AKUEM, Sudan, 15 September 2005 — Akol Deng Akol expected the end of Sudan’s 21-year civil war to end the hunger that usually takes hold when the rains stop. But eight months after peace was agreed between southern rebels and the northern Khartoum government, Akol’s home region of Bahr El Ghazal is recovering from its worst food shortage since a famine killed at least 60,000 people seven years ago.
Tackling seasonal cycles of hunger is a critical challenge the yet-to-be-formed southern government will have to face as it seeks to develop one of the poorest places on earth, where about eight million people struggle to feed themselves.
The situation in southern Sudan is also a snapshot of the difficult task of meeting the United Nation’s millennium development goal of cutting the number of those suffering from hunger in half by 2015. “We’ve been told about peace, that change will come, that food would be brought by the government of southern Sudan,” Akol said at an emergency feeding center where he had rushed his one-year-old twins.
Sitting on grass mats, his chubby-cheeked babies no longer show the thin limbs and sunken eyes they displayed a month ago when they arrived.
Lush, green fields of the staple food, sorghum, have sprouted around the mud tukuls close to the center, suggesting the worst of the starvation may be over. Health workers are feeding powdered milk and peanut paste to 88 infants, compared to 250 children at the height of the crisis in the dry months of May and June. But aid workers warn that next year’s dry season will probably produce more cases of malnutrition among Bahr El Ghazal’s four million people.
“Next year it might be worse, because we have experienced less rain than in previous years,” said Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) doctor Morpheus Causing. Scarce rains caused last year’s meager harvest in the war-ravaged region where farming methods, like much of the rest of southern Sudan, have not evolved for centuries.
Peace may have come to the south but villagers, unused to political stability, are still growing sorghum in small plots — a habit acquired during the conflict when bombing raids forced them to scatter into the bush and abandon their crops.
In the fields, the little they grow is fertilized with cow dung and tilled with wooden hoes. “There are food shortages because sometimes there is drought, crops are destroyed by disease, there’s no fertilizer, no farming tools, like ox ploughs,” said Akol, a father of five.
