The government in Sudan who has appointed the military regime yesterday strongly rejected a report supported by the United Nations which notes that the famine spreads across five war-torn regions of the country.

In its latest report, released last Tuesday 24 December, the Integrated Food Security Ranking (IPC) framework used by its services UNnoted that 638,000 people are now facing catastrophic levels of hunger and another 8.1 million Sudanese are on the verge of starvation.

During a press conference in Port Sudan, a city on Sudan’s Red Sea coast that has effectively become the new capital, the government’s humanitarian aid commissioner, Salwa Adam Benya, called rumors of famine in Sudan “pure fabrications,” according to with the Sudanese official news agency.

Flanked by representatives of the Ministries of Agriculture, Media and Foreign Affairs, she argued that some aid agencies are using “food as a pretext” to further their own ends.

In Sudan, a war has been raging for the last twenty months between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has caused a terrible humanitarian crisis.

Earlier, a statement from the Foreign Office stressed that the government “categorically rejects” the term “famine” used by the IPC to describe the situation in Sudan, calling the report “essentially” based on assumptions.

The government noted that the IPC did not have access to the latest data on the situation on the ground and that it did not consult its technical team before releasing its report.

The IPC did not immediately respond when asked by AFP for comment.

Sudan’s de facto government has been repeatedly accused of obstructing international efforts to assess the country’s food security situation.

The authorities are also accused of creating bureaucratic obstacles for humanitarian work and not granting visas to groups of foreigners.

Both the regular army and the DTY have been accused of using hunger as a weapon in this war.

According to the NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC), the army is “taking advantage of the status of an internationally recognized government” it enjoys and preventing “the UN and international (aid) organizations from reaching areas controlled by the IRC”.

Sudan is experiencing “the worst humanitarian crisis since we began keeping records” of the emergency, the IRC said in its most recent emergency report, 2023.

The war that broke out on April 15, 2023 has claimed the lives of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, and has turned over 12 million others into internally displaced persons and refugees, with a large proportion of people in IDP camps and areas controlled by the military to be food insecure.

Across the country, nearly 25 million people, or roughly half the population, are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, according to United Nations estimates.