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Starved for a solution

Ongoing war has increased Sudan's need for food and medicine

BY TINA SUSMAN | Newsday Staff Correspondent

May 15, 2006

NYALA, Sudan - A 5-month-old boy who, at 7 1/2 pounds looked as fragile as a newborn, sucked formula through a thin tube positioned against his emaciated mother's chest. Some day, when his mother is able to provide milk to nourish her son, it is hoped he will have learned to associate her breast with food and be weaned from the tube.

Until then, Martam Mohamed Khamis and her tiny boy, Abdul Rahman Suliman, are full-time residents of one of the most troubling symbols of Darfur's 3-year-old war: a therapeutic feeding center for children on the verge of starvation.

By the end of April, malnutrition was affecting 15 percent of the population in South Darfur, where this feeding center is located. That is a sharp increase from three months earlier and a sign of deteriorating conditions in the region, where international aid groups had cut malnutrition rates from 21.7 percent in 2004 to about half that last year.

But an upsurge in fighting since January has increased the number of those needing food and medical assistance. So has a drop in international donations to UN agencies such as the United Nations' World Food Program, which last month had received just $238 million, or 32 percent, of the $746 million it needed for Darfur in 2006. The shortfall is so great that starting May 1, the agency resorted to what its Darfur director, Carlos Veloso, called "drastic measures." It halved rations to the 3 million people it is feeding in Darfur, bringing their daily caloric count from 2,100 to 1,050.

In this harsh environment, where people must walk several miles in searing heat through soft sand to fetch water and firewood, and where cooking is an energy-consuming, time-intensive exercise involving stirring and mashing of the dried rations, aid workers worry about the cut's impact.

"If this continues, I'm afraid we'll go back to where we were in 2004, and all the gains we made in Darfur will be lost," said the program's Penny Ferguson.

Aid officials blame the shortfall in donations on several factors, including an international "donor fatigue" that set in after governments, corporations and individuals responded with unprecedented generosity to the December 2004 Asian tsunami. Since then, the Pakistan earthquake and Hurricane Katrina have created stiff competition for donor funds, which are always more forthcoming when a disaster is visible to television viewers around the world.

Even with sufficient food aid, malnutrition is a constant during war because of the increased risk of illness among people forced into cramped, unsanitary conditions. The problem is particularly acute in a place like Darfur, where people accustomed to growing their own crops have suddenly been forced to survive on rations.

The signing of a peace accord May 5 between government forces and one of three rebel factions is not expected to lessen the needs in Darfur anytime soon. That's because people living in camps will not be able to return home until UN troops are deployed to enforce the plan -- something that could take at least six to nine months. Until then, they will be dependent on aid.

The director of the clinic where Khamis and her son received care, Manah Katta, said most children there were borne of women who had lived at Kalma at least a year but who for various reasons had not properly fed their newborns.

Marin Yahya Mohamed had kidney problems and couldn't produce milk for her 31-day-old son, who weighed four pounds when they were admitted to the center. Khamis could not explain her illness, but it had left her unable to produce milk.

Because most women here are illiterate and uneducated, they often don't recognize symptoms of illness until it is nearly too late, Katta said.

For some, the pressure of having lost their homes, their close relatives, and having to raise children in unfamiliar surroundings with no money simply takes its toll. When money becomes too tight, some women simply give up in despair and stop feeding their youngest. "It's like they say, 'okay, just let this child go and that problem will be solved,'" Katta said.

Sometimes, rations are not evenly distributed in families.

One pregnant woman arrived at a clinic in Kalma and admitted that she had not eaten in five days because her husband was giving the family's food to his other wives. In this Islamic society, men may have up to four wives.

The chart for another patient at the clinic read: "20 days after delivery. 5 kids. Husband not supporting her. No $ for food."