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The politics of hunger: can famine in Gaza and Sudan be stopped?

• ODI

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The crises of hunger in Sudan and Gaza are grave humanitarian emergencies with profound consequences for affected communities.

A recent UN briefing to the Security Council stated that Sudan is set to face the “world’s worst hunger crisis”, while an international committee of experts issued a dire warning that famine is not only imminent in Northern Gaza, but a risk across the entire territory.

While man-made famine continues to be used as a weapon of war for political gain, the prevailing response from international humanitarian agencies is to provide food aid. But is this really the solution? And how does it affect local humanitarian efforts?

This episode dives into these questions and seeks to hold those responsible for these hunger crises to account.

Guests

  • Sara Pantuliano (host), Chief Executive, ODI
  • Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation
  • Omima Omer Jabal, Khartoum State ERR Jabal Awliya Program Office
  • Hamish Young, Senior Emergency Coordinator in Gaza, State of Palestine
  • Nuha Yousif, ERR Sennar state, Programme office

Related resources

0:00:10 - Sara Pantuliano 

Welcome to Think Change. I'm Sara Pantuliano. The news headlines are full with the looming threat of famine in Gaza and Sudan. Here at ODI, we've been covering the hunger crisis in Sudan for many months, which is on course to be the world's worst hunger crisis, according to a recent briefing to the UN Security Council in March. Also in March, an international committee of experts issued a dire warning that famine was not only imminent in northern Gaza, but a risk across the entire territory. The latest Integrated Phase Classification report, or IPC for short as it is called, and we'll explain what it is in this episode, was released on 15th March. It covered the situation up to that date and it predicted that 1.1 million Gazans, which is half of the population, will face Phase 5, that is, famine by mid-July. 

 

And while man-made famine continues to be used as a weapon of war for political gain, the prevailing response from international humanitarian organizations is to try and provide food aid. But is that working? And is it the right response? How does that affect local humanitarian efforts? Well, I'm really pleased to be joined by my friend Alex de Waal, the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, to help answer these questions and discuss how we hold those responsible for man-made famine to account. Alex, we know very well that once famine is declared, it's too late for many people, and we also know that when famine happens rapidly, it's hard to gather accurate data and meet the necessary thresholds to declare a famine. Can you unpack this warning of the IPC, the warning of the UN, for our listeners? 

 

0:02:04 - Alex de Waal 

 
So let me start by going back to the debates that happened 20 years ago when the famine scales were drawn up. So famine can be measured across several dimensions, of which there is intensity - how severe the suffering is in one particular place, and Gaza is currently the most severe. There's magnitude - the numbers of people affected, and Sudan is the crisis of the greatest magnitude. And there's duration, and there are a number of crises: Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which vie for that terrible qualification of being the most protracted hunger crisis. All of them kill. 

And the metric that was decided upon for the official measurement of food crisis and famine was severity, with this five-point scale of one, which is normal or near normal; two, which is stressed; three, which is crisis; four, which is emergency; and five, which is catastrophe and famine. But actually, in the prototypical scale, that was the first proposal, put the threshold of famine somewhere between three and four. And there were two reasons for this. Number one, that children are already dying at that stage when you're in crisis, and certainly in an emergency. And secondly, our experience over the decades is that the international community only responds when you cry famine, so let's cry famine early in order to stop the descent into severe famine when we have mass starvation. 

Unfortunately, the threshold of famine was set extremely high, which means that we have numerous crises and emergencies, including in Sudan, including in much of Ethiopia and Yemen, and, of course, in Gaza, where famine would have been declared months or even years ago under the prototypical scale, and the world has not responded on the scale and with the urgency required. 

0:04:12 - Sara Pantuliano 

Well, in Gaza we're seeing deliberate withholding of food. That is really a tactic of war. That the International Court of Justice and human rights groups have rightly stressed is, you know, Israel is committing a war crime by denying access to food and water. But this is not unique to Israel. You know, we're seeing this being used as a tactic by many belligerents in so many different places. Can you say a little bit how you think the situation in Gaza compares to other crises, particularly what we're seeing in Sudan? 

