WFP looks at trucking food aid across the Sahara

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said on Wednesday that it was seriously looking at the possibility of trucking food aid across the Sahara desert to feed up to 200,000 refugees from Sudan's troubled Darfur province who are fleeing into eastern Chad. WFP officials in Chad and the organisation's West African regional office in Dakar, Senegal said that one possibility was to truck food 3,000 km across the Sahara desert from the Libyan ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. Another option was to use a circuitous route from N'djamena to eastern Chad that passes through northern Chad, a completely desert area that is not generally affected by the rains that will soon make the main road to the east of the country virtually impassible, they added. WFP said last week that it had so far moved 7,600 tonnes of food by road from the port of Douala in Cameron to N'djamena, the capital of Chad, and onwards to the eight refugee camps that have sprung up between Abeche, the main town in eastern Chad, and the Sudanese border. The WFP officials said delivery along this route typically takes four to six weeks. However, the 825 km dirt road from N'djamena to Abeche will soon be knocked by the rains that began earlier this month and WFP said it still needed to deliver 8,000 tonnes of food to these refugee camps to ensure that people living there were adequately fed between now and the end of the rainy season in October. "It will soon be difficult to use the Douala-N'djamena-Abeche road during the rainy season since whole portions of it will become impassible," Jean-Charles Dei, WFP's coordinator in eastern Chad told IRIN by telephone. Martin Ohlsen, the Senior Logistics Adviser at the WFP's West Africa regional office in Dakar, said there was another dirt road, to the north of the N'djamena-Abeche route, that should remain open throughout the rainy season since it passed through the desert where rainfall was usually negligible. Ohlsen said this had been used -occasionally and with a certain amount of difficulty - to get supplies through to eastern Chad during the rainy season for the past 20 years. Both men said WFP was also actively considering the possibility of trucking food into eastern Chad from Libya. Ohlsen said WFP headquarters in Rome was currently discussing this possibility with the Libyan government with a view to reducing taxes on the food in transit and ensuring adequate security for truck convoys. Ohlsen said WFP was reluctant to airlift food from N'djamena to eastern Chad at a cost of several hundred dollars per tonne since this was an extremely expensive process and donors might not be willing to foot the bill. "Donors are focussed on Sudan, not on Chad," Ohlsen remarked. "The chances of being able to have the airlift are low." However, Dei said air drops were the only way to get more food into the southernmost refugee camps which would soon become totally inaccessible by truck. Earlier this year, international relief agencies said they expected fewer than 100,000 refugees from Darfur to seek shelter in eastern Chad. However, nearly twice that number have already crossed the border and the humanitarian community has been forced to revise sharply upwards the estimated cost of providing them with food, water, basic shelter and medical services. Last week, UN refugee agency UNHCR raised its estimate of the number of Sudanese already inside Chad to 194,000 and more than doubled its international appeal for aid to look after them to US$55.8 million. The UNHCR had previously asked donors for $20.8 million, of which it has so far received $18 million. So far the organisation has managed to move 93,000 Sudanese refugees from the semi-arid frontier area where they are vulnerable to cross-border raids by Sudanese Janjawid militia groups fighting alongside the Sudanese army into proper camps. Ultimately it aims to move all of them away from the border to sites where they can provided with tents, food and a supply of clean water. "We hope to accommodate 150,000 refugees (in camps) by the end of the rainy season and 200,000 by the end of this year," Alphonse Malanda, the UNHCR head of mission in Chad told IRIN by telephone on Tuesday. WFP has increased its own appeal for food aid by more than 50 percent and is now looking to move 31,500 tonnes of food to the refugee camps in Chad by the end of this year. "For Chad, WFP is now seeking a total of $30.5 million to feed 192,500 people, of which nearly 42 percent has been resourced," the organisation said in a statement issued on 7 June. The United Nations reckons that in addition to the refugees who have fled to Chad, there are more than a million people who have been internally displaced within Darfur. The United States government has warned that a third of these could die unless relief agencies are allowed to bring them food, water and medical assistance immediately.