In the 1998 food crisis in Rumbek county, South Sudan, Dinka mothers began voluntarily to remove their malnourished children from Oxfam's therapeutic feeding programmes. This article explains how this incident led Oxfam to re-examine its ideas about food aid in the region and to take a fresh look at Dinka ideas of need. Oxfam gives supplementary feeding according to scientifically-defined physiological need, and assumes that the families of those it targets have sufficient food themselves. Oxfam believes that food aid should go to individuals and families who have no food or who show signs of going without. In contrast, the Dinka find it strange that Oxfam singles out individuals, when to them, it is the job of the chiefs, not outsiders, to distribute resources.
Dinka life revolves around cattle, which provide milk for children and the elderly.
Dinka clan code requires gifts to be shared equally, therefore they believe that a child whose family or clan has sufficient cattle shouldn't need special attention, even if they happen to be thin occasionally. When the mothers were forced to choose, they opted naturally for the food gift which the whole family could eat. Oxfam decided that the best way forward was to discuss these issues and set up a workshop of women and men involved in decision-making about food. In the workshop, the women said that they liked the clarity that the weighing sessions gave them about who was admitted and who discharged from the feeding programmes. Both women and men felt there were people who were more in need than most of the children in the feeding programmes of being targeted for the general ration.