0:04:49 - Alex de Waal 

One of the tragic things about the crime of starvation is that it is not put up there as a canonical international crime alongside other atrocity crimes, and the reason for that is that Western powers — the UK, France, the United States — all used it historically, as recently as the 1960s or in the 1970s, in Southeast Asia, for example, and they were very candid in calling counter-insurgency operations ‘operation starvation.’ The British did so in Malaya, for example. Now, nonetheless, starvation is prohibited under various different bodies of international or international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and crimes against humanity and genocide prohibit creating conditions under which it's impossible to sustain life. 

Gaza is sadly the clearest cut case of a famine brought about entirely, 100%, by political and military action. Before the war started in October, the Israelis had what they called the Red Lines document. They calculated, calorie by calorie, what was going into the Gaza Strip, so that they stayed, in their own calculation, just the right side of the law in terms of providing enough to sustain life. Clearly, any reduction in that amount, along with a destruction of agriculture, food supplies and everything that is necessary to sustain life, is by their own prior calculation, at least the war crime of starvation, if not something worse.  

0:06:44 - Sara Pantuliano 

And what about Sudan? How do you see the situation there?  

0:06:48 - Alex de Waal 

Sudan is a more complicated case because there were a lot of pre-existing vulnerabilities, including legacies of previous wars, including wars of starvation in Darfur, Nuba Mountains, and elsewhere, alongside a major economic collapse. But both sides have been recklessly conducting their war in a way that they knowingly will generate mass starvation. Now, the fact that a population is already poor and food insecure doesn't exonerate the belligerents. If anything, the reverse. You know these people are desperately poor and vulnerable, on the brink of a food crisis, so why use hunger as a weapon in those circumstances? Surely you are doubly responsible in this case. 

0:07:40 - Sara Pantuliano 

Absolutely, Alex. Well, let me bring in my other guests, who I'm sure will have a lot to say on this topic. I'm delighted to be joined by Omima Omer Jabal from the Khartoum State Emergency Response Room (ERR), the Jebel Aulia Programme Office. I'm also joined by Nuha Yousif from the Sennar State Emergency Response Room Programme Office, and Hamish Young, the Senior Emergency Coordinator for Gaza for UNICEF. 

Hamish, I'll start with you. You've been deployed to Gaza since November 2023 with UNICEF, and you will, I'm sure, agree that the pace of destruction in Gaza has been unprecedented and catastrophic. Considering what Alex has also said, do you think famine is inevitable in Gaza? Can anything still be done to avoid it? 

0:08:29 - Hamish Young 

Thanks, Sarah. I don't think famine is inevitable. I think we're already seeing it, certainly in the northern governorates. We have a lot of problems with access, so it's difficult to determine the magnitude. But I was in northern Gaza, I was in Gaza City on Saturday, and just looking around, the situation is desperate. In terms of what's needed to prevent further spread of famine or getting any worse, unequivocally, above and beyond anything, a ceasefire is needed urgently and desperately. But that needs to be also a ceasefire for humanitarian purposes, not for political purposes. It can't be just a ceasefire to negotiate the recovery of hostages. We saw with the humanitarian pause at the end of November that there were still enormous limitations on the humanitarian space we have there. So it needs to be a ceasefire that includes safe and unimpeded access of humanitarian assistance - food, obviously, nutrition supply services, health services, clean water, water and sanitation services, and the restoration of infrastructure. These all need to go together. And just if I can comment in terms of access, we've heard a lot recently about airdrops, about a sea bridge from Cyprus. If we're serious about access and preventing famine, none of those things are necessary. All that's needed is to open the gates and clear the roads and let the humanitarian actors come in because Gaza is actually a tiny, tiny place. It's 365 square kilometres, it's 41 kilometres long, it's readily accessible. It's very, very easily accessible if the will is there to allow people in.  

