Food is especially scarce in Khartoum, because travel in and out of the city is so dangerous for the usual suppliers and, as Hadeel points out, "Most of the stores have been looted, but in certain areas, some bread and other food is available for a few hours per day per week. There's no fixed schedule, though." Worse yet, wherever there's active fighting, electricity and water supplies are normally cut off. "Some people can have electricity for weeks, while others will not have it for weeks." Some engineers have bravely remained in Khartoum trying to keep power and water supplies flowing, but it's often a hopeless task.
"People are on such unstable ground," Hadeel concludes. "They really don't know when their next food supplies are going to come in or when they're going to be able to refill their water." They have to watch for opportunities to slip outside in relative safety to "find something to keep them and their neighbors going."
And what exactly has been Washington's response to this ongoing horror? Well, the State Department issued a toothless admonishment that the army and RSF "must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including obligations related to the protection of civilians." And that was about it, other than ineffective sanctions applied to the leader of the RSF. Meanwhile, international efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting have collapsed, and humanitarian aid efforts have been hopelessly bogged down. Anyway, who has time for Sudan when arming and backing the Ukrainians has the attention of everyone who matters in the United States?
"Severe, Extreme, or Catastrophic Conditions"
Mind you, that paucity of interest is anything but unique to the crisis in Sudan. For example, U.N. World Food Program (WFP) Director Cindy McCain recently told ABC's This Week that there isn't enough food-assistance money for desperate Afghanistan, filled with starving people, to "even get through October." In addition, the WFP has had to cut food aid to other countries in desperate need, including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. As for explaining that shortfall, McCain was blunt, blaming the rush of rich nations of the Global North to support Ukraine which, she says, "has sucked the oxygen out of the room."
Typically, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that its famine-prevention program for war-ravaged Yemen is now receiving just 30% of the funds it needs, putting millions of Yemenis at risk. OCHA points to the peril facing Fatima, a 60-year-old woman living in the village of Al-Juranah. The program supplies her family with wheat, peas, and oil, but delivery is sporadic, a reality about which Fatima is all too matter-of-fact. "We receive a sack of wheat," she says, "and sometimes we get only half a sack. They also give us roasted peas and oil. If this support stops, we will starve to death." And sadly enough, that support is now anything but guaranteed.
Two years after a ceasefire in that brutal civil war fed by Saudi Arabia (with U.S. support), a conflict that received only the scantiest media coverage in this country, more than half of Yemenis 17 million people are food insecure. U.N. forecasters predict that without massive intervention, a quarter of those people will experience "acute food insecurity" by year's end, with three-quarters of them reaching "crisis levels of hunger." Such massive intervention is decidedly not in the cards, however, and the continuing neglect is having horrific consequences. National Public Radio's Fatma Tanis did, in fact, report on this from a Yemeni hospital in August:
"We head next to the intensive care unit for newborns, often born with complications because of malnutrition. As we enter, a nurse pulls a sheet over a baby who just died. The parents aren't here. Often, families use all their resources to bring their child to the hospital but can't afford to return again. So the hospital has to take care of burials too, without them."
The people of Syria are similarly striving to recover from the civil war that erupted in 2011 and was finally put on hold with a 2020 ceasefire, but only after a full decade of ferocious warfare and terrible suffering. Like the Sudanese and Yemenis, they remain largely unnoticed and uncovered these days in the American media. In addition to extreme water shortages, a catastrophic 55% of Syrians are officially in the crisis phase of acute food insecurity. In late 2022, OCHA reported that "severe, extreme, or catastrophic conditions" were affecting 69% yes, you read that right! of the country's population. Furthermore,
"Basic services and other critical infrastructure are on the brink of collapse" Over 58 percent of households interviewed reported accessing only between three to eight hours of electricity per day, while almost seven million people only had access to their primary water source between two and seven days per month in June."
Is the world paying attention? In one respect, Syria is more fortunate than Sudan or Yemen, enjoying its very own annual conference of donor nations. At this June's conference, hosted by the European Union, donors pledged an increase in total aid, but the amount still fell $800 million short of what the U.N. was seeking for that country. Worse yet, just before the conference kicked off, the World Food Program announced that it would cut food aid to almost half of Syria's 5.5 million current recipients just when they're most in need.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in deep distress, finds itself in the global spotlight, but not for the suffering its people are experiencing. Its huge deposits of cobalt, copper, and other mineral elements essential to future renewable-energy economies have finally brought it some attention. However, the Global North, transfixed by those priceless minerals, has remained remarkably blind to the wave of human misery now sweeping the Congo.
Last month, Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just back from a trip there, told Democracy Now, "It's the worst hunger catastrophe on Earth. Nowhere else in the world is there more than 25 million people experiencing violence, hunger, disease, neglect. And nowhere in the world is there such a small international response to help, to aid, to end all of this suffering."
As in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, hunger and war have gone hand-in-hand in the Congo. Today, Egelend said, an almost unbelievable 150 or so armed groups vie for power in the cobalt-rich eastern part of the country. In the early 2000s, cobalt was valued for its role in mobile phones and laptops. The stakes are far higher now, with vastly larger quantities required to produce the lithium-ion batteries essential to the development of sprawling new power grids and a vast global fleet of electric vehicles.
Collateral damage radiating from the Congo's ongoing violence includes a hunger crisis, an epidemic of sexual assault by combatants on tens of thousands of civilian women, and so much more. The U.N. sought $2.3 billion in humanitarian assistance for the Congo in 2023. It has, however, only received a measly one-third of that sum, enough to help just one of every 18 people now in desperate need.
On Democracy Now!, Egeland put his finger on the terrible calculations of global economics and diplomacy: "Congo is not ignored by those who want to extract the riches of that place. It is ignored by the rest of the world" As humanity, we're really, really failing Congo now, because it's not Ukraine, it's not the Middle East."
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