Last week famine was officially declared in the Darfur region of Sudan. Since April of last year, civil war has wrecked the country resulting in the displacement of over eight million people and bringing nearly 750,000 Sudanese to the brink of starvation and death.

Despite the horrifying statistics, the crisis in Sudan has gone largely unnoticed by the international aid community. Alan Boswell, Project Director of the Horn of Africa for the International Crisis Group, discusses with Alliance Digital Editor Charlotte Kilpatrick the urgency of getting aid relief to Sudan.

Charlotte Kilpatrick: From what you’ve heard, how dire is the situation in Sudan right now compared to how it has been?

Alan Boswell: Sudan is a complete catastrophe on a humanitarian level as well as a political and security level. Many thousands of Sudanese are starving. There has been no official famine declaration yet, but people have been waiting for it to come at any point. I’d say the most pressing issue at the moment is that a million Sudanese might be on the brink of starvation.

The famine is a symptom of everything else that’s going wrong in Sudan. The war has caused massive displacement, massive looting, and destruction. There is no real farming other such livelihoods have been destroyed. There’s very little trade, the trade is breaking down in many areas, and the surrounding neighbouring countries of Sudan are also in borderline famine including Chad and South Sudan. That makes it more expensive to get food into a place like Sudan and makes the humanitarian burden much greater as well.

Then there is the fact that the two main belligerents to the war have also been blocking food aid in different ways and the World Food Program is unable to do large-scale aid relief in the areas where people are starving because the UN-recognised government has severely restricted their access into the country.

‘But mostly the world just doesn’t seem to care about what’s happening in Sudan.  No one cares about anything outside Ukraine or Gaza, which seems to be what a lot of the media has decided. Of course, it’s hard to care about a conflict if people don’t even know it’s happening.’

CK: What needs to happen for it to be declared a famine? Who does that and when?

AB: That rests with the, what’s known as the IPC. It’s the formal body that declares famine and there’s also a famine review board that sort of sits within that ecosystem. The problem though is that famine can only be declared with a very high bar in terms of data and evidence, and the humanitarian organisations that collect that data have all pulled out of Sudan. So, there’s a vacuum of available data to even declare a famine.

CK: That was going to be one of my questions for you. Who’s in Sudan right now counting the bodies?

AB: It could be the deadliest conflict going on right now, but no one is counting the bodies. The suspicion is that if you were to do proper household mortality surveys and did excess mortality you’d find hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have already died from this war, but no one can even say that because no one’s crunched the numbers yet.

CK: Why isn’t more aid getting through to Sudan, and is it due to a lack of will or is it the environment’s too difficult for aid workers to access, or both?

AB: It is a difficult environment for sure for aid organisations to access. There are areas where aid organisations can access and keep operations going, but those are confined mostly to the east of the country which is still under the control of the Sudanese army, which is also the UN-recognised government.

The government has lost control of much of the country and it’s very difficult for NGOs to operate in the other parts of the country mostly controlled by the rapid support forces. And the government that sits in Port Sudan has largely blocked aid into RSF-held areas, and probably 90 percent of the starving Sudanese are in RSF areas, where also medical care and other things have collapsed.

Let me just also add that because the war started in Khartoum, you also have millions of Sudanese who lost all services at the beginning of the war and all the aid agencies essentially had to pull out of Khartoum, which is the biggest population centre for Sudan, and remains a war zone. So millions of Sudanese have been drastically affected from the get-go.

‘Even though food is being blocked from getting into the country, there also is not enough food even if there was open access.’

CK: I remember 2006 there was a lot of press coverage about what was going on in Sudan. Now, there’s relatively very little and I wanted to get your thoughts on why you think that is?

AB: For one, very few journalists have actually even entered Sudan since the war broke out, largely because they were not being granted visas. So, press coverage has been limited because of that. But mostly the world just doesn’t seem to care about what’s happening in Sudan.  No one cares about anything outside Ukraine or Gaza, which seems to be what a lot of the media has decided. Of course, it’s hard to care about a conflict if people don’t even know it’s happening.

Pretty much every major humanitarian agency and the top leadership of all those organisations, government and non-governmental, are entirely focused on Gaza. And that means that Sudan just doesn’t rise to the same political level and the same amount of priority.

And it’s important to remember that Gaza broke out in October, but Sudan was going on for six months before then and it was still not getting high-level attention. So, yes, we can call it a distracted world, but it somehow seems like a world that just has decided it doesn’t really care about Sudan one way or the other.

CK: What message, if any, would you like to give to funders about what is going on in Sudan? What can they do and what are they not doing?

AB: Something I didn’t mention yet is that also the aid response to Sudan has been massively underfunded. I think somewhere between 10 and 20 percent has overall been funded, that’s even after the massive donor conference that the French organised in April this year just a few months ago.

Even though food is being blocked from getting into the country, there also is not enough food even if there was open access. One thing we hear from big donor countries is that the lack of access and the underfunding are caught in a vicious circle with each other because big donors feel like the aid agencies do not have access, and therefore are not giving more funding, and then the situation just keeps getting worse and worse. and worse on the ground. I think what is very much needed now is there to be a level of attention and focus on saving Sudanese that’s commensurate with the disaster that’s unfolding.

There are a lot more creative measures that could be trying to alleviate the situation on the ground such as cash transfers to grassroots networks of Sudanese so that they can buy more food in the local markets for instance and then distribute. There’s a whole network of ad hoc soup kitchens that have been created and set up in places like Khartoum and other besieged cities, and you can donate cash to them and then they buy the food and then they feed Sudanese.

Charlotte Kilpatrick is the digital editor at Alliance