The United Nations has warned that families in Sudan's conflict zones could experience famine-like hunger by next summer, with 30 million people, almost two-thirds of the population, in need of assistance. The UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) indicates that 18 million people urgently need humanitarian food assistance, the highest number for the country's harvest season. These people are concentrated in the capital, Khartoum, where over half face acute food insecurity, and densely packed cities and towns that have seen fighting in the Darfur and Kordofan regions.
If conditions don't improve by May, families will start to experience "catastrophic" hunger, meaning they will starve to death without assistance, having depleted their assets and run out of options. A famine is declared by a government when 20% of households in a particular geographic area are at the catastrophic stage.
The conflict has devastated Khartoum and sparked ethnically driven killings in Darfur. Both sides have been accused of seizing supplies and hampering aid workers' access. In al-Shajara, a southern Khartoum neighbourhood around the army's besieged Armoured Corps, a volunteer said the RSF had taken most supplies for the 2,000 people who haven't fled the area.
The IPC revised estimates of those going hungry as fighting expands, decimating local markets and impacting agriculture. Family savings are drying up even as prices rise for costly imports. WFP and other aid agencies struggle to access people in the worst-affected conflict zones safely and have had to focus aid on more peaceful areas. The U.N.'s 2023 appeal for Sudan is only one-third funded, in line with similar crises apart from Ukraine, which is 56% funded.
