WFP races to deliver food for refugees in eastern Chad

The World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday warned that life-saving programmes in Chad will grind to a halt in a matter of weeks without urgent funding.

The stark warning comes as thousands of Sudanese refugees continue to stream across the border from Darfur, and as the rainy season looms, threatening to cut off road access for humanitarian deliveries to the camps in the east of the country – where around a million Sudanese refugees have sought shelter.

WFP’s assistance will be suspended for 1.2 million Sudanese refugees and crisis-affected people in April due to funding shortfalls, including for new Sudanese refugees, the UN organisation said.

Also at risk is the vital cross-border life-line supply route into Darfur which is the only reliable route into embattled western Sudan. This route has enabled WFP to assist one million people in Darfur since August, and the organization plans to scale up assistance to reach one million people a month.

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WFP is racing to procure, transport and pre-position enough stocks in the east of Chad to supply both its refugee response and its Darfur cross-border operations through the rainy season that will see roads become impassable mud rivers littered with stranded trucks. But without adequate funding, it warned that this will be impossible.

“We are in a race against time. The small window to pre-position supplies is closing rapidly and our funding is drying up at this dramatic juncture. We’ve already cut our operations in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, leaving hungry people close to starvation,” said Pierre Honnorat, WFP’s Representative and Country Director in Chad.

“The spillover from the crisis in Sudan is overwhelming an underfunded and overstretched humanitarian response in Chad. We need donors to prevent the situation from becoming an all-out catastrophe,” Honnorat cautioned.

Ten months after the violent conflict broke out in Sudan, over 559,000 Sudanese refugees and 150,000 Chadian returnees have reportedly crossed into Chad, which now hosts more than one million refugees.

This figure makes it home to one of the largest and fastest-growing refugee populations in Africa.

Chad is also facing its fifth consecutive year of food crisis, with record acute hunger set to affect 2.9 million people during the June-August lean season, which coincides with the rainy season. In February, the Government declared a food and nutrition emergency – highlighting the urgency of the situation.