Food security deteriorating in Northern Bahr el Ghazal

Returnees and other people living in the southern Sudanese state of Northern Bahr el Ghazal will face increasing food deficits between May and August, the US Agency for International Development's Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS Net) has warned. "The hunger season [the period before the harvest in October] really strikes in August and September, but this year, there have already seen some very high malnutrition rates," said Simon Crittle, spokesman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in south Sudan. "That is early, and many households have already completely run out of food four months ahead of the new harvest - that is a desperate situation." Nutrition assessments conducted in March and April in Aweil South County in Northern Bahr el Ghazal recorded globalised acute malnutrition rates of 20 and 21 percent respectively - well above the emergency threshold of 15 percent. "A major cause is that the agricultural practices used by the majority of the population are very primitive," Crittle said. "Most people do not use an ox and plough, but work the land by hand, on their knees. It is very labour-intensive and people cannot cultivate a very large area." High population density also forced people to farm the same, small plots of land over and over again, exhausting the soil and producing yields that would provide food for just a few months, he added. A crop assessment of the 2005 harvest indicated that the yields had been good, resulting in a cereal production increase of 30 percent across south Sudan. In Northern Bahr el Ghazal, however, the harvest was poor again. The area is very remote and the few roads into the area are completely cut off during the rainy season, resulting in very little trade to complement people's diets. The steady flow of returnees had also increased the demand for already scarce sources of food such as sorghum, pushing the price up in May, according to the FEWS Net report, published on Wednesday. "It is a densely populated area, which has received 80,000 returnees this year alone," Crittle said. "The big thing now is that you have all these returnees coming home and putting pressure on the resources. It has come to the point where it is so difficult for people to sustain themselves that you see people 're-returning' to the north." Malnutrition is not just caused by lack of food, however, it is also a result of the lack of primary health care and the lack of access to clean drinking water, both of which are problematic in Northern Bahr el Ghazal. "Although there are some boreholes in towns, as soon as you leave the towns, you still find a lot of people who use hand-dug wells and drink unclean water," Crittle said. "Pumping food into a chronically food-insecure area is not the only answer; you also need a sustained development effort to improve healthcare and to provide safe drinking water. You cannot fix the food insecurity problem until these other things come online as well." Across south Sudan, 150 children out of every 1000 die before reaching the age of five. "It is as high as it gets in the world," Crittle said. Although WFP is currently feeding 700,000 people in south Sudan, this number is expected to go up to 1.9 million during the hunger season, 450,000 of whom are expected to be new returnees. The agency warned, however, that this could be a conservative estimation, as many more people seemed to be returning this year and 325,000 returnees were receiving food assistance already. "The good news is that we prepositioned huge amounts of food before the rainy season - 39,000 tons in 65 new Rubb Halls [tented warehouses] - where last year we had none," Crittle said. "This year it is already there, waiting for the people, and it can't be disrupted by fuel shortages or upheaval."