‘I’m severely malnourished and I couldn’t produce milk’: in Kalma, Ansaf Omar has been mourning for a month and a half her 18-month-old son, who died of starvation — like dozens of other children in this Sudanese displaced persons camp.

“I took him everywhere, to hospitals, to clinics, but in the end he died,” the incredibly thin Ansaf, 34, who took refuge after the Darfur war broke out in 2003, told AFP in this camp in Nyala district. , in the capital of South Darfur province.

In this region, which borders Chad, the consequences of hunger are often fatal, but throughout the rest of Sudan, one of the poorest countries on the planet, the problem has worsened: 15 of the 45 million inhabitants are currently suffering space malnutrition.

Three million children under the age of five are severely malnourished, according to the UN. Among them, “more than 100,000 children are at risk of starvation if they are not helped,” warns Lenny Kinsley, the World Food Program’s (WFP) Sudan communications officer.

Not all children in Sudan are at risk of dying; however, a third of those under five are “below average for that age” in height, and almost half have “a 40% stunting level”, warns the non-governmental organization Alight. In and around Kalma, the aid organization recorded 63 child deaths from hunger in its own centers alone in 2022.

“You have to choose who to help”

In its camps, home to 120,000 people displaced by the war waged by Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who was toppled in 2019, there was hunger from the start. But the problem grew in 2022, after the October 2021 military coup, which led to the suspension of international aid.

Last year, there was a “massive increase in imports and requests for emergency feeding services” in Kalma, Alight’s Sudan operations director Heidi Dietrich told AFP.

The NGO says it received “863 new cases of children”, a number “increased by 71% since 2021”. And the increase in cases was accompanied by an increase in deaths, “there were 231% more in 2022” among children older than six months.

At one of its centers in Kalma, Hawa Suleiman, 38, hopes to find something to feed her baby. “There is nothing in our house, we often sleep with an empty stomach,” he explains.

Sudan’s economic problems keep piling up: the Omar al-Bashir-era embargo was followed by the novel coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which has skyrocketed food prices and created peculiar competition for populations in need of humanitarian aid.

Over the years, WFP has had to double the size of the food rations it distributes to refugees and displaced people in Sudan because of “its budget constraints”, says Ms Kinsley.

Aid organizations are now faced with an unbearable dilemma, “we have to choose who to help” — and, every time, it “breaks our hearts.”

“They never let us rest”

Because of the cuts, Nouralsam Ibrahim, 30, and her five children cannot rely on humanitarian aid alone.

“We try to secure a little money by working in the fields around the camp, but the money we make is not enough to eat for even one day,” he says.

In a country in utter economic withering, with inflation soaring and speculation rampant, “even bread is too expensive,” he adds.

As for Ansaf Omar, she is afraid to even leave the camp in Kalma, because clashes between tribes or over land often break out in the area. Across the country, around 1,000 people were killed in incidents of this nature in 2022, according to UN estimates.

“They never let us rest when we leave the camp to look for work. Women are raped, men are killed”…

And all this to try to make less than a dollar a day in the fields.