The country of South Sudan just ended its first year as an independent nation. This milestone has put the young country front and center in international headlines and with aid and relief organizations. While independence from Sudan would, ideally, make both nations more stable, that has not been the case thus far. Oxfam America posted a great blog piece on hunger in South Sudan, which we've republished below.
South Sudan: Returning to Hunger by Noah Gottschalk
As South Sudan celebrates the first anniversary of its separation
from Sudan, the world’s newest nation faces multiple challenges
including simmering tensions along the border, the influx of an estimated 165,500 refugees from ongoing conflict in Sudan, inter-communal conflicts,
and an economy crippled by the closure of the border and shutdown of
oil production. Perhaps most alarming, however, is the escalating food
crisis threatening nearly half of the country’s 9.7 million inhabitants
according to recent UN estimates. As the government, UN, and NGOs struggle to respond, the country is anticipating the arrival of hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese who
are among the last remaining in Sudan and now face an uncertain future
back ‘home’. These returnees are triply vulnerable. The already difficult return and reintegration process
ahead of them is exacerbated by the economic crisis in South Sudan,
while the multiple and overlapping challenges facing the fledgling state
means that returnees’ needs are being overshadowed by broader crises.
Instead of a joyful homecoming, they face a future of uncertainty as the
country marks the anniversary of its political independence with only
the certainty that it will remain dependent on foreign assistance for
the foreseeable future.
I recently traveled to South Sudan, where I had a chance to speak
with some of the newly arriving returnees. They told me about their
journey and about their friends and relatives still on the way. In Wau, I spoke to returnees unloading their possessions from a train that had just arrived from Sudan. They described the economic and political pressures to leave Sudan, including the loss of Sudanese citizenship, and the difficult, 18-day train journey ‘home’. A tall Dinka woman wearing a brightly-colored Sudanese tobe
and a black ski cap eloquently described her journey from a South
Sudanese area of Khartoum all the way to Wau. She had never been to
South Sudan and spoke Dinka with noticeable difficulty. Like many others
I spoke with, she had little idea of what she would do in South Sudan.
Her husband had returned many months earlier, but she had no means of
finding him after her mobile phone, which contained his contact details,
was stolen. A short while later, a shy 17 year old boy told me how he
had come to South Sudan alone, and had no idea where to go and no way of
finding friends or relatives. He was coming to the station whenever a
new train of returnees arrived in the hopes of running into someone he
knew who might be able to help him.
Such stories of people trying to establish a new life in an
unfamiliar and challenging new environment were common throughout the
years between the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in
2005 and the referendum on the future of South Sudan in 2011. In that
six year period, the return of Southern Sudanese was a political
imperative for the Government of Southern Sudan and hundreds of
thousands returned from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Republic of Sudan,
Egypt, and further afield with significant attention and financial
support from the government and the international community. Events
since then, however, have created an environment where the needs of
returnees have been overshadowed. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of
South Sudanese continue to return. Once their journey is over, they join
nearly a million recent returnees struggling to find their feet in a
land that is technically at peace but still very much in crisis.
Despite South Sudan’s huge potential and abundant natural resources,
half a century of marginalization and conflict has left the country
severely impoverished, with extremely low literacy rates, high levels of
displacement, and woefully inadequate infrastructure and public
services. Although the seven years since the signing of the CPA enabled
greater efforts to address these fundamental issues, investment has
fallen short of needs. In the year since South Sudan gained its
independence, however, the country risks backslidingeconomic outlook and austerity measures that slashed budgets for almost all social services.
At the same time, politicized tribal conflict, ongoing militia
activity, and conflict along the border with Sudan threaten the physical
safety of civilians across South Sudan. For returnees, this means
returning to a volatile and potentially dangerous independent homeland
with only minimal support.
Reintegration and absorption capacity within South Sudan is already
extremely limited. The disproportionate focus on the physical return of
displaced southerners over their reintegration which characterized the
CPA period continues today, and as a result many thousands of returnees
are still awaiting assistance and access to land.
Those reintegration efforts that do exist tend to be heavily focused
on return to rural areas, with far too little attention on either the
link between rural livelihoods and constraints on access to land, or on
return to urban areas. Returnees who do not want to settle in rural
areas—either because they are uncomfortable with a rural lifestyle, lack
connections to those ‘areas of origin’, or because those areas lack
basic services—regularly face difficulty in acquiring land in towns.
This is for multiple reasons, including government policies which seek
to avoid overcrowding of towns, particularly state capitals. The
scarcity of job opportunities in urban areas and insufficient
programming to target returnees seeking to live in towns, particularly
in places like Kuajok and Aweil, have the potential to leave large
numbers of recent returnees without any means of sustainably supporting
themselves and their families. The Government of South Sudan has a
policy that commits it to providing basic services and assistance to
returnees. But its ability to deliver is now in question under the
austerity budget. Therefore, the government must urgently revisit and
outline its reintegration plan, with both humanitarian and development
actors involved, to assess the ability to support new arrivals and
provide resolution to outstanding issues, such as land distribution, for
those returnees already in South Sudan.
More broadly, the oil shutdown in South Sudan brings into critical
focus the need for South Sudan to diversify its economy, and
particularly to develop its full agricultural potential for the benefit
of all South Sudanese, including returnees. Ultimately, South Sudan
must escape cyclical food insecurity and dependence on emergency food
aid. It needs to support vibrant markets and a diverse economy, while
building a social safety net. For this to become a reality, the
international community must continue to pursue all channels to support
negotiated solutions to the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan and
the resolution of the outstanding CPA issues. Without real peace, there
can be no full humanitarian access, durable solutions for Sudanese
refugees, or the sustainable development solutions necessary to build a
resilient and self-sufficient South Sudan.
Read more about what Oxfam is doing in Sudan and South Sudan.
For more great stories and information on the work being done by Oxfam America, check out their Politics of Poverty blog.
