Sudan is starving. Why is hunger still a problem?

Your Proximities deep dive

Hello everyone,

People sometimes ask me if war was the hardest thing I had to cover during my time as a foreign correspondent.

The answer is no. Don’t get me wrong. It was difficult and I carry memories to this day that are sometimes tough to cope with. But the thing that I found most challenging to cover, and it’s not even close, is hunger.

I once saw a child actively dying from cholera alone in the corner of a field. I saw babies so close to death from a lack of food that they couldn’t cry anymore. I met mothers who had already lost several children to hunger and were desperately seeking help for those who remained. And, when we reported those stories, the world mostly shrugged. Our work often sank without a trace.

Today, babies continue to starve to death, a small band of journalists consistently covers it, the world still shrugs and the reports still sink without a trace.

As mentioned in Proximities in recent weeks, the situation in Sudan is now critical. Today, the U.N. children’s agency said that children are “wasting away as we watch,” lambasting the world for looking away.

People are going hungry in many other places also, including Gaza.

So how is this still an issue in 2026? A Q&A below.

Until next week,

Barry.

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Where are the hotspots right now?

As mentioned above, Sudan. It is, by the numbers, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and the U.N. and aid agencies consistently say they are struggling to respond to the sheer extent of it, begging for funds that are not forthcoming. The country’s civil war has been going on for more than two and a half years and, apart from one or two spikes in coverage, it has not received the attention it deserves given its severity, the apparent war crimes being committed, and the toll on civilians, many of them children.

As covered regularly in Proximities, Gaza continues to lack enough food as Israel refuses to oblige by the terms of the ceasefire it agreed with Hamas in January and permit the required amount of aid into the blockaded Palestinian enclave. The U.N. and aid agencies have pleaded, cajoled, seethed, and attempted to apply pressure through the media, but Tel Aviv will not budge. What that amounts to is forced starvation, which is a war crime.

Then, far from the international headlines, there are several other places where people are suffering. Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Mali, Haiti, Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia.

I could go on. It’s a tragically long list.

How does famine happen in this day and age?