Darfuri refugees wait to be registered at Gaga Camp in eastern Chad in this January 2006 file photo. REUTERS/Claire Soares
'Adding insult to injury' in Darfur, putting a number on the displaced and a planet in peril.For more than 6 million people dependent on food aid across Sudan, some very grim news: The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to halve rations to vulnerable Sudanese due to severe funding shortages.
The move comes as the agency struggles to stretch limited stocks as far as possible during the July-September "hunger season", when needs are greatest before the next harvest. Daily rations for millions will be reduced to 1,050 kilocalories ' half the minimum daily requirement of 2,100 kilocalories.
"This is one of the hardest decisions I have ever made,' WFP chief James Morris said in a statement. "Haven't the people of Darfur suffered enough? Aren't we adding insult to injury?
"It's so hard to understand this funding shortfall because last year official development assistance climbed all the way to $107 billion ' double what it was just a few years ago. Donors are being incredibly generous ' but they are not putting victims of humanitarian crises like Darfur first on their list."
So just how underfunded are humanitarian operations? The WFP has appealed for $746 million to feed 6.1 million people in Darfur as well as southern, central and eastern Sudan and the so-called Three Areas comprising Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile. So far it has received just $238 million or 32 percent.
And how do the donors that have given money stack up? Here's the break-down so far for the WFP's 2006 emergency appeal:
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Last month we made something of a song and dance about a report by Nigeria's National Commission for Refugees that said religious fighting, land disputes and communal conflicts had driven more than 3 million Nigerians from their homes since 1999.
If true, this jaw-dropping statistic would give Nigeria the dubious honour of being home to the third-highest number of internally displaced people in the world after Sudan and Colombia, which have 5.4 million and up to 3.7 million, respectively.
We ran the number by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which considers the number of people uprooted in Nigeria to be "undetermined" and therefore gives no estimate on its website.
"The Nigeria estimate is widely considered to be grossly exaggerated," Jens Eschenbaecher, head of the IDMC's monitoring and advocacy department, said. "It seems that even the 200,000 used by the U.N. may be too high a figure."
Why are the numbers be so wildly different? It seems the National Commission for Refugees got it wrong.
Nigeria's migration and humanitarian affairs chief, Moremi Soyinka-Onijala, has come up with a revised figure of 500,000 people displaced in the past five years due to ethnic, religious and socio-political conflicts, according to Nigerian newspaper This Day (monitored on AllAfrica.com).
While still a shocking figure, and one worthy of world attention, it's a far cry from 3 million announced in March. The discrepancy also suggests big room for improvement in the way Nigeria's humanitarian bodies talk to each other, a point acknowledged by Soyinka-Onijala.
Announcing the creation of a new ministry of humanitarian affairs to cater for displaced people, she was quoted as saying: "We realise what was lacking was a collaborative structure. That resulted in inefficiency and ineffectiveness."
The new ministry will absorb the National Commission for Refugees and the National Emergency Management Agency, the newspaper said.
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Knowing how many people have been displaced by conflict is always a tricky business ' and no more so than in Democratic Republic of Congo, where smouldering violence in the remote east is helping fuel one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
The U.N. refugee body, UNHCR, estimates that 1.6 million Congolese are internally displaced across Congo, a country larger than Western Europe and where fighting, hunger and disease have claimed almost 4 million lives since 1998.
The official number of internally displaced people (IDPs) is likely to grow from next week, when UNHCR plans to begin registering thousands of Congolese who were forced from their homes in conflict-ravaged Katanga province.
The agency estimates that 15,000-20,000 IDPs may be sheltering in several villages in the Mitwaba area, having fled attacks by Mai-Mai militia and government soldiers.
UNHCR staff say many of the new arrivals have been hiding for weeks in the bush and are malnourished, utterly exhausted and suffering from skin diseases.
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For those struggling to get their heads round the many environmental risks facing the globe, Le Monde Diplomatique has produced a useful atlas of current threats -- Planet in Peril. There's a limited amount available online but there are graphic guides to melting polar ice caps, the spread of GM organisms, and the role of China in climate change.
You'll need to get hold of a hard copy to see disturbing forecasts of rising water shortages (with half of the world's population expected to be running short within the next 30 years), the sharp contrast in food consumption between the 'overweight North and rickety South', and how climate change could spread malaria ' with the southern states of the U.S. at possible risk.
That's it for now.
Tim Large AlertNet Deputy Editor
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