Radio Miraya
2851: A senior emergency and rehabilitation officer with FAO, Dunja Dujanovic: Food security in South Sudan is deteriorating.
The food security in South Sudan according to the latest results is deteriorating for a number of drivers. Between September and November 2024, so this year an estimated 6.3 million people are classified in order to be called the IPC phase three or above. So these are the crisis levels of food insecurity of acute hunger, meaning those populations that have significant gaps in food consumption, food access in order to be able to lead a healthy life. Of this, about 1.7 million people are facing phase four levels and a further 41,000 are facing phase five levels of acute hunger insecurity, which means that they are effectively facing starvation. That includes about 10,000 people in Malachal, Napa Malstate and about 30,000 Sudanese retroneys who have blood Sudan because of the conflict. So if you compare that to the same period last year, that's about half a million people increase in phase three and above. And what's also concerning is that then in the projection period towards the lean season, so the season before the harvest into next year, April to July 2025, we expect a further worsening of the situation and we will have about 7.69 million people in phase three or above, which is about 57% of the population analyzed. So what is also important to mention is that the malnutrition situation is also really concerning and deteriorating and we have about 2.1 million children between 6 and 59 months suffering or expected to suffer elevated levels of acute malnutrition, including over 60,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition. Most of the cases of acute malnutrition are concentrated in about five states in John Green, Northern Barra, Gazhar, Apalaya, Unity, and Bora. So we can see that overall, the food security situation is fairly concerning looking into next year. All right, thank you for that and maybe just to understand what is driving these levels of acute food insecurity in the country. Of course, we have the climate shock that everybody sounds so down, listening will be very familiar with any particular flooding, which has been quite extensive this year and which of course impacts livelihoods, impacts people's access to humanitarian assistance, but also importantly really devastates as a huge impact on food production, both in terms of crops and in terms of livestock mortality, so that then reduces the availability of food that households have, but also their ability to sell the food of the markets and so their incomes are very impacted as well. What is important to highlight here that flooding is a regular phenomenon in South Sudan, but the flooding this year was 10% higher than in 2023 and this is a trend that we have been seeing over the past years, which is very likely attributable to climate change, so even the shocks that are part of the natural unscaping of a country are now becoming overscaled that is unprecedented and we haven't seen before. And so this is really important to recognize that flooding, but also some of the dry spells that have been affecting the country elsewhere, are going to be of a different scale also going forward as you know South Sudan regularly features in some of the risk notifications in terms of one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change impact. There is also the issue of the macroeconomic crisis currently affecting the country that is generating a currency depreciation and high inflation driving up food prices and obviously that makes it very hard for families to afford basic needs and access the food that is needed to feed the households which then translates obviously into the food insecurity numbers that we see. Related to this is also the agricultural production because while it has been steadily improving in the country also with the help of actors such as FAL while he grows into the government on significantly increasing agricultural production still. In many areas of the country we need a lot more sustained investments to make sure that the communities are fully taking advantage of the resources that they have and are increasing local production and decreasing independence than on external assistance which is what in fact FAL is supporting the communities with. And lastly of course the peace agreement in South Sudan has been fundamental in really helping with the conflict dynamics especially at local level and we have seen improved access over time which has helped with humanitarian assistance and with agricultural assistance of the type we provide yet localized conflict scale so persistent part of the country and does hinder access and does disrupt people's livelihoods on a daily basis and this is something that we need to also take into account and which is affecting food insecurity it is also driving displacement as we know displaced populations are highly vulnerable to to food insecurity. Given the factors that you've already mentioned there driving factors what is FAL doing about it? Really investing in emergency agriculture is a fundamental way to address this worsening acute food insecurity that we see input seeds told with which the populations can resume food production but also things like fishing input so that blood affected communities which have also been displaced have easily the means to obtain food that's readily available in the rivers in fact overall the needs under the humanitarian response plan for the FAL South Sudan emergency operations is about 60 million dollars to support around 4 million people but let's say that in addition to this information which consists of sort of a package of interventions even an investment of 10 million dollars for emergency seed distribution could help produce between 150 and 200 millions of dollars of food production through this investment because investing in agriculture also in humanitarian prices is not only a way to address immediate hunger but it's also a way to give people the means to start generating production to help the local economy and to help put people on the path out of acute food insecurity and onto a path of development. We are doing a lot to grow the resilience of vulnerable households to future shocks so really looking at agriculture as an entry point to development to what I was saying just now putting these households on the path or out of acute hunger giving them the means to produce their local food so that they don't depend on on assistance anymore in the future so we have a large resilience building program in across the whole country where we help farmers diversify and increase production, we link farmers to markets, we develop value chains, we build key infrastructure and so you know through these efforts and also supported the government in these efforts we've hit a really important benchmark in in South Sudan in general which as a country has achieved a one million metric tons of cereal production this year for the first time in over the past decade and so it's a really big moment and Faui itself now purchases over 50 percent of our seeds locally in fact of the local markets which wasn't the case before years ago so this gives that an idea that agriculture in South Sudan is really the entry point for development, for boosting, for addressing food insecurity and we have a number of entry points that we can invest in to help with that and to put these communities in the path of recovery but then also investing in things like irrigation systems, surface water harvesting where there is little water or where there is no clean water in fact during our visit we then we visited a really great multi-purpose water infrastructure project in Libya which brought clean water to the community and that undressed so many issues in that community in terms of sustaining crop production in terms of providing water to animals but also separately providing clean water to the community which really changed so much the situation within the community in terms of diseases also in terms of how well the children were doing because as we know malnutrition and the ability of children to absorb nutrients is very much linked also to health and to water and sanitation and to clean water but also then investing in community-based infrastructures such as flood defenses, early warning system, react to floods in an earlier way this is a big part of South South Sudan's work at the moment working with the government and other partners to invest in better early warning ahead of floods, ahead of drought so that we can put in place actions ahead of time, help people evacuate, evacuate their animals, help them better absorb these shocks and not be again sort of you know have their life was entirely disrupted and have everything again experience acute hunger but prevent that from happening beforehand. Thank you so much, Aduna, for joining Radio Miraya.