0:10:50 - Sara Pantuliano 

The Gaza Health Ministry reported just a couple of weeks ago that 32 people, 28 children amongst them, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in northern Gaza. This is starting to happen at some speed. If the ceasefire is not agreed, if there is no facilitation of access, what's going to happen to the children of Gaza?  

0:11:12 - Hamish Young 

They're going to start suffering even worse malnutrition, and they're going to die at even higher rates than they are now. You know, and I mean I think I know we're focusing on famine in this discussion. I think it's also worth noting that I think it's nearly 10,000 children have been killed already in the direct conflict. So if we don't have a ceasefire, you know that number will go up as well. If we do see the incursion into Rafah that's being talked about, we'll see for sure a rapid increase in direct mortality, children killed in a conflict. But also, we'll see the sorts of conditions we're witnessing in Gaza City and Jabalia up north move down south, and I think as people have moved back into Khan Yunis, we're also realizing that with the heavy combat there over the last two months or so, now that we have access again, we're even seeing there famine-like conditions that we've seen in the north.  

0:12:21 - Sara Pantuliano 

Thanks, Hamish. Let me move to Sudan and bring in Omima and Nuha. This week marks a year since the breakout of the latest iteration of the conflict in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has resulted in more than 7 million people being displaced and 80 million people facing severe food security, with nearly 5 million of them already experiencing emergency levels of food deprivation. Omima, you and Nouha work with local volunteers through the emergency response rooms that are playing a key role, a vital role, in the relief efforts. How are you trying to mitigate the hunger crisis and support civilians? 

0:13:03 - Omima Omer Jabal 

Thank you, Sara, for the opportunity. Thank you, everyone. As Hamish stated, the situation in Sudan is a bit complicated and it's differentiated from area to another, so the challenges are very high regarding this, but currently, we have issues in the availability of food. Already, we started to enter into farming because. If I set an example by Khartoum, there's a shortage in food supplies because the agricultural season didn't work well last year, so most of the states didn't plant. Khartoum was getting the supply from Madani. The war started in Madani, and just everything is cut off. So now people are literally starving and just trying to pick their foods and they dial in each from the faraway states, like the northern states and some middle states. And also, I'd just like to talk a little bit about children and hunger. We already have a numbers of kids being died throughout out of hand, and in some other states in the middle of the country. So we're already entering this. 

[Being] blocked out of the internet and the access of phone networks was a basic challenge. Most of the local volunteers, they're using the internet, basically, and some applications to provide the money in order just to be able to buy the foods and so on. So, with the block out and everything, everything was stopping. For example, in Khartoum, we had like more than 130 communal kitchens that stopped working because there was no supply at all, so you can do the math. One kitchen can cover around 600 persons per week, so 600,000 persons per month. It's like this. So this is basically the biggest challenge. 

But recently, I'm giving one example of what happened in Khartoum, in some localities. They were working on urban agriculture. I mean, we have a great example of some localities that start planting within neighbourhoods. They're planting vegetables to supply the kitchen, basically. So it was an example for the volunteers' work that's been working. So these urban agricultures, like gardens and the small things, they help in providing vegetables for kitchens during the time of block-out of the internet. So that's basically how it's happening. 

But right now we're struggling. We have a lot of talking about how we can prepare, if that's the suitable word, to the upcoming famine within all these challenges like the block out of the internet. Still, there are some areas that are blocked out of the internet, so you can't easily access the people, and also be losing contact with the people on the ground most of the time. So this is the basic challenge that we need to work on. But I think the main thing is just building a reserve. But there's also a challenge with this. If you build the reserve, one of the conflict parties may reach out to you or maybe the area gets under attack, and you're going to lose this. There is the danger of stealing and so on by the two conflict parties themselves. So we have a lot of conversation nowadays in order to try to figure out how we can overcome this and just trying to work on it. But basically, the urban agriculture, that's now the thing that we're trying to separate. I'm giving an example basically by Khartoum. This is it. It's simple. 

