Aid bureaucracy, suspicion threaten to deepen South Sudan crisis: MSF

"We know that the peak of malnutrition comes through the summer usually, so I would say there's still a few weeks or months to prepare this properly.

"So there has to be a significant acceleration of both emergency preparedness but also simple disbursement of the means by the donors to the organizations that can help."

SLOWDOWN IN EMERGENCY AID SPENDING

But aid donors are much slower to release emergency funds than was the case 20 years ago, he said, and donor governments were finding it very hard to switch from providing development funds to humanitarian funding. So the crisis may need to get much worse to trigger international aid, Jochum said.

"There's always much more reaction when (people are) seeing thousands of critically malnourished children on TV, rather than putting money into preventive distributions of food to avoid this kind of situation."

People push each other as they wait in line during a food distribution in Nyal, Unity State, April 1 …

Emergency funding once accessible within days might now take 4-5 months to arrive. And much of the aid effort is hobbled by an "obsession with coordination" which has prioritized planning instead of physical distribution of aid on the ground, he said.

In South Sudan, a further threat to aid is posed by the warring parties' growing unhappiness with the U.N. mission in the country because of its combined military, political and humanitarian dimensions, Jochum said.

"Already today flights and vehicles of the U.N. are either checked or subject to even rejection, which is a growing problem," he said.

"As most organizations are totally dependent on U.N. logistics for their humanitarian work, we see here serious risks for the delivery of assistance in the months to come, and in the coming year, especially if this suspicion of the U.N. was to translate into more active incidents."

The heads of two United Nations organizations - refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres and World Food Programme chief Ertharin Cousin - were in South Sudan's capital Juba on Tuesday.

They issued a statement saying that millions of lives could be endangered if urgent action were not taken to end the conflict and support civilians.

They also discussed the crisis with President Salva Kiir and other government officials, and received his commitment to facilitate humanitarian assistance to all civilians in need, the UNHCR and WFP said in a statement.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

• Politics & Government
• South Sudan
• Medecins Sans Frontieres

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