New African Famine Crisis Looms in Sudan

Africa faces its next famine crisis in Sudan, where U.S. and U.N. officials fear that as many as 2 million people could starve in a calamity rivaling the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85.

In addition to drought and a plague of locusts in Sudan, which is directly west of Ethiopia, internal political strife prevents food from getting where it is needed, officials report. Bandits are believed responsible for the killing of truck drivers trying to bring aid from outside.

A congressional aide said that Sudan, the second-largest African recipient of U.S. aid after Egypt, will need much more than the $216.9 million now budgeted for it.

More Aid Needed

But working to Sudan’s disadvantage, he said, is “compassion burnout”--the exhaustion felt by Congress and relief organizations following the all-out effort required to cope with the Ethiopian famine. Congress has already heard a seemingly endless series of appeals for African famine relief, and it must cope with an increasingly acute budgetary crisis at home.

Kristina Schellinski, speaking for the U.N. Children’s Fund program in Africa, said UNICEF estimates that 5 million Sudanese are “severely affected” in the southern region of that nation and in the Red Sea province northeast of Khartoum, the capital. Schellinski said that UNICEF is focusing on the southern region, where black, predominantly Christian Sudanese are staging a rebellion against the northern Arab and Muslim majority.

As occurred in Ethiopia, she said, children have become primary victims as malnutrition saps their resistance to disease. She said the infant mortality rate of 250 per 1,000 births in the affected areas is twice the national average.

UNICEF has established 16 child survival stations in the southern region, where 3,000 malnourished children are receiving basic food requirements and immunization against prevalent diseases. UNICEF’s regular budget for Sudan for the next five years was set at $23.5 million and, since the drought, the agency has allocated an additional $10 million.

“We appealed in April for an additional $11 million for the Sudan, but there has been almost no response” from the public or UNICEF’s member nations, Schellinski said. The money is needed to set up 30 new centers to aid 10,000 children near Juba, the southern regional capital, she said.

Although Schellinski said the central government in Khartoum has provided “good cooperation,” officials of other U.N. agencies, who spoke on condition that they remain unidentified, said Khartoum has attempted to hinder deliveries of food to areas where rebels are active.

Paul Hoeffel, spokesman for the U.N. Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, said increased rebel activity, which recently threatened to shut down the Juba airport, has significantly reduced food deliveries to the south.

“Food was coming in by truck convoys from Uganda and Kenya, but a recent incident has discouraged that,” Hoeffel said. “Truck drivers from Kenya were tied to their steering wheels and grenades tossed into the cabs.”

Bandits Blamed

The drivers’ slayings were attributed to bandits rather than rebel factions fighting the central government.

Experts who worked on the Ethiopian crisis are concerned about the general lack of understanding that the arrival of food does not mean the end of the problem when a famine occurs.

Although food eventually got to the stricken areas of Ethiopia and rains came early this year, Schellinski noted that children weakened by hunger are easy targets for disease and may never attain their full physical and mental development if they are undernourished in infancy.

Jeffrey Clark, a member of the staff of the House Select Committee on Hunger who specializes in Africa, said a locust plague in Sudan, the western Sahel region and southern Africa has added a frightening dimension to the problem.

Locusts Flourish

The huge swarms of insects, described as potentially the worst infestation in more than half a century, have flourished in what for them are are ideal conditions--long drought, followed by rains and renewed crops. Unlike some earlier outbreaks, Africa now has a profusion of five different varieties: the African migratory locust, the Senegalese grasshopper, the brown locust, red locust, and desert locust.

Affected countries, in addition to Sudan and Ethiopia, include Senegal, Mali, Chad, Botswana and South Africa.

M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said last week that the United States is contributing $7 million to help combat the locusts. The money is used mainly for aerial spraying of insecticides.

But because the locusts were scarce during the 10-year drought, the Desert Locust Patrol that normally monitors locusts has been inactive, its 13 planes out of use. AID officials estimate that it will take two or three years to begin to control the locusts.

In the meantime, locusts are devastating crops in large sections of Africa, sometimes carried hundreds of miles by the wind. McPherson said swarms of locusts can grow to billions of insects, and that one such large swarm can eat enough crops in one day to feed 50,000 people for a year.