0:16:47 - Sara Pantuliano 

Indeed, it's not simple, as you point out to me, it's clearly really difficult. Noura, you're in Sennar. Can you give us a sense of what the emergency response rooms are trying to do there? Nouha, you're welcome to speak in Arabic. Omima has kindly agreed to help with the voiceover translation to English for our listeners. 

0:17:10 – Nuha Yousif (Translation by Omima Omer Jabal) 

My name is Nuha Yousif. I am a Programme Officer at Sennar ERRs. Actually, Sennar ERRs started on 8 April, five days after the war broke in Khartoum. As a quick response to the war and the IDBs they started to place outside Khartoum to the safer states like Al Jazeera and Sennar. Right now, even after we evolve, we have ERRs at localities living in Sennar state. We have like 25 evacuation centres in Sennar locality and we have other 13 evacuation centres in different localities within Sennar. In those evacuation centres we basically provide food through the communal kitchens and some health services and protection for IDPs. 

0:18:12 - Nuha Yousif (Translation by Omima Omer Jabal) 

Sennar State has many agricultural projects working on it. The last year the season of agriculture was not as good as it is. This is due to the losing of cereals and the killing and stealing things that happened by the conflict parties themselves. Besides, the citizens not feeling safe, so they're leaving their houses, no one just going for the agriculture the previous season. 

So these areas, basically, are facing the famine, so the famine response is going to be higher and higher due to the biggest number of IDPs. Most of them are women and children, so the danger of malnutrition is higher. Also, we have pregnant women who need care. And added more to all this, our volunteers get threatened, arrested by the IDPs and even HACC itself right now. As in our ERRs, to face the upcoming famine, what we're doing now is we're trying to collaborate and coordinate with the ERRs at the local level and other ERRs in states like Khartoum, like Darfur in the west, to have a strong network that can be very effective if we face any block out of the internet or phone networks, and also to deliver information. As well as we're trying to work on collaboration and coordination with NGOs in order like to try to figure out the best way to practice or to face this upcoming famine. 

0:20:14 - Sara Pantuliano 

This has been really helpful to understand what communities in Sudan are doing themselves to try and mitigate against the threat of famine, the escalating hunger. Obviously, in these situations, the default response from international organisations is to bring in food aid, but that's really not the solution. What is the solution? What is a better solution, Alex? 

0:20:27 - Alex de Waal 

Famines have multiple components. There is often not always, but often a lack of food, and so bringing in food can be very, very important. Equally or more important is providing people with the material resources, the income with which they can purchase food and they can get local food systems up and running again, and that's usually more important overall in a famine response than external food aid. So in a situation like Sudan, opening up financial, telecommunications, trading, credit and other systems can be just as important, if not more important, than providing external resources. 

In the case of Gaza, it's a bit different. In the case of Gaza, with the speed of descent into a massive, severe, acute malnutrition crisis for kids, one of the most urgent needs is the specialised therapeutic nutritional care for kids, and this seems to be completely absent from the current policy discourse, which, certainly in Washington DC, is a very rudimentary arithmetic. Okay, if we allow in more trucks, if we simply increase the calorie count into Gaza, we will solve the problem. That's nonsense. We know, for example, that refeeding a desperately malnourished child in a non-monitored, incorrect way is actually extremely dangerous for those children. We need a full spectrum of specialised child nutrition and healthcare and reconstitution of basic infrastructure, especially water and sanitation, before we can consider there's anything like an effective response to Gaza. 

0:22:38 - Sara Pantuliano 

Hamish, I see you nodding vigorously.  

0:22:41 - Hamish Young 

Yes, Alex is quite right. UNICEF's trying very hard to bring in, and together with other partners as well, six different things that are needed to address child malnutrition - the therapeutic feeding, the high-energy biscuits, lipid-based nutritional supplements, micronutrient supplements for mothers, for children under five, ready-to-use infant formula for kids that can't be breastfed. But together with all of those things, which by the way, we're struggling enormously to get in. You might have heard about a UNICEF convoy being shot at a couple of days ago, that truck was full of these six products and didn't get through. 

