Crux Now Q&A: Inside a milestone US food aid agreement with CRS

Catholic Relief Services and the US Department of Agriculture announced an agreement on Tuesday to deliver nearly a quarter-billion dollars in emergency aid to Sudan and Ethiopia, two countries hard-hit by a hunger crisis affecting at 70 million people across the East Africa region.

Crux Now heard from senior officials at both CRS and USDA ahead of the public announcement of the agreement, which involves grants totaling $235 million for 110,000 metric tons of staple foodstuffs.

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That’s an enormous quantity in absolute terms – it could feed more than six million people for a month or a half-million people for a year – but the scope of the hunger crisis in East Africa is almost unimaginably daunting.

“The scale of need can be difficult to comprehend,” CRS president and CEO Sean L.  Callahan told Crux Now. “More than 33 million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance,” he said, “and an estimated 825,000 children face severe acute malnutrition.”

“This agreement helps ensure families in Ethiopia and Sudan have access to the food they need during