JUBA/ADDIS ABABA (HT): South Sudan’s hunger emergency is deteriorating as conflict, displacement, drought and declining humanitarian funding converge with a strengthening El Niño weather system, the World Food Programme has warned.
An estimated 7.8 million South Sudanese face high levels of acute food insecurity. About 2.2 million children and 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women require urgent nutritional assistance, while another one million people could lose food support by October without additional funding.
WFP officials say drought is already damaging crops in some of South Sudan’s most productive agricultural areas. At the same time, roughly 3,000 refugees and returning South Sudanese are entering the country from war-torn Sudan every week.
Elsewhere in the Horn, El Niño could produce the opposite extreme. Somalia’s disaster-management commissioner joined an IGAD meeting in Addis Ababa focused on heavy rainfall, flooding, early-warning systems and coordinated regional action.
