UN testing suspect food donated by Sudan
June 7, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The World Food Programme (WFP) is testing food donated by the Sudanese government for people in its war-torn western Darfur region to see if it is fit for human consumption, officials said.
Two U.N. sources who declined to be named said the 20,000 tonnes of sorghum, from Sudan’s strategic food reserves, had been kept for too long and was infested with insects.
The head of WFP, James Morris, on a visit to Sudan, said he could not confirm the food was unusable as it was being tested.
“I suspect that a quick visual look at the food suggested that maybe it had been in storage for some time and we needed to double check and be sure and that it was safe,” he told reporters in the capital Khartoum on Wednesday.
In May WFP was forced to halve its food rations to 2.7 million Darfuris caught up in the three years of rape, pillage and murder in Sudan’s remote west, where rebels took up arms in 2003 accusing the Arab-dominated central government of neglect.
The United Nations says the government responded to the rebellion by arming a proxy mostly Arab militia, accused of a campaign of violence which the United States calls genocide.
The international community responded quickly to the May food crisis and WFP now says rations are at about 85 percent for June until September, a period of scarce local food supply.
Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, who rarely talks to the media, called a news conference at the presidential palace in Khartoum last month to announce the government was donating 20,000 tonnes of sorghum to WFP to help with the shortage.
But two other U.N. sources on Wednesday said that food had been in storage for so long it was very likely to be inedible.
Sudanese officials were not immediately available to comment.
Sudan says it has given hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Darfur since the humanitarian crisis began, but aid agencies say the government aid commission regularly harasses their staff and hinders their operations.
Morris said Sudan was the world’s largest humanitarian undertaking and pleaded for donors to give more money. WFP has half of the $750 million it needs for 2006 to feed 6.1 million people in Sudan’s west, east and south.
(Reuters)