Famine risk across Sudan’s Darfur and Kordofan regions could continue to worsen into January, according to the latest analysis from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which projects that up to 23 million people nationwide will face acute food insecurity through 2026. The warning identifies seven areas of North Darfur, together with Dilling, Kadugli and surrounding rural districts in South Kordofan, as carrying the highest risk of famine conditions, with malnutrition rates already exceeding 30 per cent in parts of Karari and Bahri.
FEWS NET’s classification places North, Central, South and East Darfur, most of Greater Kordofan and Blue Nile State in Emergency conditions, the fourth of five internationally recognised phases of food insecurity, with pockets reaching Catastrophe, the most severe phase, in locations including Ambro, Karnoi and Tina in North Darfur and Dilling and Kadugli in South Kordofan. Displaced communities in both regions are among the worst affected. Images from Tawila, where people fleeing violence elsewhere in Darfur have arrived with little more than what they could carry, illustrate the scale of displacement feeding into the crisis.
The analysis attributes the deepening emergency to a combination of factors compounding one another. Continuing conflict and repeated waves of displacement have destroyed rural livelihoods and cut off the humanitarian access and trade routes that would normally allow food and aid to reach affected areas. Climate conditions linked to El Niño are expected to reduce harvests and farm employment further, while disrupted supply chains have driven up prices for the food that remains available. Water and electricity outages have compounded the strain on households already struggling, and FEWS NET flags simultaneous outbreaks of cholera, malaria and dengue fever as an additional burden on communities with little functioning healthcare.
Conditions along active front lines are expected to persist in Emergency or worse through the harvest season, with only limited improvement forecast even in areas currently less affected by fighting. FEWS NET’s warning makes clear that any escalation in fighting, or new sieges of towns and displacement camps, could push hunger, malnutrition and mortality rates in affected areas to the formal famine threshold, a designation that would trigger an internationally coordinated emergency response but has so far been avoided in the current crisis despite conditions in several localities already meeting individual famine indicators.
A separate assessment reported by the regional outlet Dabanga, drawing on analysts tracking the same risk zones around Tawila and the wider Jebel Marra area, corroborates FEWS NET’s picture of a famine threat concentrated in locations where fighting has made both farming and aid delivery impossible rather than reflecting a nationwide harvest failure. That overlap between independently sourced assessments strengthens confidence in the geographic pattern of risk, even though verified, on-the-ground nutrition surveys remain difficult to conduct across much of the affected territory because of continued insecurity.
Humanitarian agencies operating in Sudan have repeatedly said that sustained access, rather than additional funding alone, is now the binding constraint on preventing a formal famine declaration, a position reflected in FEWS NET’s own emphasis on conflict and access, rather than rainfall or harvest failure, as the primary driver of this year’s crisis.
Aid workers note that the El Niño-linked climate pressures layered on top of the conflict make an already difficult access problem harder still, since poor rains reduce the limited local food production that has historically cushioned displaced communities between aid deliveries. With front lines shifting unpredictably around North Darfur and South Kordofan, agencies say planning reliable supply routes for the months ahead remains largely dependent on the course of the fighting itself.
Related reading: UN Women warns Middle East escalation could push 11.7 million more women and girls into hunger, on the gendered dimension of the wider regional food security crisis that Darfur’s famine risk forms part of.
