By Jihan El-Alaily * When Manut Nong, the fourteen-year-old Dinka boy, arrived outside the compound of one of the aid agencies in Mapel, Bahr Al-Ghazal, he looked ghastly thin. His long scarred legs were too weak to hold him. He squatted on the ground, his head down and hidden behind one hand, as if trying to escape from a dreadful nightmare. Manut had been walking for two days in the forest, after food ran out in Tonge in Bahr Al-Ghazal, where he came from. He wasn't alone: he had his mother with him, and the two of them ate wild leaves from the forest to survive the harsh walk until the next village. "She couldn't take the hunger, she dropped dead," he said, choking on his voice, which was hardly audible as he recalled what happened. "I left her body unburied... I looked around for help, there was no one, I was too tired myself to do anything... I left her and walked to Mapel." Manut survived. He was taken care of by the British aid agency Save the Children which runs a programme in Mapel for children affected by the war. Ten years after the devastating famine of 1988, which together with the fighting killed 250,000 people in southern Sudan, the shadow of another famine looms high above the dry, barren lands. Aid workers say hundreds are now dying each week because they can't get to where the food is. One aid worker who has been in Sudan for a long time puts it this way: "At the beginning, I thought if I worked sixteen hours a day, I could save people in southern Sudan... Now its too late, the death machinery is in place, we see the situation very pessimistically." The UN and aid agencies have warned that 2.4 million people in southern Sudan risk dying of hunger in the coming months. Of these, 1.2 million of the most vulnerable live in rebel-held territories in the south. In Bahr Al-Ghazal, in places like Mapel, Agaigai, Ajeip and Leer, where there is a huge displaced community, the scale of the disaster is even worse than elsewhere in the region. Tragic stories like that of Manut are to be found in abundance. When asked, almost all the people I've met with in Bahr Al-Ghazal answered in the affirmative, that they have lost a family member to the hunger. They recalled losing a child or two, some an adult relative, some a whole family. It might have been as recent as the day before, but their tired raw-boned faces could not elucidate such a loss. The British charity Save the Children has set up two centres in Wau County to care for children who have either lost their parents in the war or got separated from them. One of its main tasks is to reunite some 810 children like Manut with their living relatives. After the fighting that broke out around Wau County back in February, many children ran away into the forest. Some had seen one or both parents killed. Marie Yanout Ring, the project officer in Mapel, described the state of shock some of the children were in: "They were delirious, they were calling the names of their dead parents and crying and they were very thin." Sadly, though, Save the Children had to turn back many starving adults because of the limited nature of the programme. Marie recalled the time when a grandmother wanted to take shelter with her four grandchildren at the centre. "She was hungry and frail, with hardly any clothes on." When it became apparent to the old lady that only her grandchildren would be accommodated at the centre, she said, "We don't all have to die, I will go alone to die in the forest." She was given something to eat, after which she left contentedly. The World Food Programme (WFP), the largest UN food agency working in Sudan, targets well over two million people in the south of the country. One of its urgent requirements is to cover what it calls the "hunger gap" between June -- when the crops from last year have been consumed -- and August/September when new harvests are expected. With the ongoing drought, the worst to hit southern Sudan in several years, it looks almost certain that the people there will be facing their third consecutive year of poor harvests. Claude Jibidar, field coordinator for WFP in southern Sudan, warned that the food situation is desperate. "In four years I've seen difficult situations in southern Sudan, but this is the worst and it is going to worsen. Already we are seeing the highest death rates since 1994," he said. WFP has responded to the scale of the disaster by trebling its food distribution capacity. It is projected to reach 9,500 metric tons per month shared between 1.2 million people over the next three months. Up to three quarters of this amount will be directed to Bahr Al-Ghazal, through 35 food distribution centres. One of those feeding centres is in Mapel, where food distribution covers a population of 60,000 people whose homes are in the immediate vicinity along with many more from the displaced communities from nearby Wau or Tonge counties. They have fled their homes either because of insecurity or because of the drought, or both. Mapel