The World Food Program (WFP) is to halve food rations for up to 3 million people in Darfur from next month because of insecurity along the main supply routes.
At least 60 WFP trucks have been hijacked since December in Sudan’s western province, where government forces and rebels have been at war for five years. The hijacks have drastically curtailed the delivery of food to warehouses ahead of the rainy season that lasts from next month to September, when there is limited market access and crop stocks are depleted.
Instead of the normal ration of 500g of cereal a day, people in displaced persons’ camps and conflict-affected villages will only get 225g from next month, the UN agency said on Thursday. Rations of pulses and sugar will also be halved, giving people barely 60 percent of their recommended minimum daily calorie intake.
The WFP said while Sudan’s government provided security for convoys on the main supply routes, the escorts were too infrequent, given the huge demand for food at this time of year.
“Attacks on the food pipeline are an attack on the most vulnerable people in Darfur,” said Josette Sheeran, the agency’s executive director. “With up to 3 million people depending on us for their survival in the rainy season, keeping WFP’s supply line open is a matter of life and death. We call on all parties to protect the access to food.”
Thirty nine hijacked lorries and 26 drivers are still missing. More than 90 vehicles belonging to other aid agencies have also been hijacked this year, with some drivers forced to work for the combatants.
Humanitarian compounds are also increasingly at risk. On a single night this month robberies were reported at nine UN and aid agency compounds in El Fasher, the main town in north Darfur.
Oxfam said on Thursday that the attacks and banditry were “critically affecting the entire humanitarian response” at a time when people were still being displaced from their homes by the fighting.
“The insecurity means some areas of Darfur are effectively out of bounds to aid agencies, and rural areas where the needs are often greatest of all are inaccessible for months at a time,” said Alun McDonald, a spokesman for Oxfam in Sudan.
It had been hoped that the hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, which took over from the purely African force on Jan. 1, would help to improve the security situation.
But only 9,600 of the 26,000 peacekeepers are in place, because of disagreements with Khartoum over the make-up and duties of the operation, coupled with UN bureaucratic delays.
Meanwhile, government forces continue to mount air and ground offensives in areas controlled by the Justice and Equality Movement and a Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction headed by Abdul Wahid al-Nur.
Pro-government Arab “Janjaweed” militias, who at the start of the conflict in 2003 were enlisted to lead attacks on villages deemed sympathetic to the rebels, have added to the instability. Angry at not being paid by the government, the militias went on looting and killing sprees in main market towns such as El Fasher, Kebkabiya and Tawila in recent weeks.
The attacks were said to have prompted elements within an SLA branch led by Minni Minnawi, which signed a peace agreement with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2006, to distance themselves from the government by deploying fighters to defend traders from their Zaghawa tribe against the Arab raiders.
UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday that he was “extremely disappointed at the lack of progress on all fronts” in Darfur.
“The parties appear determined to pursue a military solution; the political process [has] stalled, the deployment of Unamid is progressing very slowly ... and the humanitarian situation is not improving. The primary obstacle is the lack of political will among all the parties to pursue a peaceful solution to the crisis,” he said.
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