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UN agencies and the South Sudanese government have warned the ongoing war has left nearly 100,000 people.
Albert Gonzalez Farran / Albert Gonzalez Farran – UNICEF
Famine in South Sudan has left 100,000 people facing starvation and nearly 8 million people in need of immediate assistance, UN agencies say.
Dire shortages, caused by the long-running civil war and subsequent economic instability, are starving thousands in Unity Province, Leer, Mayendit and Koch counties, clustered towards the northern part of the country.
“They have sold their last goods; they have fled fighting; they have kept their children in school wherever possible; and they have eaten anything from grasses to bulbs to stay alive,” James Elder, UNIECF's head of communications for eastern and southern Africa, told BuzzFeed News.
“They have run out of ways to cope.”
South Sudan, which ceded from Sudan in 2011 to become world's newest nation, has been entangled in conflict for the past 50 years.
But following its independence, conflict between President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar, who were once allies in the country's fight for independence, has further ravaged South Sudan. Fighting between factions aligned with Kiir and Machar has displaced more than two million people. As many as 50,000 people have been killed, according to the UN.
A peace deal between the two leader was signed in 2015, and a transitional government was installed the following year — only to violently fall apart months later, plunging the country back into conflict.
Albert Gonzalez Farran / Albert Gonzalez Farran – UNICEF
South Sudan has been declared on the brink of famine twice in the past three years. But aid agencies say this time is different, because they cannot reach the affected areas.
“Those facing famine today, they have been cut off by fighting and denials of humanitarian access,” according to Elder.
Famine, under the definition used by the UN and the World Food Program (WFP), is declared when all three of the following criteria are met: 30% of children are acutely malnourished, 20% of the population faces extreme food shortages, at least two people out of 100,000 are dying from hunger.
Goran Tomasevic / Reuters
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