When the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces resumed at scale in April 2023, the UN's worst-case scenario projected 2.5 million people facing acute food insecurity by mid-2025. The actual figure, per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report released in April 2025, is 4.7 million. Nearly double the worst case. Famine conditions have been confirmed in four localities in North Darfur.
The Security Council has not acted. The reasons are partly structural, partly cynical. On the structural side, both the SAF and the RSF have used humanitarian access as a military tool — opening or closing convoy routes based on battlefield calculations, not need. Neither side has an incentive to let aid reach civilians associated with the other.
On the political side, Russia has vetoed two draft resolutions that would have imposed access requirements on both parties, citing Sudanese sovereignty. China has not used its veto outright but has introduced procedural amendments at committee stage that gutted the operative clauses of proposed resolutions until the original sponsors pulled them rather than pass something toothless. The result is identical. Nothing moves.
The United Arab Emirates holds a non-permanent Security Council seat this year. UN investigators have accused it of supplying weapons to the RSF through Chadian intermediaries. Several European diplomats have described this arrangement, privately, as grotesque. The UAE denies the allegations.
On the ground, the consequences are clinical. Médecins Sans Frontières reported in April that acute malnutrition rates among children under five in the El Fasher camp complex have reached 21 percent — above the 15 percent emergency threshold that would normally trigger automatic international response. The threshold has been crossed. The response has not come.
"There is no mystery about what is happening," said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher in Geneva. "People are dying of hunger in a country that is not experiencing a drought. This is a political famine. The Security Council has the power to open those roads and it is choosing not to."