Last week, the United Nations declared that parts of South Sudan are experiencing famine since the inception of civil war in 2013, the first time the world has faced such a catastrophe. According to the United Nation, some 5.5 million people, nearly half the population, will not have a reliable source of food by July.

Also according to the UN, the disaster is known to be man-made ever since the oil-rich South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, plunged into civil war in 2013, after President Salva Kiir fired his deputy Riek Machar. Since then, fighting has fractured the country along ethnic lines, inflation topped 800 percent last year and war and drought have paralysed agriculture.

“What we’ve seen is a lot of people coming from the islands,” said George Fominyen, a spokesman for the World Food Programme. “They have been living on water lilies, they have been living on roots, from weeds in the Nile, at most they eat once in a day.”

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