Hunger fears gripping South Sudan
This year’s harvest was the smallest since 2011 independence
JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN— The hunger season came early this year.
By February, once seen as a time of plenty, Nyabolli Chok had run out of food for her three children in their village here in South Sudan. She knew they had to leave.
“We were eating leaves off of trees,” she said, describing how she boiled them into a watery soup.
“Ron reath,” she said — her words for the hunger season. South Sudan’s dozens of ethnic groups use different names for the months when food becomes scarce until the next harvest. But the fears are the same: malnutrition, disease, even death. This year is expected to be the worst yet.
More than four years of civil war have chased millions from their homes, leaving countless farms abandoned. The economy has been obliterated. Fighting has overcome some of the nation’s most productive land. Food prices are ruinously high.
Even during harvest time in January, when food was most abundant, more than five million people — almost half the population — did not have enough to eat.
Now, as food runs out over the next few months, international officials expect that number to grow considerably, with mil- lions potentially facing acute malnutrition.
This year’s harvest was the smallest on record since South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, with the country producing only a fraction of its needs, according to the World Food Program.
On top of that, peace talks have stalled and ceasefires have largely been ignored, which means fighting has cut off some areas from emergency help. Aid workers have been targeted by government and rebel fighters, making food distribution increasingly difficult.
Even here in the capital, which had been largely immune to the food crisis, many families are finding it impossible to pay the steep prices demanded in the city’s markets, their options vanishing as the currency crashes.
South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, was born from an enormous international push to end decades of conflict between the north and south of what was then Sudan. Just two years later, the new country was at war.
The civil war has set off the largest refugee crisis in Africa since the Rwandan genocide, the United Nations says. More than two million people have fled the country, crippling food production. Nearly two million others have abandoned their homes and remain scattered around the country.
At the nation’s southern border, dozens of refugees cross a narrow bridge into Uganda each day, bringing stories of hunger with them.
Mary Yar, 20, arrived with her 1-year-old son at a small reception centre on the Ugandan side. At the site, the first assessment that refugees go through is a malnutrition screening.
“There is no food there,” Yar said of her home village.
South Sudan’s currency is in free fall and hyperinflation has squeezed virtually everyone. Before the war, one U.S. dollar was worth about five South Sudanese pounds. By March, it was worth about 220 pounds.
The impact has been devastating. A 2017 World Food Program report determined that the relative price of a meal in South Sudan was among the highest in the world. It found that people here typically needed to spend 155-per-cent of their daily income for a single plate of bean stew. To put it another way, a meal that would cost a New Yorker just $1.20 would cost someone in Juba the equivalent of $321.70.
By early 2018, half of South Sudan’s population relied on food aid, according to the United Nations, and the percentage will grow as the hunger season reaches its peak.
But delivering that aid is another matter entirely. The rainy season hits during these lean months, too, turning many roads into rivers of impassable mud.
Beyond that, at least 100 humanitarian workers have been killed here since the start of the conflict, 30 in the past year alone, targeted by warring parties that think the efforts are helping their enemies.
The malnutrition clinic offers a chilling glimpse of what this hunger season may hold.
The hospital ward, frequently dark because of intermittent electricity, is treating nearly a dozen more children each day than it did this time last year.
For now, with the peak of the hunger season still weeks away, the clinic manages the steady flow of patients, said Josephin Ruben, the head nutritionist.
But, she noted anxiously, there “will not be enough when we get to June and July.”