World Food Programme Fighting Hunger Worldwide

Violence in Sudan's Darfur region is threatening the ability of humanitarian organizations to assist the people in need and putting at risk long-term food security, a UN spokesperson said here on Tuesday. The World Food Program (WFP) says that the escalation in the decade-long conflict in Darfur has created the largest wave of population displacement that the region has seen in recent years and is straining its ability to feed vulnerable families, said Martin Nesirky, spokesperson for UN Secretary-general Ban Ki- moon, at a daily briefing. According to a news release by the agency, the renewed violence since the beginning of the year has prompted more than 250,000 people to flee their villages and abandon their livelihoods, and the inter-tribal clashes have strained WFP's ability to feed vulnerable families.

The world may have tired of the civil war in Sudan's Darfur but for Fatima there is no escape from its painful legacy, a decade after fighting began. (..) The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says 1.4 million people like Fatima are still living in camps for the internally displaced and will need monthly food rations this year. "It remains in a humanitarian crisis," says WFP's Amor Almagro. Darfur, though, has long faded from the world's attention.

Sudan launched a major dam project on Tuesday to boost power supply and agricultural irrigation, a plan officials hope will foster farmland exports and attract more Gulf investment to the African country as it battles an economic crisis. (..) Faced with the loss of most of its oil reserves with South Sudan's secession in 2011, Sudan plans to increase exports of agricultural goods, such as wheat, fruits, oil seeds and gum arabic.

South Sudan’s Upper Nile state is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from Sudan’s Blue Nile state, where conflict has raged between government forces and insurgents for more than a year. (..) Stanlake Samkange, the East and Central Africa Director for the U.N's World Food Program [WFP], said the situation improved mainly due airdrops of food - a costly last resort - but could quickly worse again if more refugees arrive, and unless more funding is found.

A plan backed by the United Nations, the African Union and the Arab League for delivering aid to war-affected Sudanese states has not come too late, the head of the World Food Programme said Monday.(..) "It's never too late to get to a plan when there is an opportunity to serve," WFP's executive director, Ertharin Cousin, told reporters. "We have beneficiaries in need."

Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, urged donor nations to ease "the enormous humanitarian tragedy." (..) Guterres said more than 200,000 refugees have fled the states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile and into neighboring Ethiopia and South Sudan. (..) Because of the fighting in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, families did not plant crops, fearful that Sudanese bombers would target them while in the field. That has forced residents to eat roots and leaves to survive. (..) The World Food Program says the latest influx of refugees into Ethiopia — from both Sudan and Somalia — is straining its operations there.

Thousands of unaccompanied children are streaming out of an isolated, rebellious region of Sudan, fleeing a relentless aerial assault and the prospect of famine.

Thousands of unaccompanied children are streaming out of an isolated, rebellious region of Sudan, fleeing a relentless aerial assault and the prospect of famine. (..) Disease is sweeping the countryside, and many infants who make it to Yida on their mothers’ backs are so skinny and sick that they are immediately treated in a field hospital with feeding tubes up their noses.

Refugees say Sudan's armed forces are attacking villages in the Blue Nile border state with warplanes, helicopters and troops, killing civilians and torching settlements, in a counter-insurgency campaign that rights activists say could include war crimes. (..) The fighting between government forces and rebels, whom Khartoum accuses the South of backing, has complicated already-fraught talks between the two countries to resolve a raft of issues related to partition. It has also alarmed aid agencies who fear a humanitarian disaster in Blue Nile and in South Kordofan, another border state, as food stocks dwindle.

South Sudan, Around 35,000 people have poured over the border to South Sudan from Sudan's war-torn Blue Nile state in recent weeks. Increasingly malnourished, exhausted and sick, they are arriving to overcrowded and ill-prepared sites that aid agencies fear could run out of water and be cut off by rains very soon. (..) Aid agencies are concerned that water could dry up within a week’s time if no more is found, while rains could cut off access to aid agencies and water trucks. Having expected 75,000 refugees and now dealing with more than 100,000, a new camp is being set up, while existing camps are overcrowded and have suffered water shortages for months.