Food insecurity in Bieh gives cause for concern

Humanitarian field workers and local authorities have described Bieh state in Jonglei region, southeastern Sudan, as currently being "highly food insecure", according to a mid-February situation update by the Famine Early Warning System Network.

The population's vulnerability follows a poor harvest last year, but also a situation in which the greater part of the population did not cultivate crops, but migrated southeast towards "the promised land" south of Akobo following a self-declared prophet, FEWS Net reported. Moreover, late seasonal flooding damaged crops planted by those who managed to do so.

In January 2001, perhaps 85 to 90 percent of the central Lou Nuer population followed the 'prophet' southeast towards Akobo and Nyandit districts, according to humanitarian sources. This led them into a precarious food security situation because they had limited coping options and their livestock was frequently looted in attacks by the Murle tribe, they said.

With much of the Bieh state population around the Pibor river near Akobo - where most of the lowland Murle herders live - for much of last year, the concentration of people contributed to tension and conflict between the residents and migrants, especially during food distributions, humanitarian sources informed IRIN.

"Field reports indicate that the migrants have [now] returned, following the unconfirmed death of the prophet in January," FEWS Net reported in its Southern Sudan Update on 15 February. The implications of the prophet's reported death for the physical security environment in Bieh had not yet been established, it said.

Observations by intervention teams from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) indicated high rates of malnutrition among the returnees, and these had been corroborated by local authorities which had described the situation as desperate, the USAID- and WFP-supported FEWS Net stated. Field reports also indicated that most of the returnees were women and children, it added.

The nongovernmental health organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (Belgium) is currently making a nutritional survey in parts of Bieh state. The results are expected to afford humanitarian agencies with a clearer view of the prevailing food security situation.

More generally, the crop situation was not expected to improve before the next harvest in August/September, according to FEWS Net. January is typically a dry month across southern Sudan, and forage availability, currently declining, is accordingly expected to decrease further. Provision of food aid had begun and might need to continue up to the harvests, it said.

Malnutrition was also "observably high" - and sanitation poor - in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) at Mabiya, Tambura County, Western Equatoria, FEWS Net reported. The camp is host to some thousands of IDPs who fled the fighting which resulted from a government offensive in and around Raga, Western Bahr al-Ghazal, in October 2001.

The physical condition of an uncertain number of IDPs in the Malueth and Malek areas in Rumbek County, Lakes Region, was also noted to be poor, the report stated. Those IDPs had been displaced by fighting between the Dinka populations of Tonj and Rumbek, which had further extended to IDPs of the Nuer tribe in Mapear, it said.

"Urgent and sustained intervention measures are needed" to stem further nutritional deterioration among the IDPs in Tambura and Rumbek, especially given that the hunger gap (the period after planting, between about April and August/September, when food from the previous harvest runs out, while it is still too early for the next) was yet to begin, it added.