Delivering food aid in South Sudan

DW: Mr Fominyen, how would you describe the humanitarian situation in South Sudan?

George Fominyen: A lot of people have been displaced and many of them have moved out of their homes. A good number have crossed borders to other countries in the region. So the key thing is that we have a situation where lots of people are living in discomfort because their normal patterns of livelihood have been disrupted due to the ongoing conflict. So for the past nine months, WFP and all humanitarian groups have been working to ensure that they will be able to provide immediate assistance to the people in very urgent need of assistance.

What kind of challenges do you face while carrying out the humanitarian operation in South Sudan?

We have been working flat out for months to ensure that we help the people who are most in need and we are overcoming enormous obstacles to bring food to people in isolated parts of the country. We have been using emergency response teams, which are deployed in remote areas response. They have set up distribution sites from scratch, working with little or no infrastructure. They identify, clear and manage air drop zones. They register thousands of beneficiaries and conduct large-scale distribution of food and other forms of assistance.

Talking about the challenges: This is a country where, in the rainy season, close to 60 percent of the country is inaccessible by road. For us this means that to bring assistance to people in distant areas, we have to do it by air. We do it in two ways. We move food by air drop, where the plane is loaded with food, which it then drops. But since not all the commodities can be dropped from the air, there are planes which land and this is called an air lift. So these are the kind of challenges that we face. Going by road would have been seven times cheaper, but at this moment we have trucks which are stuck on the road, because the roads have deteriorated to the point that trucks cannot move.

What kind of mechanisms do you have to make sure that the food that you drop reaches the target people and not, for instance, the rebels?

What happens is that when our assessment teams have gone to a particular location, they identify that we have a population in need. This information is then channeled back to the WFP headquarters in Juba. We then deploy an emergency response team that identifes a suitable place where we can drop food. So when the plane leaves, either from Juba, Entebbe in Uganda or from Ethiopia, it flies to the location, drops the food and the WFP staff who are there coordinate and organize that the food is collected and stacked until the air-drop operation is done. They then distribute the food. So the food is not just dropped and left there. It is a very well organized and complex operation.

Georeg Fominyen is a World Food Program spokesperson in South Sudan.

Interview: Chrispin Mwakideu