The UK and 31 partner governments and humanitarian agencies have issued a joint warning that 19.5 million people in Sudan are now facing high levels of acute food insecurity, as the country’s civil war grinds into a fourth year. The statement, issued on 23 October and reported by the Darfur-focused outlet Dabanga, says roughly five million of those people have already slipped into emergency-level hunger, one step short of famine on the five-stage scale used by international food-security monitors.
The partners project that child severe acute malnutrition could exceed 825,000 cases this year if current conditions persist, a figure that has climbed steadily since fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces broke out in April 2023. Large parts of Darfur and Kordofan, where displacement camps have swollen and farming seasons have been repeatedly disrupted, account for the sharpest deterioration.
Statisticians tracking the crisis point to a familiar chain of causes: active combat blocking farmers from their fields, a collapsed currency that has pushed food prices beyond the reach of displaced families, and supply routes that pass through contested territory. Markets in besieged towns have reported bread and flour shortages for weeks at a time, compounding a hunger emergency that aid agencies had already flagged as one of the world’s worst.
Aid access remains the central obstacle
Humanitarian organisations operating inside Sudan say the bigger constraint is not food supply in the region but the ability to move it. Convoys attempting to reach besieged areas of Darfur and Kordofan have faced delays at checkpoints controlled by both sides of the conflict, and several aid agencies have had to suspend operations in contested towns after security incidents. The 31 signatories to this week’s statement renewed calls for both the army and the Rapid Support Forces to open humanitarian corridors and halt attacks on aid workers and supply lines.
Funding has not kept pace with need either. Major donors, including some of the signatories themselves, have trimmed humanitarian budgets this year even as Sudan’s displacement crisis, already the largest in the world by number of people uprooted, continues to grow. Agencies working in the country say they are rationing assistance in several states, prioritising areas closest to famine thresholds over those merely facing severe hardship.
A worsening trajectory
With no ceasefire in sight after three and a half years of fighting, the joint statement stops short of declaring famine but makes clear that the trend lines point in that direction. A formal famine declaration requires confirmation from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, which assesses mortality, malnutrition and food-access data against strict thresholds; parts of Darfur were formally found to meet those thresholds in 2024, and monitors say further areas could follow.
For now, the 31 partners say their immediate priority is securing access rather than waiting for formal classification, arguing that each week of blocked convoys adds to a toll already measured in the hundreds of thousands of malnourished children. Sudan’s hunger crisis, once described by aid officials as a forgotten emergency overshadowed by conflicts elsewhere, is a reminder of how quickly protracted war can tip a fragile food system towards catastrophe, a pattern also playing out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ebola containment measures are now colliding with household food access.
Sudan’s displacement crisis, which the United Nations has repeatedly described as the largest in the world by number of people uprooted, has pushed millions of families into informal camps where host communities are themselves stretched thin by rising prices and reduced aid flows. Several agencies working in Darfur and Kordofan say funding shortfalls have already forced ration cuts in parts of their operations this year, even as new needs assessments point to further deterioration as the country heads towards its next lean season between harvests, the period when stored grain typically runs lowest and market prices rise fastest for displaced households with little income of their own.
