WFP Acting Executive Director's Press Conference Following his Mission to Sudan — Remarks as Delivered

Thanks for this opportunity, and thanks for those of you in the room listening.

I'm speaking to you actually from Oman, from Muscat, but all the same. I just wrapped up an eight-days visit to Sudan. I visited Khartoum, I visited El Obeid, El Fasher, Tawila, and I really had a chance on those front lines to see what this terrible conflict and its aftermath in some places do to people, to access and to hunger.

If I start with people, I met people across the country. I met people who had been displaced three years ago when the war started, but I also met people who had been displaced the same day that I spoke to them, or some that had walked for four or five days to get to an IDP camp when their houses, their villages had been destroyed. You know, I sat down with women in camps. I had a chance to speak to one, you know, former university student who is now sitting in that hut. All she wanted was to work but there was no opportunity. She had lost family members, her mother depressed, her father sick. And you know, I also spoke to women who were waiting in the queue to get water from a water tank. About noon that water tank ran out of water so they had to return with their empty cans back home, obviously extremely distressed. So I'm just sharing with you illustrating a few examples of what hundreds of thousands of people now in Sudan are going through and the kind of human dimension behind all these numbers that we see.

On access, the journey between El Obeidin and El Fasher, which before the war used to take around six hours by car, now that took me three days. I had to take three different flights, an eight-hour all-together flight from Khartoum to Addis, to N'Djamena, to Adra, then about a 30-hour car ride through the Jebel Mara mountains to get to al-Fasher. And this is, of course, because of the conflict, because we are not able to go cross-line, across the fighting lines.

And finally on hunger, I mean, it's important to underline here that Sudan is still the world's largest hunger and displacement crisis. 20 million people in acute hunger, 14 million people displaced, some 5 million of those acutely hunger in emergency level, IPC4, and you know, still 200,000 in IPC5 levels of starvation. This is the largest hunger crisis that we are facing right now.

And given that, Sudan does, in my view, not get by far the attention it deserves. You know, humanitarians are attacked. We had a hit two weeks ago only on one of our convoys trying to get to dealing in the Kordofan.

Access is difficult, as I explained, partly due to security, partly due to not getting the clearances necessary. But it's also possible to work there. WFP reaches between 4 and 5 million people every month. 2 million or 2.5 million of those are in the hardest to reach areas. So it is possible to make a difference.

Now what is really our main challenge is funding. Our operations are completely underfunded and there is a risk that we will have to scale back quite significantly in the next few weeks unless more funding is being provided. I will walk you through the trip I took just to kind of illustrate what this looks like. So I'll start with El Fasher because, you know, I'm one of the few who have visited El Fasher following the events of last year. And I must say that this was a very heavy experience. It's a daunting city. You know, it's the city that was under siege for 18 months. The people suffered through famine. They suffered through these unspeakable atrocities. It's a city that once was, you know, home to a million people, the sprawling kind of capital of Darfur.

Now there are only a few tens of thousands of people still. You know, we were driving through street after street with homes riddled with bullets. You know, there were burned cars basically everywhere in every street corner. I didn't see any economic activity, no markets, maybe a couple of stands with women selling something. And you know, some families I spoke to had returned because frankly where they had fled to, they had nothing. But they also weren't staying at home. Their homes were burned, so they had decided to be in maybe some other empty house they had found and everyone trying to also, the few who are left, staying more closer to each other.

So really a daunting city, a harrowing experience. The largest crowd of people I saw in El Fasher was only where we were doing our WFP distributions. You know, we are reaching some 20,000 people now with life-saving food assistance, but that's the only assistance, frankly, that gets into El Fasher. It's the only thing that the people who are still there rely on.

Driving out of El Fasher we went through the Zam-zam camp, you know, this IDP camp that was already there when this besiegement began. And this, if anything, is even worse than El Fasher. It's a completely abandoned place, and with huts and small houses completely destroyed. There was no one there, a complete ghost town. Then moving on from Zam-zam, we took the road, or it's basically driving on the savannah, from El Fasher to Tawila. It's about a 60 km drive.

It took us now an hour. But you know, driving through the bush there, you know, it was hard to imagine that only less than a year ago, some 700,000 people had moved through that space, had done that journey. You know, this exodus of people that made it out of and through the atrocities of El-Fasher to seek safety in Tawila, where we also know that many of these atrocities took place on that journey. So arriving in Tawila, it's my second time I mean, Tawila, I was there in April, as some of you may know.

It's an endless ocean of grasshuts. It's now close to a million people. When I was there in April, there were 700,000. Now some 250,000 more have arrived. If I compare to back in April, though, despite the fact that there are many more people now and that the area has expanded even more, some now the shelter is better. I then called for the need for better shelter because the women had told me they want plastic heating tarps for the roofing. Because of the rains, there was some of that now. There was nothing when I was there last time. And of course, also we, since then, as WFP, have been able to scale up.

