GENEVA, Oct 10 (Reuters). Nearly a quarter of a million people in Sudan's Darfur region cannot access U.N. food rations due to fighting, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday.

The United Nations food agency, which aims to reach 3 million people in the violent region each month, delivered food to about 2.8 million people in September, a spokeswoman said.

This meant that about 224,000 people in Darfur, most of them in the north of the region, remained cut-off from WFP rations, although this was an improvement over past months, WFP spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume told a news briefing.

"For the fourth straight month, thousands of people could not receive WFP food aid due to insecurity", Berthiaume said.

"Nearly a quarter of a million are cut off. It is an improvement, but the situation remains dramatic", she said.

With "great difficulty," the WFP had managed to reach more people last month than in July and August, when 470,000 people and 350,000 people, respectively, had missed out, she said.

The WFP gave double rations to those it reached in North Darfur in September as it was not sure it could reach them over the next months due to fighting, according to Berthiaume.

The situation was particularly critical as this is the period which WFP calls the "hunger season", just ahead of the harvests when people's food supplies are virtually exhausted.

"We hope that some people will be able to make up for the lack of aid with their harvests, but again, will the insecurity allow the farmers to harvest? It is far from certain", she said.

Khartoum has rejected a Security Council resolution authorising a U.N. takeover of the cash-strapped African Union mission in Darfur, where experts say 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million forced to flee their homes since 2003.

Under a proposal which looks to be a short-term fix for the deadlock, seen by Reuters in Khartoum on Monday, about 200 U.N. military and civilian staff will deploy in Darfur to support the AU peace monitoring mission.

WFP's programme in Sudan, including the south, aims to feed 6 million people and is its biggest operation worldwide.

To date it has received nearly 90 percent of the $746 million it sought for the country, with two-thirds of the funds earmarked for Darfur, the WFP spokeswoman said.

Reuters AlertNet

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