DAKAR (Reuters) – The United Nations World Food Programme said on Thursday it urgently requires $162.4 million to support the government of Chad in assisting 2.3 million people in urgent need of food, including over 30,000 who recently fled the conflict in Sudan.
The WFP said it was responding to growing food needs in Chad, but financing shortfalls meant food assistance for refugees and internally displaced people will come to a complete halt this month if no additional funds arrive.
“We need urgent funding to provide rapid food assistance to all vulnerable people in the country,” Pierre Honnorat, WFP’s country director in Chad, said in a statement.
“We are pre-positioning food to respond to the Sudan refugee crisis, but it is a race against time as the rainy season hits in June and access to many areas in Chad will get cut off.”
Some 2.3 million people in Chad, an impoverished central African nation, are in urgent need of food aid, WFP said.
Since hostilities erupted in Sudan three weeks ago, over 30,000 people have crossed the border into Chad to escape the violence, and thousands more may arrive in the coming weeks.
The new arrivals have added to around 600,000 mostly Sudanese refugees already present in Chad after fleeing previous conflicts in their countries.
Separately on Wednesday, the WFP warned that hunger is set to hit a record high in Sudan with an additional 2.5 million people in the country likely to be affected in the coming months as a result of the ongoing bloodshed.
(Reporting by Bate Felix, Edward McAllister and Emma Farge, editing by Mark Heinrich)
