Rains, insecurity hampering aid delivery to Darfur

Heavy rainfall and ongoing insecurity are slowing down the delivery of humanitarian assistance to many parts of the strife-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur, aid workers warned on Wednesday. "It is a nightmare to move food; the rains are much worse than last year," Diego Fernandez, head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) field office in Kabkabiya, in the west of North Darfur State, told IRIN. WFP emergency coordinator for Darfur, Carlos Veloso, confirmed that the amount of rain that had fallen in Darfur was above the region’s average. "In terms of the quantity of rain, this is very good news for the expected harvest next year, but right now it does delay the turnaround of our trucks to El Fasher and Nyala [the capitals of North and South Darfur respectively] by a couple of days," Veloso said on Wednesday. "The rains [in North Darfur] started at the beginning of July, and it rained for 13 days in a row," Mawut Deng, a WFP field monitor in Kabkabiya, added. In 2004, Kabkabiya received 296 mm of rain over the whole year, but during the first two weeks of July 2005 alone, 275 mm of rain had flooded the area. "We had 19 of our trucks with sugar, salt, peas and lentils stuck in Birkat Seira [on the border of North and West Darfur] for 2 weeks," Deng noted. He added that food deliveries were being delayed as trucks got stuck in wadis - seasonal riverbeds - and suffered many more flat tyres than usual. "Since two commercial trucks sunk to their roofs into a wadi near Birkat Seira, trucking companies refuse to go west of Kabkabiya and we can only use our own trucks," Fernandez said. "It will get worse throughout August," Deng warned. Veloso said a lot of food had been pre-positioned in strategic towns with high beneficiary populations in order to guarantee smooth distributions throughout the rainy season and the so-called hunger gap, which usually lasts until October. "This year, we also started food distributions in rural villages to avoid IDP [internally displaced persons] camps becoming magnets for the surrounding populations during the rainy season," Veloso added. Fernandez also noted that bandits, particularly on the road to Tawila town, east of Kabkabiya, were kidnapping drivers and hijacking their trucks. "Incidents are happening on a weekly basis," he said. "It is a big worry," Veloso acknowledged. "Our trucks are being attacked and we need to stop this." He added that ten of the trucks that had been hijacked in Darfur over the past year had not been recovered. Despite the difficulties, Veloso did not expect people to go without food in Darfur. "Across Darfur, the rates of malnutrition are better than they were last year and there has been a decrease in admissions to feeding centres when compared to a few weeks ago," he noted. He said the improvements were a result of the distribution of food to approximately two million people – one third of the total population - in June and July, the sanitation and health services that were being provided in IDP camps and the Darfur-wide immunisation campaigns. "There has been an improvement, but overall malnutrition rates are still above what is considered the emergency threshold," he cautioned. Veloso also noted that the funding situation was "very dark", as WFP had borrowed a lot of money from its own internal resources to be able to pre-position food in the region ahead of the rainy season. "Now that the situation has been solved, donors forget that we never got the money for this emergency operation," he said. Meanwhile, following heavy rains on 3 August, El Fasher flooded, resulting in the death of eight people. More than 2,000 families were reportedly displaced and an estimated 600 houses destroyed, the International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) reported on Wednesday. The State government of North Darfur, UN agencies and NGOs were providing relief items and temporary shelter to those families who lost their houses, the World Health Organization reported on Wednesday in a weekly update on Darfur.