WFP warns of “looming crisis” in the south

WFP has warned of a catastrophe in the making in southern Sudan because humanitarian agencies are being denied access to vulnerable populations by inter-factional fighting and government restrictions on humanitarian flights. “A humanitarian crisis is looming in this part of the country and we are urging all parties to the conflict to provide total access and to guarantee the delivery of food,” the WFP representative in Sudan, Mohamed Saliheen, warned on Wednesday. Humanitarian agencies could not get access to many areas of Western Upper Nile in October and November and “140,000 targeted and vulnerable people could not get their emergency food assistance,” Saliheen said. This included Unity State, where the government’s oil programme is alleged to have involved infringements on the population’s human rights and a worsening of the civil war. In the Nile river corridor between Malakal and Juba, 300,000 people could not be given their rations due to fighting and the government flight ban, he added. “If this combination of factors continues, we could face the same horrifying tragedy that happened in Bahr el-Ghazal last year,” Saliheen said, referring to the famine which cost thousands of lives.