And we are now delivering to the entire population, to some 950,000 people every month. But we're only providing a half ration. We are only providing them the food that lasts them for two weeks and that is done every month.

And so, you know, it is not enough. And there are many, many women-headed households there. Many have lost their husbands, many have lost their sons. And you know, the women I sat down to speak with, you know, they are really struggling to make it last, given that they're only receiving this half ration. And of course there is not enough education or space for kids to play, not enough shelter and health care. It's just a massive city now of one million people without the basics.

On top of that, driving through Darfur, everywhere I stopped what people wanted to talk about was the drought. Darfur hasn't been this dry since 1984 and right now is the rainy season. And so, you know, everyone is frightened that this will have a serious hit on agriculture and the agriculture outcome.

And then, of course, also for livestock further down the road. And like some told me, you know, we rely on that agriculture and we rely on the WFP food. And if, you know, the agriculture is now hit by the drought and WFP's food is hit by funding cuts, how will we survive?

And I think that is really the concern in Darfur for the next few months. Then I actually started off my trip in the Kordofan, well in Khartoum but then in the Kordofan and the Blue Nile is where the fighting is now escalating. If the epicenter a year ago of the fighting was in Darfur, now it's in the Kordofan in the Blue Nile.

And I visited the city of El Obeid, which was under risk of being besieged a few weeks ago with heavy fighting in the surroundings. It's a huge city that had a million people before the war, and it's now kind of doubled in size. It's a city that used to be really the meeting place of Sudan.

It's kind of like Rome, all roads in Sudan lead to El Obeid. And so it's become kind of a safe haven where people from across the country have been arriving and now like a melting pot with displaced from all over. There are eight camps there for internally displaced. Many also live in host communities. But these camps are absolutely overstretched. And when I was there, as I said, people kept arriving.

I mean, I was at the registration place where people had arrived that morning. The women had been walking for five days in the west Kordofan, in the south of Kordofan. Their houses, their villages had been destroyed.

Our challenge there is also funding. So we are providing less and less, but we're also having to cut off assistance to those who arrived three years ago. So we are prioritizing those who are newly arrived, but of course to the detriment of those who have been there longer, which frankly people who have nothing to turn to either, not possible for them to get any jobs. They have been through terrible atrocities, they cannot return home. So it's a very tense and difficult place where we now have to so tightly prioritize.

I mean, in terms of challenges, access remains a challenge. There's no doubt, like I explained, you know, we are not able to do the cross-line that we wish we were, but we are being able to, in Darfur, bring food from Cameroon or through Cameroon and Chad into the Darfur. In the Kordofan we are bringing food from from Port Sudan and from Khartoum. So you know we are being able to deliver, we are getting it done. It's very dangerous as we saw when our trucks were hit a couple of weeks ago but we're trying our best. Of course we would like to have more staff permanently on the ground in those difficult places. We would like to have better deconfliction and we would like to be able to drive across lines which would be much cheaper and faster in order to reach more people much faster. We would also like to expand our air service. We are now providing an air service into Khartoum but of course it would be great if we could do that also in Darfur and into El Obeid. Now the big issue though is funding. We now have have the capacity, we have the presence, but we are not fully using that space because of the lack of funding. And in the next few weeks, as I said, the risk is that we will have to scale back even further and then that will be very difficult for us to regain that space.

I mean, in concluding, what we see playing out in Sudan is really what we also see at the global level. And it's all hitting at once. So it's the conflict that is driving displacement, disrupting markets and trade. It is the maritime disruptions in Bab el-Mandeb and Hormuz that is really hitting Sudan as well, with its ports on the Red Sea. And thirdly, it's the El Nino and the climate shocks with the drought we now see in the Darfur. And all this is coming together, really putting pressure on the already suffering people in in Sudan. So what's needed clearly is an end to this conflict and I can't underline that enough heading into this year's UN High Level Week General Assembly. I really hope that there will be political investment, political energy in to bring an end to this conflict.

That is my number one appeal. But short of that, people deserve to be supported with basic humanitarian assistance. I feel that we are really failing to protect the civilians now in the Kordofan, in the Blue Nile. We certainly failed to protect and prevent the atrocities in El Fasher last year and we have not done enough for those IDPs who have ended up in camps. But we need to do more. We need to step up. We cannot keep failing these people. We need to provide them the basics. We feel that we now have the capacity on the ground. We have the access together with with the UN agencies under the leadership of Denise Brown, the RC.

And we just want to get that work done. And we hope that donors will step up and provide us the funding to do so.

Note to editors:

Broadcast quality video footage from the Acting Executive Director's Mission to Sudan can be downloaded here.