How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT
Famine has plagued South Sudan for many decades. This situation is due not only to the geographical position of this country but also to the rapid climate change and ethnic wars. Several solutions have tried to bring relief to this significant problem of famine without real success. Therefore, it is advisable to think of it differently. In this work, I analyze the reel causes and impact of the famine in South Sudan. To bring the solution to the famine in this region, I suggest looking at the Israeli system of irrigation that succeeded in the desert and implementing it in the South Sudan context considering its realities to develop intensive agriculture and boost the country’s development.
KEYWORDS
Famine, Mass displacement
INTRODUCTION
South Sudan has experienced many famines, which cause the mass displacement of its population and animals. The frequent famine experience has long pushed the government and international community to overcome this great challenge. However, this situation also fuels ethnic conflict underpinning the political and economic stability of the country with consequences of violating human rights. How can Israel’s case of irrigation serve as a model to end or reduce a significant percentage of famine in South Sudan?
MAIN CORPUS
Understanding Reel Causes and Impact of Famine in South Sudan
Although famine can sometimes result from man-made catastrophes caused by wars and economic collapse, most famines in South Sudan are caused by natural disasters. Consequently, this force over 4 million people – 1 in 3 –to flee their homes. In addition, nearly 2.5 million have fled to neighboring countries. Famine has short- and long-term effects on physical health (especially severe undernutrition of children, pregnant women, adults) and economy and flaws in all society activities sectors. On adult health, the long-term effects of famine are the depression of the economic development of South Sudan. The coordination of humanitarian efforts contributed to addressing this issue so far. However, if nothing is done greater, the exact cause will produce the same effect and result in a repeated and continuous conflict.
South Sudan Famine Situation
South Sudan suffered the 1998 famine before its independence. On 20 February 2017, the UN officially declared famine in parts of South Sudan. This was due to several years of instability in the country’s food supply caused by war and drought. The famine primarily focused on the northern part of the country. An estimated five million people (nearly 50% of the South Sudanese population) were affected. In May 2017, the famine was officially declared to have weakened to a state of severe food insecurity. The international community uttered famine was man-made, pointing to the current conflict to generate such conditions. 70 000 TO 100 000 were reportedly died during the famine. In 2018 the UN, through the coordinated effort of its agencies, the World Food Program, the United Nations Children’s Fund), called for sustainable peace across the country. However, inadequate rainfall in 2018 has exacerbated the effects of the conflict and reduced crop production. A handful of peace agreements have been signed for the war — the most current in September 2018, but they have been constantly violated. But the situation in South Sudan remains precarious, and eruptions of violence continue.
Israel’s Land Reclamation Case as an Example For Zero Hunger in South Sudan
South Sudan is mainly covered in tropical forests, swamps, and grassland. The White Nile passes through the country, passing by the capital city of Juba. Half the water of the White Nile is lost in the swamps as vegetation absorbs it or animals drink it. The Sudd, the Bar El Gazal, and the Sobat River swamps provide a significant resource for wild animals and livestock. Referring to the case of Israel, a state-of-the-art irrigation system can be built from the Nile with a sophisticated drainage system. This, of course, requires coordination of effort at the highest summit of the Sudanese state. It demands the framing of a comprehensive program to develop the country’s soil and water resources. It requires numerous outstanding experts, such as specialists in soil science, forestry, horticulture plant breeding, and civil engineering. This expertise is to establish the ultimate modern agriculture in short order. Above this, a thriving national land development program should be found through a land inventory and classification according to their relative exposure to erosion and the water. Another critical point is to build the staff capacity in this domain to carry out such a mission in a particular department of agricultural engineering. With this system, South Sudan will develop a water supply and sufficient agriculture for its population.
SUMMARY *
The article proceeds from a diagnosis to a proposal. The diagnosis describes recurrent famine in a country whose water resources are substantial, and notes that the international assessment of the 2017 famine attributed it principally to the conflict rather than to drought. The proposal is technological: that the intensive irrigation and land reclamation methods developed in Israel could be adapted to the swamps and river systems of South Sudan to produce food security. The author’s closing question, whether continuing hostilities would permit such a programme, acknowledges the difficulty on which the proposal depends.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this process, our job has been to understand whether the Israeli desert irrigation system can be applied to southern Sudan to end severe famine. After analyzing the causes and consequences of this ending, it emerges that the Israeli example could well be used to the south of Sudan, considering its realities. Such a system undoubtedly requires hard work and coordination of financial and technical efforts at the highest summit of the Sudanese state. But will the ongoing hostilities favor the development of such a system?
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The author’s closing question is the decisive one, and the answer that emerges from famine research is uncomfortable for the proposal that precedes it. Famine in South Sudan has been repeatedly assessed, including by the United Nations bodies that declared it in 2017, as arising principally from armed conflict rather than from water scarcity. Fighting displaces farmers at planting time, destroys stored harvests, prevents markets from functioning and blocks relief convoys. Where that is the mechanism, infrastructure does not resolve it, and infrastructure built into an active conflict tends to become a target, a source of contested revenue, or both.
This does not dispose of the technical argument, but it reorders it. Water management has genuine potential in a country with the resources described here, and small scale approaches are considerably more promising than large ones in these conditions: community managed water harvesting, flood recession agriculture using the existing seasonal cycle, improved seed and storage, and veterinary support for pastoralists. Such measures are cheap, quick to deploy, and, crucially, resilient, because they do not depend on a functioning central state or on security along hundreds of kilometres of canal.
The Sudd deserves particular caution, and this is where the analogy with Israel becomes misleading. Draining that wetland has been attempted before, in the Jonglei Canal project, which was halted in 1983 and became a grievance in the war that followed, partly because the communities whose grazing and fishing depend on the seasonal flood were not consulted. The Sudd is not wasted water; it is the basis of a pastoral economy and a major ecosystem, and it is also the subject of downstream interests under the Nile water agreements. A project altering it would create new conflicts while addressing an old one.
The comparison itself is worth examining rather than dismissing. What made Israeli agriculture work was not principally the technology but the conditions surrounding it: functioning institutions, secure land tenure, decades of investment, research capacity and a state able to plan. Those are precisely what South Sudan lacks, and they are what any transfer would have to build first. Read that way, the article’s proposal converges with its own closing question: the sequence runs from settlement to institutions to infrastructure, not the reverse.
That places the immediate work where this journal would locate it. Local peace agreements between communities over cattle, grazing routes and water points have been negotiated successfully in South Sudan and have reduced violence in specific areas even while the national conflict continued. Humanitarian access negotiated with all armed actors saves lives now. And the implementation of the revitalised national agreement, particularly the provisions on security arrangements and the sharing of oil revenue, determines whether anything longer term becomes possible. Famine here is a political outcome, and the instruments that address it are political ones.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
References
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Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team
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Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, Addis Ababa, 12 September 2018.
Checchi, F. et al. (2018). Estimates of Crisis Attributable Mortality in South Sudan, December 2013 to April 2018. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London.
de Waal, A. (2018). Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. Polity Press, Cambridge.
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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, country programme documentation on agriculture and livelihoods in South Sudan, Rome.