As Starvation Spreads in Sudan, Military Blocks Aid Trucks at Border • A country torn apart by civil war could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades, experts said.

As Sudan hurtles toward famine, its military is blocking the United Nations from bringing enormous amounts of food into the country through a vital border crossing, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people during the depths of a civil war.

Experts warn that Sudan, barely functioning after 15 months of fighting, could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades. But the Sudanese military’s refusal to let U.N. aid convoys through the crossing is thwarting the kind of all-out relief effort that aid groups say is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths — as many as 2.5 million, according to one estimate — by the end of this year.

The risk is greatest in Darfur, the Spain-sized region that suffered a genocide two decades ago. Of the 14 Sudanese districts at immediate risk of famine, eight are in Darfur, right across the border that the United Nations is trying to cross. Time is running out to help them.

The closed border point, is at Adré, the main crossing from Chad into Sudan. At the border, little more than a concrete bollard in a dried-out riverbed, just about everything seems to flow: refugees and traders, four-wheeled motorbikes carrying animal skins, and donkey carts laden with barrels of fuel.

What is forbidden from crossing into Sudan, however, are the U.N. trucks filled with food that are urgently needed in Darfur, where experts say that 440,000 people are already on the brink of starvation. Refugees fleeing Darfur now say that hunger, not conflict, is the main reason they left.

The Sudanese military imposed the edict at the crossing five months ago, supposedly to prohibit weapons smuggling. It seems to make little sense. Arms, cash and fighters continue to flow into Sudan elsewhere on the 870-mile border that is mostly controlled by its enemy, a heavily armed paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F.

The military doesn’t even control the crossing at Adré, where R.S.F. fighters stand 100 yards behind the border on the Sudanese side.

Even so, the U.N. says it must respect the order not to cross from the military, which is based in Port Sudan 1,000 miles to the east, because it is Sudan’s sovereign authority. Instead U.N. trucks are forced to make an arduous 200-mile detour north to Tine, at a crossing controlled by a militia allied with Sudan’s army, where they are allowed to enter Darfur.

The diversion is dangerous, expensive and takes up to five times as long as going through Adré. Only a fraction of the required aid is getting through Tine — 320 trucks of food since February, U.N. officials say, instead of the thousands that are needed. The Tine crossing was closed for most of this week after seasonal rains turned the border into a river.

Between February, when the Adré border crossing was shut, and June, the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger went from 1.7 million to seven million.

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