Darfur Facing 'Inevitable' Famine

On top of all the other suffering in Darfur, the people there now face what USATODAY.com describes as an 'inevitable' famine.

Food prices have doubled, immigrants' remittances have been cut off, and the demand for day labor and homemade handicrafts has collapsed. And now the region enters the annual hungry season —gafaf, they call it — when food from the last harvest runs low and daily meals drop from three to two to one.

It all means that Darfur, so benighted that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan likened it to "hell on earth," faces another curse: famine. A Tufts University study released earlier this year says that because of problems unprecedented even in Darfur's tortured history, "regionwide famine appears inevitable."

If so, the international community — already struggling to reach the 2.6 million of Darfur's 6 million people who need help — may have to feed and shelter even more. And this effort, second only to the tsunami relief operation in South Asia, promises to stretch on for years, until some way is found to put Darfur back together again.

It is particularly telling that, after all the words about genocide, "all agree that violence is no longer the primary killer."

As usual with Darfur, few are talking about this new catastrophe hitting those who have survived the previous catastrophes of the region.

"People are starving and no one is reporting it, because technically they are not starving," says Bir Chandra Mandal, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Program emergency director in South Darfur. They die from TB (tuberculosis) or malaria or diarrhea, their immune systems weakened by malnutrition. He calls it an "invisible famine."