“I am severely malnourished and unable to produce milk”: In Kalma, Ansaf Omar mourns his 18-month-old son who died of starvation for a month and a half, as do dozens of other children in the displaced persons camp. V Sudan.

“I took him everywhere, to hospitals, to clinics, but in the end he died,” Ansaf, an incredibly thin 34-year-old who took refuge after the war in Darfur broke out in 2003, told AFP in this camp in the Nyala region. capital of South Darfur province.

In this region bordering Chad, the consequences of famine are often fatal, but elsewhere in Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the problem has worsened: 15 of its 45 million inhabitants now suffer from space malnutrition.

According to the UN, three million children under the age of five are severely malnourished. Among them, “more than 100,000 children are at risk of starvation if they don’t get help,” warns Lenny Kinsley, communications officer for the World Food Program (WFP) in Sudan.

Not all children in Sudan are at risk of death, but a third of children under the age of five are “below average for their age” and almost half are “a 40 percent stunting rate,” warns the NGO Alight. In and around Kalma, the relief organization recorded 63 starvation deaths of children in their centers alone in 2022.

“You have to choose who to help”

In his camps, home to 120,000 people displaced by the war unleashed by Omar al-Bashir, the dictator ousted in 2019, there was hunger from the start. But the problem escalated in 2022, after a military coup in October 2021 led to the suspension of international aid.

Last year, Kalma saw “a significant increase in imports and requests for emergency feeding services,” Heidi Dietrich, director of operations for Alight in Sudan, told AFP.

The NGO says it has received “863 new child cases” and that number has “increased by 71% since 2021.” And the increase in the incidence was accompanied by an increase in mortality, “in 2022 there were 231% more” among children older than six months.

At one of the centers in Kalma, 38-year-old Hava Suleiman hopes to find something to feed her child. “There is nothing in our house, we often sleep on an empty stomach,” he explains.

Sudan’s economic problems continue to mount, with the Omar al-Bashir-era embargo followed by a new coronavirus pandemic and a war in Ukraine that has sent food prices skyrocketing and created competition for a population in need of humanitarian assistance.

Over the years, WFP has been forced to double the food rations it distributes to refugees and displaced people in Sudan, Ms. Kinsley said, due to “budget constraints”.

Aid organizations are now faced with an unbearable dilemma: “we have to choose who to help” – and every time it “breaks our heart.”

“They never gave us peace”

Because of the cuts, 30-year-old Nuralsam Ibragim and her five children cannot rely on humanitarian aid alone.

“We are trying to earn some money by working in the fields around the camp, but the money we earn is not enough to feed us even for one day,” he says.

In a country in total economic decline, with skyrocketing inflation and rampant speculation, “even bread is too expensive,” he adds.

As for Ansaf Omar, she is even afraid to leave the camp in Kalma, because clashes between tribes or over land often break out in this area. The UN estimates that about 1,000 people died in similar incidents across the country in 2022.

“They never let us rest when we leave camp looking for work. Women are raped, men are killed…

And all this in order to try to earn less than a dollar a day in the fields.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}