'Brink of famine': Why South Sudan’s children are paying the price of war

South Sudan is said to be on the brink of famine (Credit: ITV News)

ITV News has travelled to a region in South Sudan declared IPC5 - catastrophic malnutrition. The only other place in the world with this level of food insecurity is Gaza. The governor of the Upper Nile region says they are close to a famine. Senior International Correspondent John Irvine has this special report

The villages have been left to fend for themselves, but can’t.

They are situated in a remote part of eastern South Sudan and are among the few places in the world designated as category five on the world’s hunger scale. There is no category six.

We’re in Upper Nile State, where a child’s upper arm is the giveaway.

If it’s thin enough for a medic’s measuring tape to enter the red zone, then the boy or girl is suffering from acute malnutrition.

Throughout our visit, we saw too much red tape.

“We are on the brink of a famine. There is no doubt,” the state governor, James Koang Khuol, told me before we left the South Sudanese capital, Juba, to get here.

The region is so remote that, travelling from the Middle East, it took four flights and a four-hour boat ride up the White Nile to reach here.

The great river bisects the country, and in the worst-hit parts of Upper Nile state, it is the only reliable lifeline left.

South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation, but for 13 of the 15 years since it gained independence in 2011, it has been blighted by civil war or strife.

The biggest tribe forms the rump of the government, but there’s continuous tension with other tribes and that frequently leads to conflict.

Upper Nile state saw more violence back in February, and that is one of the main drivers behind this crisis because the international aid agencies are no longer operating in the areas affected.

South Sudan has also seen violence along the Nile (Credit: ITV News)

Those are the places we went to. Over the years, they’ve become totally reliant on aid, and now that it’s no longer arriving, these communities are withering.

Many of the villagers are trapped because they’re too poor to go elsewhere, and if they do, they risk not being welcome for tribal reasons.

So they stay put and struggle to provide for themselves and their children.

There are no hospital wards full of malnourished babies because the hospitals aren’t up to providing inpatient care.

So local nurses set up clinics to receive concerned mothers and their young, hungry children. They give them what medicines they can, then send them home.

Another big factor in the dwindling aid supply across the state is cuts in the aid budgets of rich nations like the US and the UK. Cutbacks have consequences that are visible here.

Ending the conflict is South Sudan’s best hope, but the UK is now less invested than it was when it came to peacemaking.

Cuts in the aid budget also mean cuts in the peace and reconciliation budget.

Source: https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-02/brink-of-famine-why-south-sudans-children-are-paying-the-price-of-war