is quite an attractive tropical village, with its red earth, fresh green grass, dramatic sunsets and rainbows arching through the sky. But this outer beauty is deceptive. Down in the village many small children look severely malnourished with ribs showing and bloated stomachs. Skeleton-like men are lying on the ground, nearly comatose, oblivious of their surroundings, while a few women are boiling wild leaves for their families to eat. Mapel is essentially an agricultural area, which means that there is hardly any livestock to compensate for the loss of the harvest. The villagers complain that the late and intermittent rains have devastated their crops. Other coping mechanisms have been stretched to the limits, explained WFP liaison officer Jason Matus. "Wild food from the forest has been over-exploited, trade is down because there is no grain to sell or exchange, and kinship support is failing because there is very little left that people can share now." In the market there were many people standing around, but hardly any bartering or selling was going on. The few items on display included tobacco, soap and salt, along with a few green leaves like molokheya, and smoked fish balls which are boiled up together with maize or sorghum to make a stew. Marie Louise, a 27-year-old widow whose husband died in the war, was at the market hoping to get some food for her five children: "There is nothing around here, many people are dying, my children eat once a day. We scavange for wild food in the forest, if the rains don't come, maybe I won't find food for my children, except every two days. Maybe we will all die." Marie, like many people in the village, goes to the WFP food distribution centre in Mapel to get her share of yellow maize and split yellow peas, which is supposed to last her and her family for a whole month. The food ration is calculated in kilocalories per person per month. as recommended in the nutrition value charts of WFP, UNICEF, WHO and others. But even when aid agencies were providing enough food assistance, people would complain that they weren't getting enough food. One WFP food officer in Mapel said that food management as practiced by the population was in question here. "When we give them food for one month, they might consume it in three weeks and go hungry for one week," he said. Adults have been arriving in a severely malnourished state at feeding centres in Bahr Al-Ghazal and others have died in places like Ajeip. The high adult mortality rate is an additional indicator of a deteriorating situation. But it is the rising malnutrition figures among children that are the most alarming phenomenon. A survey recently conducted by UNICEF among 4,000 children under five years of age in Bahr Al-Ghazal showed that fifty per cent were malnourished. UNICEF, which is feeding 15,000 children in this area, said that it needed to reach a total of 66,000 malnourished children in rebel-held areas. "We plan to open 18 more feeding centres over the next two to three weeks, security permitting," said Patrick McCormic, spokesman for UNICEF. The aid agency Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) is particularly active in nutrition and health in Bahr Al-Ghazal. MSF Holland reported a more than six-fold increase from March to June in the number of children admitted to their supplementary feeding programme. Dr Els Mathieu, medical co-ordinator for MSF Belgium, said that in their feeding centres, they now have a lower admission criteria than normal for children. "In the supplementary feeding programme, we admit children whose weight-for-height ratio is less than 75 per cent and in the therapeutic feeding programme their weight-for-height ratio is less than 60 per cent," she said. Children admitted to the therapeutic programme get six to eight meals a day, partly made up of high-energy milk. In this programme, children under five years are treated alongside their mothers, and both mother and child are regularly fed over a one-week cycle. Aid workers have observed that as soon as the child shows signs of improvement, many mothers take their children and leave prematurely before the end of the programme, as their other children were going hungry and had to be fed as well. One senior aid worker voiced his frustration: "Therapeutic and supplementary feeding are like medical treatment, if they are interrupted than they won't have any effect." In Mapel, there are several aid agencies working in nutrition, health and providing care for unaccompanied minors. But in Agaigai, in central Bahr Al-Ghazal, there is only a WFP food distribution centre. Around the dirt airstrip, the hungry and emaciated crowds wait nervously in lines to get their food ration. Some have walked for as much as six hours from their villages to come to where the food is being distributed. The drought has left many areas in Agaigai and the surrounding area looking desolate and barren, and many crops have been ruined while still in the ground. Many