More than half of South Sudan’s population is now facing acute food insecurity, according to the latest assessment by humanitarian agencies operating in the country, making the situation one of the most severe hunger crises in the world at a moment when international attention has largely shifted elsewhere. Aid workers on the ground describe conditions not seen since the country’s worst famine declaration in 2017, when parts of the country were officially declared to be in a state of famine for the first time since the concept was globally formalised.
The drivers of the crisis are a familiar and devastating combination: heavy seasonal flooding that has damaged crop fields and displaced communities from their farmland; persistent insecurity that blocks aid delivery routes; and a collapsing economy that has pushed the South Sudanese pound to historic lows against the dollar, making imported food prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population. The result is a slow-motion catastrophe that lacks the dramatic visual immediacy of a natural disaster but is, in sheer scale, far more lethal.
International humanitarian funding has fallen sharply over the past two years, as donor governments — many of them facing domestic economic pressure and competing priorities — have reduced their commitments to South Sudan. The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that its current operations in the country are sustainable only through July unless new funding is secured. WFP officials say they have been forced to reduce rations across several states, a decision that compounds the vulnerability of families already living on the edge.
The political situation adds another layer of complication. South Sudan’s transitional government, formed after years of bloody civil war, remains fragile. Rival factions within the ruling coalition have been disputing control over security portfolios and resource revenues, creating policy paralysis at the very moment when decisive action on the food crisis is needed. The SPLM/A, the former rebel movement turned governing party, is struggling to present a united front on the emergency.
For the people of South Sudan — a population whose average age is under 21, meaning most have known nothing but conflict and dependence on international aid — the choices are brutal in their simplicity: move to a displacement camp where conditions are overcrowded and disease spreads quickly, or stay on ancestral land where flooding has ruined this year’s harvest and there is no income to buy food at markets that are themselves running low. Neither option is safe. Both carry the risk of starvation.
What is striking aid workers most acutely is the absence of global media attention. The crisis in South Sudan has developed gradually, without a single triggering event that commands headlines. There are no dramatic rescue images, no high-profile celebrity appeals, no viral social media moments. The famine is unfolding in near-silence. “People are dying one by one, in their homes, in the bush, in displacement camps,” one aid worker told journalists in Juba last week. “We know the numbers. We are watching it happen. And the world has moved on.”
The World Food Programme has called for an emergency donors conference and has urged Gulf states and emerging economies with interests in East African stability to contribute. Whether that call is heeded will determine whether South Sudan enters a second formal famine declaration — a distinction no country should have to endure twice in a single decade.