In Darfur Camp, Desperation Leads People to Eat Ombaz

In August, the UN-backed Famine Review Committee determined there is famine in a refugee camp in the Darfur region of Sudan. It was an exceedingly rare assessment: The FRC has only concluded there were famines underway on the planet twice prior in the last 20 years, reported CNN at the time. Now, the Telegraph checks in on the situation at the Zamzam camp—and it's grim. As the paper reports, sustenance is just out of reach: Food trucks have been lined up some 260 miles away for months, largely unable to break through the front lines of Sudan's civil war. The 15 trucks that managed to get through in November were reportedly the first World Food Programme trucks to reach the camp since April.

One camp resident tells the Telegraph, "There is a lot of hardship and suffering in this place; one of the things is that people here are eating ombaz." That's what the paste made from crushed peanut shells is called. It's typically used to feed cattle, and desperation is leading people to eat it "just to dampen the pain of hunger," says the deputy Sudan director for the WFP. "People are looking for tree roots and peanut shells, locusts, and types of grass," another resident adds. The camp was constructed to take in those who were fleeing the war in Darfur 20 years ago; many never left, and its population is thought to have ballooned to as much as one million people. (More Sudan stories.)