World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Up to 4,000 people are fleeing into South Sudan every day to escape fighting in Sudan's Blue Nile province, according to medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres. (..) MSF believes tens of thousands of other people are waiting to cross the border. (..) With the rains having begun, getting access to this isolate region is becoming increasingly difficult.

Refugees are streaming into the Yida camp in South Sudan, across the border from the Nuba Mountains in the South Kordofan area, Sudan's last remaining oil-producing state. (..) The fleeing refugees need help - and food. Resources are tightly stretched and the World Food Program's representative in South Sudan, Chris Nikoi, says stocking supplies at Yida has been delayed by recent clashes over oil at the north - south border. "But we're confident that during the month of May, we will get the food here - enough to make sure that these people are fed right through the rainy season," Nikoi says, referring to rains that could last up to six months.

The World Food Program has warned clashes along the border between Sudan and South Sudan threaten to plunge the region into widespread hunger. (..) WFP spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs said her agency is particularly concerned about the critical situations in South Sudan's Unity State and Upper Nile State. (..) “These people are already in a very dire situation, and now with the clashes their situation is going to worsen," Byrs said. (..) The World Food Program also said s helping other humanitarian agencies establish a humanitarian lifeline for the affected population.

Tens of thousands of refugees have now gathered in camps in South Sudan after being forced out of their villages by the fighting, with hundreds more making the trek every day. (..) The World Food Programme has designated the situation a Level Three emergency, giving it the highest priority for deliveries to help starving civilians before seasonal rains make the dirt roads impassable.

Fighting has sent a flood of refugees into South Sudan camps, which are struggling to cope with a critical water shortage. (..) UK international development minister, Stephen O'Brien, who visited the Jamam camp on Wednesday, announced £10m in emergency food from the existing aid budget to provide assistance for 100,000 hungry people for five months through the World Food Programme, plus £5m in reserve in case of a mass return of South Sudanese from Sudan. (..) The minister met several NGO representatives in Jamam, where it was decided that the best option to stave off catastrophe once the rains come is to move around 15,000 people to the nearby Doro camp.

More than 100,000 people fled to South Sudan from Abyei, a contested, oil-rich area occupied by Sudanese troops in May 2011. Almost a year later, they find themselves nearly destitute after missing harvests and exhausting the scant resources of local communities in the newly-independent, but impoverished south. (..) At a distribution center in the village of Abothok, local administrator Kat Kuol says that around 6,000 people arrived here from Abyei, pushing the local population to over 10,000. He says that for now, relatives and aid agencies such as the U.N. World Food Program are filling the gap, but that resources will be strained until these people can cultivate themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese who have spent most of their lives in the north now find themselves straddling two worlds, their lives upended by a tumultuous border that recently split the country in half. (..) But for southerners living north of the border, like Mrs. Ley, whose stooped back and cracked, calloused hands tell their own story of suffering and toil, the south’s joyous independence compounded their misery.

A great humanitarian catastrophe and vicious ethnic cleansing is unfolding here in the remote and impoverished region where Sudan and South Sudan come together. (..) While the Sudanese government is trying to suppress an armed rebellion in the Nuba Mountains, it is civilians who bear the brunt of the suffering.

Last year, around 13 million people in the Horn of Africa needed food aid. Now aid agencies warn failed harvests in the Sahel, the band of desert and scrub that runs south of the Sahara, mean 12 million more people require assistance. (..) The world has more than enough food to feed itself. Redistributing it to those who lack their share is the job of large and well-funded international aid agencies, particularly the World Food Program.

Half a million people will face an emergency bordering on famine by March if international humanitarian organizations are not allowed into areas of Sudan that are mired in conflict, United States envoy to Sudan Princeton Lyman warned Wednesday. (..) Groups like the World Food Programme and UNICEF must be able to work in the border areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, he said. (..) Countless lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands have been displaced, exacerbating an already desperate humanitarian crisis, according to rescue officials.