By Mark Doyle
BBC World Affairs correspondent |
 A humanitarian crisis is unfolding |
A new report by the British charity Save the Children says thousands of tons of food must be delivered to Sudan urgently to avoid a major crisis. A quarter of a million people died from hunger in a crisis which occurred in the country in 1984.
The report has new data on the extent of malnourishment in the Darfur region where pro-government Arab militias have been fighting a rebel group.
The rebels say they represent marginalised ethnic African Sudanese.
The Arab militias are accused by human rights groups of engaging in a scorched-earth policy.
Inadequate
The Save the Children report concentrates on a small part of the western Darfur province where it has been possible to gather relatively accurate information.
Focussing on this small region of Malha the charity says it found that a third of the population there were malnourished - that is about three times the normal rate in this chronically poor corner of Sudan.
Save the Children says this is particularly alarming because Malha has been less affected by the armed conflict than other parts of the Darfur region. It says the overall food aid needs of the Darfur area have been calculated at over 20,000 metric tons per month if a tragedy on the scale of 1984 - when a quarter of a million people died of hunger - is to be avoided.
The charity welcomed the fact that a ceasefire had been signed in the Darfur conflict and that ceasefire monitors from the continental body the African Union were to deploy.
But it said attacks on civilians, including attacks on children, were continuing, and that deploying 120 monitors to check on a region the size of France was, to say the least, inadequate.
One-Minute World News 
News services
E-mail this to a friend 
Printable version 
