South Sudan is on the brink of a full-scale famine, the United Nations’s top humanitarian official warned Friday, as a combination of intensifying armed conflict, economic collapse, and climate shocks converge to create conditions that aid agencies describe as deeply alarming. UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher told the UN Security Council that hunger is tightening its grip on the young nation, with millions of lives hanging in the balance.
Words of Condemnation — and a Government Response
In unusually direct language for a senior UN official, Fletcher accused South Sudan’s government of ignoring the early warning signs and refusing to acknowledge the scale of the crisis unfolding within its borders. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reportedly backed those remarks, charging that the government in Juba has failed to express “any sense of urgency” in addressing what UN agencies are calling a looming catastrophe.
The South Sudanese government pushed back sharply against the characterization. Information Minister Michael Makuei dismissed the warnings as exaggerated and politically motivated, insisting that the government was working diligently to address food insecurity. Makuei’s comments drew swift rebuke from opposition politicians and civil society groups, who argued that the official response reflects a dangerous denialism at the highest levels.
The Numbers Behind the Crisis
The statistics are stark. South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011, has spent much of its short life in civil war. The 2018 peace agreement brought a fragile calm to parts of the country, but violence has surged again since late 2024, particularly in the Upper Nile, Unity, and Jonglei states. Hundreds of thousands of people have been newly displaced, many of them farmers who have lost their livestock and crops to both fighting and flooding.
The World Food Programme has warned that without urgent intervention, parts of the country could see famine conditions — technically defined using the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale — within months. The last time South Sudan declared famine was in 2017; that declaration was withdrawn seven months later after a massive international response.
A Perfect Storm of Crises
What makes the current situation particularly dangerous is the convergence of multiple pressures. Armed conflict disrupts planting and harvesting seasons. Flooding — made worse by climate change — has submerged farmland in several key agricultural zones. The South Sudanese pound has weakened sharply against the US dollar, making food imports prohibitively expensive for most households.
Oil revenue, which accounts for the vast majority of South Sudan’s national budget, has been volatile. And donor funding, which once supplemented government spending on essential services, has declined as humanitarian fatigue sets in globally.
“The window to act is narrowing by the day,” one country director for a major NGO told reporters. “Every week we delay, the cost in human lives grows.”