The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — a consortium of 21 organisations including UNICEF, WFP, WHO, and the World Bank — issued a warning Monday that conflict and El Niño-induced drought are driving Darfur and Kordofan toward famine. The dual shock is not coincidence; it is the predictable result of a war that has destroyed agricultural livelihoods precisely when climate stress demanded them most. The numbers are severe. As of May, 19.5 million people — over 40 percent of Sudan's population — faced high levels of acute food insecurity. Of those, 135,000 were classified at IPC Phase 5, the most extreme tier, characterised by starvation, very high malnutrition, and death from disease. The drought is hitting hardest where the fighting is worst: poor vegetation growth affects nearly two-thirds of cropland in North Darfur and about half in South Darfur, West Kordofan, and South Kordofan. The malnutrition data from Nyala, South Darfur, is a leading indicator of what comes next. The proportion of children accessing nutrition services admitted for severe acute malnutrition doubled from approximately 5 percent to 11 percent between January and August. Two displacement camps in South Darfur already recorded global acute malnutrition above famine thresholds. These are not projections — they are current measurements. Sudan's war erupted in April 2023 when tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into open conflict in Khartoum before spreading nationwide. The military controls central and eastern regions; the RSF holds much of Darfur and parts of the south. At least 150,000 people have been killed according to conflict monitor ACLED, though aid groups believe the true toll is higher. Some 13 million people have been displaced — a population roughly the size of Belgium, pushed from their homes inside a single country. The Darfur region, roughly the size of Spain, has absorbed some of the worst violence, including invasions of displacement camps and ethnic cleansing campaigns killing thousands at a time. Western Kordofan is experiencing its worst drought since 2004, with critically low food stocks and delayed rains that wrecked crop cultivation in North Darfur. Healthcare is described as "extremely limited, often entirely inaccessible," and clean water is becoming increasingly scarce — conditions that transform malnutrition into mass mortality through disease. The IPC's forecast is blunt: food insecurity, acute malnutrition, and excess mortality will likely intensify. Farmers' livelihoods have deteriorated, and dependence on food assistance is rising — but aid access in a fractured warzone remains severely constrained. Sudan's army chief, al-Burhan, has rejected talks and vowed to retake all territory from the RSF, foreclosing the diplomatic off-ramp that might allow humanitarian corridors. This is a crisis of compounding fragility. War destroys the systems — agriculture, healthcare, water infrastructure, markets — that populations use to absorb climate shocks. Drought then accelerates the collapse of whatever remains. The extraction is not by a single actor enriching itself, but by two armed factions whose territorial contest has turned 40 percent of the country's population into collateral damage, with the climate amplifying every failure.