Dinka villagers said that their cattle had been stolen in raids by the Nuer tribes that live in Upper Nile along the borders with Bahr Al-Ghazal. The food economy of an average Dinka household is normally dominated by milk, crops and fish. With the present disruption of two of those variables, the people are left vulnerable and wholly dependent on food handouts. Around the food distribution centre, we saw a lot of tired mothers holding dying babies, who were trying in vain to suckle on breasts that had long dried up. Some of those women explained that the struggle to save their babies meant walking six hours to the nearest emergency health centre and thus missing out on the food distribution. Jason Matus of WFP says those women with many children to feed are forced into a position where they have no options: "They have to prioritise among their children. If a child loses the will to live, they won't fight for him." Regarding the food situation, Oscar Biget, the WFP officer in Agaigai, said, "On a good day, if food is flown in, we can distribute 34.8 metric tons of maize and peas per day. That is enough to feed 4000 people." Agaigai, like most places in Bahr Al-Ghazal, receives its food consignments by air drops, as road, train and barge routes are still unpassable or insecure to many areas in southern Sudan. Over the past months the regularity of food distribution has been disrupted because of mechanical problems with the cargo aeroplanes. But WFP remains confident that it can vastly improve its food distribution capacity, once the UN's Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) -- the main umbrella group that co-ordinates aid to this vast country -- has expanded its delivery capacity to 12 cargo aeroplanes. This fleet will include for the first time four Aleutians, larger aircraft that can carry a load of up to forty metric tons of food each trip. OLS criticised the Khartoum government earlier this year for refusing to open airstrips to aid agencies in February and March, thus making many more people vulnerable to dying of hunger. Despite the massive amounts of food aid targeting 1.2 million people in the south, many are still dying of hunger. Claude Jibidar of WFP said the drought alone did not account for the level of the disaster in the south. "The problem today is compounded by the war and by the waves of displacement resulting from the war," he added. Fighting or fear of attack has meant that many households have had to flee their homes more than once. In the process precious productive assets like seeds and tools are often lost. The displaced roam around from one food distribution centre to another, hoping to get some food. Many times they don't succeed, as they are not welcomed in the communities they descend on. WFP includes them among their target populations for food assistance, however difficult that may be, says Jibidar of WFP, because of the very complex nature of the displacement. In Bahr Al-Ghazal where there are many pockets of insecurity, there have been "consecutive waves of displacements in all directions," he explained. Food is also a politically sensitive matter, in a way which often prevents it from getting to the most needy. One senior WFP official, who did not want to be named, puts it this way: "Food is trouble, because it attracts a lot of predators." Among those alleged predators are some local village chiefs. At many of its distribution sites, the WFP insists that the women come themselves to receive the food for their households. But they have often discovered that back at the village level, the women had been forced to give up the food bags for the chiefs to redistribute. "If he is a good chief, he will keep 10 per cent of the food and distribute 90 per cent, but if he is a bad chief he will keep 80 per cent of the food for himself and distribute 20 per cent," said the WFP official. In other instances, the alleged predators have been the SPLA or certain government-backed militias, though both sides have denied such charges in the past. Aid agencies have welcomed the three-month ceasefire agreement reached last week between the Khartoum government and the main rebel movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), under which food is to be allowed into famine-stricken areas in the south. The ceasefire and proposals for safe aid corridors were put forward by British foreign office minister Derek Fatchett who met with both sides in the region. The ceasefire applies to the worst affected areas of Bahr Al-Ghazal and Upper Nile. The limited ceasefire is expected at least to allow some consistency in relief operations. "Our goal is to keep people alive, settled in their homes and productive" said Jason Matus of WFP. But for that to happen, the international community will have to do a lot more to get the regime in Khartoum and the rebels finally to put an end to this vicious 15-year-old war. * Jihan El-Alaily is a Cairo-based correspondent for the BBC Arabic Service.
