Afrasianet - Last Monday, the Financial Times published an article based on the Integrated Food Security Phases Classification (IPC) reports that warned of the world's increasing famines, focusing on the two most serious current crises: the famine crises in Gaza and Sudan. The ranking was developed by the Food Security Analysis Unit (FSA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Twenty years ago, the ranking was developed in response to the worsening famine in Somalia. A standardized scale that takes into account the data on food security, nutrition and livelihoods available in each crisis, allowing for an assessment of their severity and for comparing crises and identifying the most serious ones.

The worst case in the ranking is the so-called catastrophic situation, in which "at least one in five households (or 20 percent) is severely undernourished and faces the risk of starvation, leading to death, destitution and very critical levels of acute malnutrition." The classification goes on to describe the catastrophic situation: "At this stage, the prevalence of acute malnutrition in children under five years of age exceeds 30 percent, and families reach a limit destitution, and deaths are spreading."

A catastrophic situation is followed by a state of emergency, where families suffer from "large gaps in food consumption reflected in very high acute malnutrition and excessive mortality rates," or families are forced to take extreme measures to avoid starvation, such as liquidating what little property they have left In both cases, the number of people in the Gaza Strip (641,000) exceeds the number in Sudan (637,000).

The number of those facing the state of emergency in Sudan (8,100,000) is just seven times that of Gaza (1,140,000). Overall, the Interim Classification (PHASE) data indicate that the entire population of the Gaza Strip and nearly half of Sudan's population are food insecure, which calls for urgent action to avoid worsening their situation.

The people of the poor countries of the Global South are nothing more than second- or third-class human beings in the perspective of the apartheid system

With the world's attention focused on Gaza immeasurably more than its interest in what is happening in the Sudan, and knowing that the famine in the Gaza Strip is neither a natural creation nor a product of a lack of humanitarian aid, and that it is available at the gates of Gaza enough to prevent widespread hunger if those doors are opened, the first conclusion that a comparison of the figures of both cases dictates is that the famine in Gaza is the result of a deliberate effort to suffocate its population The second lesson from the aforementioned data and the comparison between them is that the world's acute awareness of what is happening in the Gaza Strip greatly increases the responsibility of countries capable of exerting effective pressure on the Zionist state.

These countries, led by the United States, of course, include the European Union and most Western countries, and they are either complicit in the genocide or indifferent enough to do serious work to stop the aggression (or they are preoccupied with their own aggression, as Russia is in Ukraine).

All the countries in question have multifaceted economic, military and political relations with Israel, which have so far prevailed over the need to stop the genocide. It is the most serious humanitarian crisis in our contemporary world, in which, in addition to the horrific food security figures, the displacement of some fifteen million people within or outside Sudan's borders.

Since the ugliness of the war of annihilation that Israel is waging in Gaza is present every day, and even every hour, in front of the eyes of the world on all kinds of screens, the ugliness of what is happening in Sudan, whether it is the criminal war in which the two Sudanese military groups are fighting at the expense of the population or the genocide that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been practicing again in the Darfur region, this ugliness is almost ignored by the Western media, except for a single report here or there from time to time.

As Mahmoud Darwish once said to the Israeli poet Hillet Yeshuron in an interview in 1996: "Do you know why we Palestinians are so famous? The reason for this is that you are our enemy.

The interest in the Palestinian question stems from the interest in the Jewish question. Yes, people are interested in you, not me...!

The [Western] international interest in the Palestinian question only reflects people's interest in the Jewish question," and this latter concern is the same that Western rulers use to justify their inertia about what the Zionist state is doing in Gaza (it is enough to compare this position with their intensive efforts in the face of Russia's war on Ukraine).

The people of the poor countries of the Global South are nothing more than second- or third-class human beings in the perspective of the apartheid system that continues to prevail throughout the world.