UN agency cuts food rations for Sudan victims

The World Food Program, the United Nations agency responsible for feeding three million people affected by the conflict in Darfur announced on Apr. 26 that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributed there because it was short of money. The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories–about half the level the agency recommends. In March, the agency announced an initial cut of sugar, salt and beans to some Darfur residents, but that reduction did not include grain, blended foods or oil, the rations' main sources of calories. Unicef said this week that malnutrition rates for children in Darfur were rising, with a 20 percent increase in admissions to feeding centers for severely malnourished children since January. Like the World Food Program, Unicef is in a money crunch in Sudan. It has received just $15 million of the $89 million it requested from donors. Last year, malnutrition rates were cut in half, hundreds of thousands of children were sent to school and the mortality rate was reduced, said Ted Chaiban, director of Unicef in Sudan. But with the food program's rations being cut just as the rains begin, more children are bound die, he said.