Around 62,7%, or 7.74 million people, will face a crisis or worsening levels of food insecurity between April and July, the United Nations Children’s Fund warned quoting the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis.
Although prompt international assistance prevented the situation from deteriorating further, in 2017 famine was declared in two counties of South Sudan.
Due to food insecurity, as the analysis points out, over 1.34 million children under the age of five will be impacted by acute malnutrition and the most affected by the food insecurity (more than 80%) will be people in the states of Jonglei, Unity, Upper Nile, Lakes, and Eastern Equatoria.
According to the United Nations, the floods, droughts, conflicts, economic downturn, displacement, and disrupted livelihoods have only worsened the situation.
South Sudan’s representative in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Meshack Malo, stressed the organization’s concern about the rising number of food-insecure people, pointing out the problem is driven by the additional burden of heavy flooding that has occurred in the country for the last three consecutive years.
Malo noted that they need to produce more food where it is needed most to tackle acute hunger with FAO’s continued help with providing seeds, tools, and fishing kits to people in urgent need of assistance.
Malo, citing the latest IPC data, noted that 1.34 million children in South Sudan are malnourished severely along with over 600,000 pregnant and lactating.
He also emphasized the need of finding innovative ways to help farmers in South Sudan adapt to climate change so they can grow enough food, but the only way to do that is to increase investment to allow them to do that.
His call for more funding in order to provide humanitarian aid to South Sudan was echoed by all three UN agencies.
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