But as well as that, it's a whole range of support services. As Alex mentioned at the beginning, enough food has been allowed into Gaza historically, so there hasn't really been a significant issue of child malnutrition, some micronutrient deficiencies here and there, but generally it's not been an issue. So what we've found is that health service providers such that they are left unable to function have no real experience in either identifying kids who are sliding into a malnourished state, even struggling with kids who are obviously severely, acutely malnourished, to even identify them, as opposed to suffering from other illnesses and diseases, and then what to do. So not only is the nutrition cluster desperately trying to get these supplies in. They're also trying to give everyone a very fast crash course in identification and treatment of child malnutrition. And the restrictions we're facing are across the board, they're not just on bringing in the supplies because the access is so severely limited, the training is also massively hampered. 

0:24:58 - Sara Pantuliano 

Omima. What do you think the role of international humanitarians should be in Sudan? You're so deeply involved in supporting local communities through local efforts. What can international organisations add from your perspective? 

0:25:11 - Omima Omer Jabal 

I think the international community can do a set of things. First of all, supporting the small traders. The small traders are the only ones who are able to bring food supplies and so on in Sudan because they have the distribution networks and channels. Also, they have the storages and they have the contacts. Also, they can set a training for the key basic skills that we need during the famine time, and supporting the urban agriculture, like a small garden and gardens and house gardening and so on. Also, they can assist in raising awareness, setting a psychosocial for all communities. And also they can provide a treatment and anti-rape campaign and treatment and campaign for anything related to health. So this is basically, I think, what the international community can do. 

Added more to this, as I said, in Khartoum, for example, the urban agriculture will be like an amazing thing. People do not get an access to anything and it's. It's showed that it's very effective and it worked in many parts in Khartoum. But otherwise, in other states, it depends on the state itself and the condition of who control over it, who control what, and who control where. So that's basically what I think. 

0:26:32 - Sara Pantuliano 

Yeah, it's very interesting. Of course, you know, while the default effort is always focused on the idea of having to bring in food aid, clearly is where we can have more influence or be more helpful as internationals is actually raising awareness, pushing the political buttons to get ceasefire, to get access, to make sure that we enable people on the ground to function as they normally do, and to respond. On that note. One thing that normally is left to governments or authorities on the ground is the declaration of famine. Who should declare famine in Gaza and in Sudan if the parties are clearly not interested to do so? 

0:27:23 - Alex de Waal 

So the current system for declaring famine is a little bit obscure. The way it works up to now is that the IPC has a technical working group, and when it thinks there's a risk of famine, it brings in the Famine Review Committee, which can advise on whether famine is occurring or there is, or may be happening they're not quite sure etc. And then really it's up to the United Nations. And I think this is where the system is breaking down. There are international legal obligations for responding when there is a food emergency, especially one caused by armed conflict. There's UN Security Council Resolution 2417. But that's not being used. That's not being utilised in these circumstances. So, I think this is a failure of leadership at the highest level. I think it would be appropriate, therefore, for international agencies to elevate the role of some sort of committee of respected elders to say either this is famine, based on our best judgment, regardless of the minutiae of the evidence, regardless of what political authorities are trying to conceal or deny, or famine is actually inevitable under these circumstances, under the current trajectory.  

0:29:00 - Sara Pantuliano 

Absolutely, and I think that's what we hear. I engage a lot with Omima and other colleagues in Sudan and that's where it would be helpful to have international organisations say more clearly and in a less technocratic way, when these conditions are really so urgent, that political action cannot wait anymore. Omima, how can international organisations best help from your perspective? 

