The Director-General of the International Organization for Migration, Amy Pope, said this week that "the entire humanitarian system may collapse within weeks if we do not act now", confirming that emergency relief supplies through the joint humanitarian corridor are nearly exhausted. And days before her, the acting Executive Director of the World Food Programme, Carl Skau, said from Darfur that the programme's funding for Sudan had fallen by half this year — 206 million dollars so far compared to 645 million last year — and the gap is about 300 million. The numbers are known: 8.6 million internally displaced, 4.9 million returnees since the start of the year, and about 20 million people facing hunger. (Sources: UN News and Reuters, September 14, 2026)
But let us read what lies behind the numbers. This is not a passing funding crisis, but an explicit declaration that the world has decided to watch. The donors who used to race to pledging conferences found other wars and other priorities, and Sudan — as usual — is at the bottom of the list. And worse still, some of these very donors are part of the equation of prolonging the war with money and weapons through proxies, then they shed tears over "the humanitarian crisis" in press statements.
The truth that must be said: no one will feed Sudan except the Sudanese. Every bet on the outside is a losing bet — whether on the Security Council, which this month contented itself with a technical extension of the mandate of the Panel of Experts, or on conferences that neither satisfy hunger nor enrich. The solution is not in waiting for relief trucks, but in restoring the state and its institutions: institutions that plant, store, distribute, and protect food convoys instead of them being targeted by drones.
And let us be franker still: there is an entire class living off this crisis — aid brokers, war merchants, and hotel politicians who draw organizations' salaries and speak in the name of the hungry from distant capitals. These people do not want an end to the war, because its end means the end of their privileges. As for the Sudanese people — who received 4.9 million returnees this year alone — they have proven that they are stronger than all of these.
The real battle today is not only against hunger, but against the mentality of waiting. Sudan is a country that owns the land, the Nile, and the minds. What it lacks is not charity, but institutions that protect it from thieves: the thieves inside who steal the aid, and the thieves outside who steal the decision.
— Adil Mansour
