Drought and war push Sudan's west closer to famine
A new alert from the global hunger monitor says conditions in Darfur and Kordofan are worsening fast, as the harvest fails and aid falls further behind.
On Monday 12th October, the world's main hunger monitor warned that the risk of famine is growing in western Sudan, where a drought linked to El Niño has wrecked this year's crops in the regions worst hit by the war.
The warning came from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, which measures hunger for governments and aid agencies. It is a partnership of 21 organisations, including UN agencies and the World Bank.1 The IPC said conflict, displacement and drought were "driving an increased risk of Famine in parts of Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan".2
This was an alert, not a new assessment: a last-resort warning, issued when conditions worsen too fast to wait for a full analysis. It declares no famine and gives no new estimate of how many people are hungry.2
What the new evidence shows
The IPC grades hunger in five phases, from Minimal (Phase 1) to Catastrophe or Famine (Phase 5). Individual households can be in Catastrophe anywhere. A whole area is in Famine only when three thresholds are crossed together: one household in five faces an extreme lack of food, 30% of young children are acutely malnourished, and two people in every 10,000 die each day from hunger, malnutrition and disease.2
The alert reports that malnutrition has passed the second threshold in two camps. A survey in August and September of four camps for displaced people in Eastern Jebel Marra, in South Darfur, found acute malnutrition among children at 38% in one camp and 30.8% in another. Death rates there were at emergency levels, and nearly a quarter of households reported severe hunger.23
Across Greater Darfur, 13 of the 17 nutrition surveys carried out since January found critical levels of acute malnutrition.2
The new factor is drought. It covers more than half of Sudan. In North Darfur, 64% of cropland shows poor plant growth; in South Darfur, West Kordofan and South Kordofan the figure is about half. Rain came in September, too late for most cereal crops. The IPC says rainfall in West Kordofan points to one of the region's worst droughts since 2004, and that cereal prices will very likely keep rising.2
The IPC's Famine Review Committee, the panel that confirms famine classifications,4 backed the alert. It wrote: "Famine is the collapse of systems." It added: "We are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe, already of historic proportions."2
What the May assessment found
The last full assessment, published on 14th May, gives the wider picture. Between February and May 2026, nearly 19.5 million people, about 41% of Sudan's population, faced high levels of acute food insecurity (Phase 3 or worse). About 135,000 of them were in Phase 5, Catastrophe.56 Those figures describe the spring, not the situation in October.
In May, no area was classified in Famine. In an assessment published in November 2025, the IPC had classified El Fasher, in North Darfur, and the besieged town of Kadugli, in South Kordofan, as in Famine.4 By May, it said, conditions there had improved somewhat, mainly because people had left for places where they could find aid and food to buy.5 Instead, the May assessment identified 14 areas in North Darfur, South Darfur and South Kordofan at risk of famine during the June-to-September lean season, under a "reasonable worst-case scenario". All but one were still expected to be at risk from October to January.5
Its projections covered only 56 of Sudan's 195 localities and camps, because data were missing for the rest. For October 2026 to January 2027, it projected that nearly 4.9 million people in those areas would face high levels of acute food insecurity. It expected an above-average harvest to improve food supplies from October.5 In this week's alert, the Famine Review Committee instead described "a near record-poor harvest".2
A war fought over food
Sudan's war began in April 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, in the capital, Khartoum, and spread across the country.6 The army holds sway in central and eastern Sudan, while the RSF controls Darfur and parts of the south.1
The alert calls Kordofan "the epicentre of Sudan's conflict". More than 300,000 people there have been forced from their homes since October 2025. There have been more than 170 airstrikes, looting incidents or armed clashes in its markets this year. Kadugli and Dilling remain at risk of full siege, and the city of El Obeid, in North Kordofan, depends on a single supply route from Kosti that is vulnerable to drone strikes.2
Aid is falling further behind
As of 8th October, the UN-coordinated Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Sudan had received less than half the money it requested. Food security work was 42% funded and nutrition 30%.2 By August, only 26% of the children expected to need treatment for severe malnutrition with medical complications had received it. Without treatment, the IPC says, as many as two-thirds of those children could die.23
Two trucks contracted by the World Food Programme, or WFP, came under fire on 2nd and 3rd October, and at least one person was killed.2
At the Security Council
On Friday 16th October the United States asked the UN Security Council to back a humanitarian truce and widen the arms embargo on Sudan. "We need a humanitarian truce," said Jeff Bartos, a US ambassador at the UN, according to Radio Tamazuj.7
China and Russia opposed a wider embargo, as they had when the council renewed the existing Darfur-only embargo on 8th October. Sudan's ambassador, Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, said a truce would require the RSF to withdraw to designated assembly points under international monitoring. He said, according to the same report, that the government had extended the opening of its border crossing with Chad for aid until 31st December.7
The week before, on 6th October, Sudan's military chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, had rejected negotiations and promised to take back "every inch" of territory held by the RSF.8
The May assessment projected that conditions would ease from October as the harvest came in. That relief has not arrived. The drought has hit hardest in the same regions as the fighting, where food was already hardest to grow, buy and deliver. The areas of greatest concern are also the hardest to measure, which is why the IPC could issue only a warning rather than a new count. A shortage of data there is not evidence that conditions are better.
What remains unresolved
The alert declares no new famine. Whether any area has crossed the famine line depends on surveys that fighting and restricted access make hard to carry out.
The aid plan remains less than half funded as the failed harvest begins to take effect.
And there is still no truce: the army's chief has rejected talks, and the Security Council is divided over how far to press either side.