0:29:28 - Omima Omer Jabal 

Proactive efforts to collaborate with, like ERRs or any other local actors, because they understand more, they know more, and there's like a complexity on the ground. That's totally different than what we say. It's very good when you say, but when it comes to implementation it's always a difficult thing. So effort for more collaboration is like the most important thing right now.  

0:29:46 - Sara Pantuliano 

Nuha, what do you think?  

0:29:48 - Nuha Yousif (Translation by Omima Omer Jabal)  

Right now, we're working on raising the societal awareness about the famine, so we're trying to figure out how to use the social cultures and habits and how to improve it in order to face the famine itself. As well as the ERRs cannot do it alone, so we need the support of the actors, the local, the national and international actors to put more pressure into stopping the fires and just working on open ceasefires, to receive the aids and trying to provide a level of protection to the civilians and to the volunteers of the ERRs, especially the women volunteers within the ERRs. 

We also we would like to put some pressure on the funders, the international organisation, to increase the amount of funds in order to try to figure out how we can respond together as ENRs, as ERRs, and as local actors right now in this situation. As well as, we require them to go into a quick intervention in these cases, because the feature of famine it's all existed there, especially in Sennar, because it's been like a gate for other states, for transportation, for people to move in. It was like a safe road to reaching the western states of Sudan and also the northern one. So Sennar could be a very, very effective ceasefire to deliver the aid to other localities in the current situation. As well as, as ENR are local actors, we can work on a mechanism that's going to be very effective at this mechanism to the quick responses by the international organisations and all the actors in the field in order to respond to the famine. So that's the last thing I would like to say. 

0:32:01 - Sara Pantuliano 

Thanks, we are very much at time. I just have one last question for all of you. I mean, Alex said very clearly at the start of the episode that starving people is a violation of international humanitarian laws. I mean, no matter how you see it, it is a war crime. How do we hold those responsible to account? 

0:32:20 - Alex de Waal 

There are several elements to accountability. The one that lawyers will get excited about is criminal accountability, putting perpetrators in the dock. Now, this will be slow, we'll only ever get a few of them, but nonetheless should be supported. I think what is more important in the longer term are two related things. One is political accountability, making sure that the perpetrating starvation is so morally toxic, so utterly reprehensible, that those who commit this crime can never have any type of social or political respect. And then the final point here is that the experience of starvation is like the experience of torture, something that is deeply humiliating, deeply traumatic, a profound loss of dignity, and a process of accountability is, perhaps more than anything else a process of restoring the dignity, recognising the humanity of survivors and victims. 

0:33:31 - Sara Pantuliano 

Thanks, Hamish.  

0:33:34 - Hamish Young 

Yeah, obviously, as you know, I'm a lawyer, so I do agree with Alex's first point that pursuing legal options wherever possible are important. But, as he said, realistically it's never going to lead to a lot of convictions. So I think it's only political accountability that can really work, that can really have any impact in either the short run or the long run. 

0:34:04 - Sara Pantuliano  

Thanks, Omima.  

0:34:06 - Omima Omer Jabal 

Well, just saying I would like totally to agree with Alex and Hamish that we need pressure to guarantee that political commitment to the efforts and everything. And also, I would like to pressure more on collaboration and just trying to create new ways. That's what we need, because the situation in Sudan is unique and it's complicated, just trying to find new ways of collaboration, new ways of implementing things themselves. 

0:34:36 - Sara Pantuliano 

But thank you very much, everyone. I think this was a very important episode of Think Change because of the lack of attention, particularly in Sudan, to these issues, because the lack of political action both in the case of Gaza and Sudan. We really hope that the conversation today will have helped make clear how dangerous and how urgent the situation is in both places, and actually in other countries too. But I think Sudan and Gaza in particular are really on the brink of two devastating sort of urgent situations when it comes to hunger and the threat of famine. Political action is what we need, political accountability is what we should demand. And I hope that, with the efforts that a few organizations and individuals are making, we continue to amplify and push for the political action that has been so wanting in both crises so far. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do like, subscribe and rate it and we hope you'll join us again next time. Thank you. 

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