Risk of famine in South Sudan, Save the Children alert

Photo: Luis Tato Archives Agence France-Presse Girls fleeing war gather in the shade at a refugee transit center in Renk, South Sudan, February 15, 2024.

France Media Agency in Nairobi

Posted at 10:57 a.m. Updated at 7:05 p.m.

• Africa

There is a “risk of famine” in the coming months in South Sudan, an East African country where historic floods threaten in the coming months, the NGO warned on Wednesday Save the Children.

The youngest state on the planet, independent from Sudan since 2011, “is on alert in the face of an imminent human and climatic catastrophe in the months to come », according to a press release from the British NGO which ensures that South Sudan is expected to suffer “its worst floods in 60 years, which will bring certain parts of the country to the brink of famine”.

The NGO draws on data from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net), a food security monitoring organization funded by American cooperation, which “shows that massive flooding will contribute to a risk of famine in South Sudan from June 2024 to January 2025.”

The people expected to be most affected have “already faced years of conflict, hunger, rising food prices food supplies, previous floods and, more recently, a recent influx of refugees and returnees following the 15 months of conflict raging in Sudan.”

Famine was declared in South Sudan in 2017 in Leer and Mayendit counties in Unity State, areas that have often been a hotspot for post-independence violence.

According to the British NGO, Unity State is one of the most vulnerable to famine due to flooding.

Despite its oil wealth, Sudan South, one of the poorest countries in the world, has struggled to position itself since its independence in 2011 and is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

< p>In 2018, a peace agreement ended a civil war raging since 2013 by providing for the creation of a government of national unity, with Salva Kiir as president and his rival Riek Machar as vice-president. president, the two men at the center of the civil war which left nearly 400,000 dead and millions displaced.

Since then, the country has been in the grip of anarchy, outbreaks of communal violence, chronic political feuds and natural disasters.

According to Save the Children, around 9 million people – or 75 per cent of the population – including nearly five million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The crisis is compounded by the return of hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese refugees fleeing the brutal war in Sudan.

South Sudan is also being cut off from vital oil revenues by the shutdown of a damaged pipeline in Sudan.