Sudan’s food crisis deepens as famine risk spreads across Darfur and Kordofan
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has issued a new food insecurity and malnutrition alert for Sudan, warning that parts of Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan are sliding toward famine conditions. Conflict, mass displacement, severe drought and inadequate humanitarian funding are converging on the same populations, leaving families with fewer calories, less water and almost no dependable access to care.
An El Niño-induced drought is affecting roughly half the country and is tightening the pressure on already fragile livelihoods. Food availability is falling, prices are rising and people who depended on farming, grazing or local trade are losing the means to feed their households. In practical terms, the nutritional reserve that protects children, pregnant women, older adults and chronically ill patients from acute decompensation is disappearing fast.
The alert points to alarming levels of acute food insecurity and malnutrition in multiple localities, including new areas of concern. Hunger in this setting is not an isolated social problem; it is a clinical accelerator. As nutritional stores collapse, the body loses muscle mass, immune competence and the ability to recover from even routine infections. A child with severe undernutrition can move from mild diarrhea to shock, sepsis or death with little warning.
Malnutrition is colliding with disease, displacement and a broken care network
Health care across the affected regions is described as extremely limited and, in some places, entirely inaccessible. Clean water is also becoming scarcer, which adds a second layer of risk for communities already exposed to food shortages and overcrowding. In a setting where sanitation is compromised and safe water is unreliable, communicable disease spreads more easily and malnourished people face a higher likelihood of severe illness and death.
That clinical interaction is central to the danger in Sudan right now. Hunger does not act alone. It magnifies the impact of cholera, measles and other infectious threats by weakening host defenses and reducing the body’s capacity to withstand fluid loss, fever and metabolic stress. A poorly nourished population facing disrupted water and health services enters a cycle in which infection worsens malnutrition and malnutrition worsens infection.
The alert also calls for an end to hostilities, protection of civilians, and protection of food, water and health systems. Safe and sustained humanitarian access is especially urgent in frontline areas in North and West Kordofan, where operational barriers can turn a treatable nutritional emergency into a fatal one. Flexible and predictable funding is part of the same equation, because fragmented support cannot sustain feeding programs, water services, supply chains and referral pathways at the scale now required.
WHO’s nutrition response is treating severe acute malnutrition, but the caseload remains enormous
WHO is supporting Sudan’s health and nutrition response, including treatment for children with severe acute malnutrition and medical complications. The practical value of this work is immediate: children with SAM often need not only therapeutic feeding, but also management of infection, dehydration, electrolyte disturbances and other complications that can become fatal during the refeeding process if care is delayed or incomplete.
In 2026, WHO provided training, supplies and other support to all 161 operational nutrition stabilization centres across the country. Between January and August, those centres treated more than 26,000 children with severe acute malnutrition and medical complications. The number is substantial, but it sits beside a much larger emergency still unfolding in communities where care never arrives or arrives too late.
One sentence captures the urgency: severe malnutrition is already entering treatment centers in large numbers while many more children remain out of reach.
The health system has been weakened further by conflict, displacement, attacks on health care and chronic funding shortages. Since 15 April 2023, WHO has verified 228 attacks on health care, with 2,055 deaths and 817 injuries. By 2026, 37% of the country’s health facilities had stopped functioning. Those figures help explain why the alert is not limited to food access alone. A starving population cannot be protected if hospitals are damaged, clinics are empty and referral systems no longer work.
Collapse of infrastructure turns a nutrition emergency into a mortality emergency
The most dangerous feature of the Sudan crisis is the overlap between malnutrition and system failure. Therapeutic feeding requires uninterrupted access to supplies, safe water, trained staff, functioning centers and transport for patients who deteriorate. When any of those links fail, children with severe acute malnutrition are left vulnerable to the infections and metabolic complications that commonly accompany starvation.
The current shortage of water adds another layer of concern. Clean water is essential not only for hydration, but also for safe food preparation, hygiene and the prevention of diarrheal disease. In areas where food is scarce and water is unsafe, families are forced into impossible trade-offs that push already weakened children toward rapid clinical decline.
WHO is calling for increased funding and sustained humanitarian access to expand essential health, nutrition and hygiene services. Only 23% of its US$97.7 million humanitarian appeal is funded. That leaves large gaps in a response that must cover treatment centers, supplies, disease control, water-related interventions and the operational costs of reaching communities isolated by insecurity and drought.
For clinicians, the alert is a reminder that famine risk is rarely a single diagnosis. It is a cascade. Conflict drives displacement, displacement interrupts food production and care-seeking, drought shrinks harvests and water supply, and the health system loses the ability to absorb the shock. By the time severe acute malnutrition is visible at the bedside, the failure has already advanced through agriculture, transport, sanitation and protection systems.
The next phase will depend on whether humanitarian access improves and whether sustained funding reaches the places where the nutritional collapse is deepest. Without those two conditions, the number of children arriving in stabilization centers will keep rising while far more remain outside the health system entirely.