CAIRO – As Sudan’s brutal civil conflict approaches its second full year, a leading global food security monitoring body has delivered a grim new assessment, revealing that more than two-fifths of the war-ravaged nation’s population is already suffering from extreme levels of acute hunger. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global initiative that tracks and grades food insecurity worldwide, published its updated analysis Thursday, laying bare the catastrophic humanitarian fallout of the 14-month-old war between Sudan’s regular army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
According to the report, nearly 19.5 million Sudanese are currently experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity. Of this vulnerable population, 135,000 people are already in the most severe IPC Phase 5, a classification defined by catastrophic food shortages, widespread starvation, acute malnutrition at critical levels, and elevated mortality from hunger and preventable disease.
The IPC’s assessment warns that the situation is on track to worsen dramatically in the coming months, as Sudan enters the annual June-to-September lean season, when crop supplies from the previous harvest are depleted before new yields can be harvested. Looking ahead to 2026, the group projects that roughly 825,000 children under the age of five will develop severe acute malnutrition – a life-threatening condition that disproportionately kills young children in conflict zones. That figure marks a 7% rise from 2024 levels, and a 25% jump from the rates of severe child malnutrition recorded before the war erupted.
Even with limited aid access, more than 98,500 children have already received life-saving treatment for severe acute malnutrition in the first three months of 2025, according to IPC data. But widespread gaps in healthcare and humanitarian access leave hundreds of thousands more without the care they need to survive.
Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict ignited in April 2023, when years of festering power-sharing tensions between the national army and the RSF boiled over into open armed confrontation across the country. The fighting has already killed at least 59,000 people, displaced roughly 13 million Sudanese from their homes, and pushed vast swathes of the country to the brink of mass starvation. Currently, more than 30 million Sudanese – over two-thirds of the country’s pre-war population – require emergency humanitarian assistance to meet basic survival needs.
While the IPC confirmed that no regions across Sudan are currently classified as being in formal famine, the organization warned that 14 local areas across three hard-hit provinces – North Darfur, South Darfur and South Kordofan – are at imminent risk of famine if conflict intensifies, food access continues to shrink, healthcare and sanitation infrastructure further collapses, and more people are forced to flee their homes. Famine was formally confirmed in two Sudanese locations last year: el-Fasher, the largest city in western Darfur, and Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan.
Compounding the existing crisis driven by internal conflict, Sudan’s agricultural sector – the backbone of the country’s food supply – is facing new, external pressures that threaten to deepen food shortages in the coming months. Farmers across the country are bracing for a prohibitively expensive planting season, as key input costs for fertilizer, fuel for farm machinery, and diesel for irrigation pumps have skyrocketed, driven in large part by ongoing tensions in the Middle East that have disrupted global supply chains.
More than half of Sudan’s imported fertilizer arrives via sea routes from the Gulf region, where hundreds of commercial vessels have been stranded in recent weeks amid heightened tensions around the Strait of Hormuz. The resulting supply disruptions have pushed domestic fuel prices in Sudan up by roughly 30%, making it even harder for small-scale farmers to plant the crops that would feed millions in the coming year.