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The head of UNICEF said Sudan is one of the worst places in the world for children.
Catherine Russell said that the country currently has the largest number of displaced children in the world, millions of children face malnutrition, and most children are out of school.
She was travelling to a country devastated by more than a year of brutal civil war, and as warnings of famine grew louder.
The backbone of Sudan’s food economy has collapsed, and the warring parties — the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — are restricting the delivery of much-needed aid.
Ms Russell told the BBC on her way to Nairobi that children were the hardest hit by the hunger crisis: nine million did not have regular access to enough food and nearly four million were severely malnourished.
“We should have acted a long time ago and we must act now or this is only going to get worse,” she said.
“You can always make progress on something, so nothing is completely impossible. But for individual infants, for individual children, for those who are starving now, who are starving, who are severely malnourished now, it’s too late for them.”
Earlier this month,The BBC interviewed a food safety expert The World Health Organization says 70 percent of Sudan’s population will be facing extreme hunger by September.
“This could result in 2.5 million deaths, or even more,” says Timo Gasbeck. “It could be as many as 4 million deaths. There simply won’t be enough food.”
The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Security Forces have roughly divided the country in two and plunged it into a humanitarian disaster.
The army has restricted the flow of food across the conflict line into areas controlled by the Rapid Security Forces.
RSF fighters are accused of rampant resource looting and have been besieging El Fasher, a city of nearly 2 million people, for more than a month.
Ms Russell said she could not tell whether they were using starvation as a weapon of war. But she said the crisis was “100 per cent man-made”.
“Our challenge is not that there is no food, but that we cannot get the food to the people who need it. This is truly a crisis.”
Ms. Russell said Sudan has the largest number of displaced children in the world, at five million, and almost all of them are out of school, at risk of becoming a lost generation, which could exacerbate future instability.
“It’s hard to reteach them because a lot of the knowledge is lost. But getting them back into the classroom is also difficult in many cases,” she said.
“So in that sense, they could be lost… If that is lost, what do we think the future is going to look like? It’s going to be unstable.”
She will join a chorus of calls for an end to the fighting. But recent UN calls for calm in El Fasher have been ignored and US efforts to restart peace talks have so far failed.
Asked why the international community had not been consistently engaged to change the growing chaos in the strategic African country, citing conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Haiti, she said: “Capacity is limited.”
“That’s really why I went, to try to draw attention to this and say, we need to pay attention to this right now. It’s very scary.
“It’s hard to imagine how bad the results would be if we didn’t act.”
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