A funding shortfall could leave South Sudan’s most vulnerable refugees without U.N. food aid within weeks, the world body warned Friday.
"Without immediate and urgent funding, the final food and nutrition assistance for the most vulnerable 240,000 refugees will be provided in September, cutting off a lifeline for hundreds of thousands already living on the edge," two U.N. agencies said in a joint statement.
"These are the last remaining refugees of the 650,000 who had been receiving food support across the country," said the World Food Programme and the UNHCR refugee agency.
The warning comes with up to 3,000 refugees and returnees arriving from Sudan each week seeking food, shelter and safety, straining already overstretched humanitarian resources.
"After more than two decades on the humanitarian frontlines, I have rarely seen such a painful gap between scale of human suffering and the resources available to respond," said Adham Effendi WFP's deputy country director for South Sudan.
"Needs are rising while the lifeline to the most vulnerable is running dangerously thin," he told a Geneva press briefing, speaking from South Sudan's capital Juba.
Besides refugees, he said that from October, food assistance for around 180,000 internally displaced people would also cease.
Overall, 7.8 million people face acute food insecurity in South Sudan, and 2.2 million children are acutely malnourished.
WFP said it needed $37 million for its refugee response, and had a shortfall of $258 million for the rest of 2026, threatening support for 4.2 million food-insecure people across South Sudan.
Meanwhile, UNHCR has secured only 28 percent of the $286 million needed this year to sustain core assistance for nearly four million people.
South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but soon descended into civil war and remains mired in extreme poverty, corruption and insecurity.
A 2018 power-sharing deal between President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival, Riek Machar, has been unravelling since last year, with clashes in recent months bringing the country back to the brink of civil war.
