Darfur News: Farms Destroyed, Stricken Sudan's Darfur Faces Food Crisis

This amazingly poignant article was on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal,and has been reprinted (with permission) by the Sudan Tribune.
Excerpts:

After the killings, the rapes, and the expulsion of nearly two million farmers from their land, the people of Darfur are now facing a new threat -- the worst food shortage in decades.

As the need for longer-term aid in Darfur escalates, the world's attention has shifted to the tsunami devastation in Asia. Last year, the U.N. branded Darfur the "world's worst humanitarian crisis." Post-tsunami, Ramiro Lopes da Silva, the WFP's Sudan director, wryly refers to Darfur as "what is now the number two emergency in the world."

So far, full-blown famine has been kept at bay with help from food rushed into Darfur by the U.N.'s World Food Program. The U.S. is the program's largest donor. In December, the WFP fed about 1.5 million people in Darfur. But the agency is predicting a steep rise in the number it will need to feed this year -- up to at least 2.7 million a month -- as displaced farmers continue to file into camps and city residents and herders become more desperate. The amount of food WFP says it needs to bring to Darfur this year is triple what it needed in 2004, or more than 450,000 tons.

Although the U.S. has labeled the events in Darfur a genocide and other countries have called it an ethnic cleansing, no western military force has joined a peacekeeping mission that now consists of a small African Union deployment. U.S. diplomats complain that their attempts to get the U.N. to impose sanctions on Sudan's government have been stymied by other countries, notably China, which is a major partner in Sudan's oil production.