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HUMANITARIAN IMPLICATIONS OF THE CONFLICT

In addition to the on-going human rights crisis in Darfur spilling over into Chad, there are real fears that the situation could drastically deteriorate on the humanitarian level if speedy action is not taken to avert a potential nutritional crisis in Chad and Darfur. Survival in Darfur is a delicate balance with limited room for margin—while most communities have developed complex coping mechanisms to deal with a single bad season of drought or failed harvest, a second failed, ruined, burned, or looted harvest can push families to the edge of survival. Even if willing to assist, resident communities rarely possess the resources to provide long-term food aid to displaced neighbors.

Currently close to a million people—25 to 30 percent of the estimated population of Darfur—have been forcibly evicted from their homes and fields and have lost most or all their assets, including their resources, livestock and crops. Many in the three most affected ethnic groups have been stripped of their assets or have been forced to sell them, and will be dependent on relief. Relief agencies, however, do not have access to most populations in need in Darfur. Dozens of towns across Darfur have now doubled or tripled in size due to the huge influxes of displaced rural villagers who arrive bearing few belongings, and even if they salvaged some goods or livestock, see their last remaining assets stripped by continuing raids on displaced settlements.

More bad times await the displaced. They will probably have no crops to look forward to in 2004. It is highly unlikely that displaced communities will be able to return home and plant, given the continuing war and insecurity permeating the rural areas, the scale of the destruction of their shelters and water systems, and the lack of seeds and tools. Unless they return to their lands and plant within the next planting season, April-June 2004 at the latest, the 2004 harvest due in October will be drastically reduced, an outcome that is almost certain.

In the few areas of Darfur accessed in early 2004 by aid workers, serious rates of malnutrition are already evident among displaced children under five in some of the areas that have been accessed.⁹¹ The status of children under five is always an indicator of potential food crises; children are among the first to deteriorate when conditions worsen. While the nutritional situation is not yet a widespread emergency, hundreds of malnourished children are already presenting at humanitarian feeding centers.

While relatively better in terms of the security situation for refugees, the situation in Chad is also of concern, not because of a lack of political will on the part of the government to address the needs, but because of the failure of the international community to pledge funds for these immediate relief needs. U.N. pleas for funding of the humanitarian operation in Chad have largely fallen on deaf ears, although the U.S. government did pledge $7 million recently, a welcome development.⁹²

It is also enormously difficult to provide adequate humanitarian relief in this very challenging terrain—a problem shared by both eastern Chad and Darfur. The region’s lack of infrastructure and impending rainy season combined will make access to displaced populations more impossible than it already is. Distributions of bulky logistical items such as food will be a challenge, and although the World Food Programme began airlifts of food to the Chadian border for refugees,⁹³ airlifts are notoriously expensive.

The trauma and poor living conditions faced by many of the displaced should also ring alarm bells, as some U.N. and other humanitarian agencies have already begun to do.⁹⁴ History in Darfur has shown that under such conditions, communities can succumb to man-made famine if adequate, timely and appropriate intervention does not take place.