malnourished across South Sudan; over a quarter of a million
children are already severely malnourished. If we do not reach these children
with urgent aid many of them will die,” Mr Jeremy said.
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