Geneva - A famine that was declared in parts of South Sudan four months ago is over, U.N. aid agencies said Wednesday, but extreme hunger has increased to its highest levels ever across the war-torn country. "The accepted technical definition of famine no longer applies in former Unity State's Leer and Mayandit counties where famine was declared in February," according to a joint statement from the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). The manmade famine, due to three years of conflict, has affected 100,000 people. The term famine is used according to a globally agreed scale determined by levels of access to food, acute malnutrition and daily deaths due to hunger. But while the famine has eased, the number of people struggling to find food each day has grown to six million from 4.9 million in February, in what the agencies said was the "highest level of food insecurity ever experienced in South Sudan." And the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger, one step below famine, has increased to 1.7 million from one million in February.
