The world’s hunger watchdog warned of catastrophe in Sudan. Famine struck anyway.

A perplexing finding

Starvation is making a resurgence as a method of warfare, and so the IPC urgently needs to strengthen its understanding and analysis of the links between conflict and famine, said Tufts University scholar Daniel Maxwell, who sits on the IPC’s Famine Review Committee.

Four months into the civil war in Sudan, the IPC issued a report that described the many ways conflict was worsening food insecurity across the country. It cautioned that war would make things worse, affecting “all aspects of food security, pushing further numbers of people, especially internally displaced populations, into acute food insecurity.”

The August 2023 report raised the severity rating of conditions in al-Fashir, the state capital of North Darfur, and the surrounding area, which includes Zamzam, to Phase 4. Just one step away from famine, a Phase 4 finding is supposed to sound an international alarm and trigger urgent action by donors and aid agencies to keep people alive and prevent a freefall into famine.

But as war raged across Sudan, the report contained a perplexing contradiction. It predicted that food security would improve in the months ahead, from Phase 4 to Phase 3. It surmised that the coming millet and sorghum harvest would mitigate food shortages, along with the “opening of roads and markets and supply chains of food and non-food commodities.”

The IPC’s methods for analyzing food security have focused more on weather and economic conditions and have not adequately considered conflict, the leading driver of famine for more than two decades, review-committee member Maxwell said. He said that the IPC has been working to address this.

In October, the IPC issued new guidance on how to conduct more rigorous conflict analyses, urging working groups to consider not just warfare but also other armed conflict, such as gang violence. The guidance notes many ways conflict can drive food insecurity, such as impeding access to food, causing food prices to skyrocket and disrupting crop production.

After the IPC’s optimistic projection in August 2023, aid groups ended the year having raised about half the $2.6 billion they estimated they needed for relief in Sudan, according to U.N. data that tracks the flow of humanitarian funding.

In the following months, conflict drove thousands more Sudanese from their homes and farms. The fighting obliterated markets and smashed supply chains. The agricultural harvest was below average. Starvation in the region increased in severity and scale, and Zamzam plunged into famine.

The main providers of aid, U.N. relief agencies, won’t cross borders without the approval of Sudan’s army-backed government, which the U.N. recognizes as sovereign. That has made it hard to get aid to Darfur, where the U.N. lacked government permission for many months to deliver aid from a key border crossing in the Chadian town of Adre.