US Official Urges Sudan to Invest Oil-Money in Fighting Hunger

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News Article by VOA posted on July 28, 2001 at 18:22:04: EST (-5 GMT)

US Official Urges Sudan to Invest Oil-Money in Fighting Hunger

By Katy Salmon
VOA News
Nairobi
27 July 200

A United States official says Sudan could be facing its worst famine since 1984. The U.S. official says that while in Khartoum, he told the Sudanese government to devote some of its oil revenues to feeding its own people.

Andrew Natsios is the Bush administration's special humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

He spoke to reporters in Nairobi [July 21] on his return from a one-week visit to north and south Sudan.

Mr. Natsios says hunger is widespread throughout the country, but the situation in Sudan's northeastern Red Sea province is especially serious. "I asked the oldest people in the villages: 'When have you remembered a drought this severe?,'" Mr. Natsios says. "And one of them said they had not seen anything like this since the 1940s. And this drought in the Red Sea Hills was as severe as that. If this drought lasts until next year, in other words, if the crop fails this year and there is no food for next year, then we will face something like the greatest Sahelian drought."

Sudan has been embroiled in civil war for the past 18 years that pits the Islamic military government in the north against Christians and animists in the south. An estimated two million Sudanese have died of war-related injuries, disease, or starvation. Over four million are internally displaced.

The Khartoum government started exporting oil from southern Sudan in 1999. It earns $2 million a day from this. Government critics say most of the money is being spent on arms to fight rebels in the south.

Mr. Natsios says he told Sudanese government officials to use their oil wealth to feed their own people. Otherwise, he says, it is not likely that international agencies will be willing to supply much aid. "It might be easier for donor agencies to help the people in Sudan," Mr. Natsios says, "if the Sudanese government would provide some of its new oil wealth to offer assistance to their own people. I focused on that issue in the provinces and in talking with the ministers. When I was in Sudan 12 years ago, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. That is no longer the case, at least in the north. And that, it seemed to us, it would be a sign the government was engaging on these issues if they provided funding on their own for their own people from those increased revenues."

Mr. Natsios is the highest U.S. government official to visit Khartoum in more than a decade, and his trip signals a shift in U.S. policy toward Sudan under the Bush administration.

In May, the U.S. government approved 47,000 tons of food aid for northern Sudan. During the Clinton administration, the United States would grant relief only to war-affected populations, not drought victims.

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