MaximsNewsNetwork: 12 August 2009 - UNMIS: UN Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator Lise Grande says that spiraling inter-tribal conflict, a massive food shortage and a lingering budget crisis are contributing to a "humanitarian perfect storm" brewing in Southern Sudan.
SEE: CHALLENGES FACING SUDAN "ALMOST UNMANAGEABLE" SAYS HUMANITARIAN COORDINATOR, BY CAROLINE PATTON: 13/08/2009,
http://www.maximsnews.com/news20090813perfectstormsudan10908130301.htm
At least 40 percent of the population in southern Sudan is at risk due to factors like spiraling inter-tribal conflict, massive food shortages and a budget crisis brought about by the global economic crisis.
Highlighting grim statistics of what ails the countrys humanitarian situation, Lise Grande, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan said the best way to characterize the humanitarian situation in southern Sudan is as a humanitarian perfect storm.
Grande was speaking in Khartoum at a press conference in which she said that inter-tribal conflicts were increasing in number and intensity.
SOUNDBITE (English) Lise Grande, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan:
Since January of this year more than 2,000 people in southern Sudan have been killed as a result of inter-tribal conflict and a quarter million people have been displaced across the ten states.
She said the attacks were worrying as each attack led to counter-attacks which targeted women and children.
Grande said that massive food deficits caused by a combination of late rains, high levels of insecurity and displacement, disruptions of trade and high food prices were also affecting the south.
The East African region is currently faced with lack of rain and Sudan has also been affected.
SOUNDBITE (English) Lise Grande, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan:
Typically in the South rural population that depends on agriculture to survive go hungry from around the 1st of June to mid August. That first harvest breaks the hunger gap. Now here is the bad news thats failed and its failed because of the rains. What that means is that the hunger gap for large parts of the worlds populations in five critical states is going to be extended not to mid August but all the way through to mid October. There are going to be a lot of hungry people in South Sudan.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is currently faced with a deficit of 16,000 metric tones of food for the south.
Grande also said that the south which heavily relies on oil revenues had lost 40 percent of expected revenues due to the global economic crisis.
SOUNDBITE (English) Lise Grande, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan:
Probably no other government in the region has suffered as much from the global meltdown as South Sudan. It has lost a staggering 40 percent of the revenues that it expected. So 40 percent of what the government thought they were going to have they dont. Why? Because the economy is based entirely or almost entirely on oil and when the price of oil plummeted the revenues that the government of southern Sudan expected havent come on-line.
Grande said the scope of the crisis was overwhelming for agencies including the government and non-governmental organizations working in the south. She said the situation was very tough and organizations in the area were stretched.
SOUNDBITE (English) Lise Grande, UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan:
We are not moving out of the emergency phase fast enough. I know that there is a lot of attention that is given to Darfur. This is deserved. But the key point is that the South deserves much more than it is receiving particularly when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) is entering its critical stage.
She also said it has been hard for all to keep up despite some of the achievements that have been reached, four years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005.
A two decade civil war between the north and the south left much of the south destroyed, marginalized and under-developed.
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