Articles

The Politics of Hunger in Sudan, by Nisrin Elamin – 11 October 2025

From Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora

In January of 2025, days after the RSF was forced to retreat from central Sudan, I received a video of my grandfather’s house situated at the edge of a rural community along the Blue Nile. The RSF had ransacked the house and had strewn most of its content on the sand-covered floors around it. They had curiously also felled some of the larger-than-life trees that had made my grandfather’s house the shadiest gathering place in the village: a magical place of refuge for bats, birds and stray cats. I spent parts of my childhood, long after my grandfather had passed, climbing those trees and playing under their shade. As children, we would befriend the lambs tied to the trees before they were taken away for slaughter. The older children among us knew the drill, but inevitably one of the younger ones would have their heart broken upon discovering the lamb’s fate. More devastating than the albums and letters and family documents they had torn up and strewn over the floor was the fact that they had destroyed the refuge created by these trees. The trees were older than me, older than my eighty-seven-year-old father. If you climbed up to the highest point of one of the smaller trees you could see the vast network of fields surrounding the village. A sea of greens and browns patterned by small irrigation canals that formed a subtle mathe- matical grid established by the British to extract cotton for empire. This grid, known as the Gezira agricultural scheme, encompasses two million acres of land, fed through irrigation by gravity. Before this war, as noted by Ahmed Mohamed Eldaw (2004), it produced half of Sudan’s wheat and provided a livelihood for almost two million tenant farmers and laborers. In its heyday in the 1970s, it served as the economic backbone of the country, constituting 60% of Sudan’s export revenue, according to Tamer Abd Elkreem and Susanne Jaspars (2025).

A relative told me over a WhatsApp voice note that the RSF had systematically destroyed the scheme’s canals and looted or destroyed its remaining infrastructure, storage facilities and assets, wherever they could. It made little sense and yet this destruction mirrored the ways the RSF had systematically targeted vital agricultural infrastructures after burning entire villages to the ground during the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. Their intent had been to destroy all forms of life and livelihood, such that it was no longer viable for survivors to return. Twenty years later, they had honed this deadly tactic as they besieged rural towns and villages across the Gezira.

As Sudan faces the world’s largest hunger crisis, I often return to the childhood memory of us looking out onto the vast fields of the Gezira. A hunger crisis triggered by the current war but decades in the making. Nestled between the White and Blue Niles just south of the capital Khartoum, the Gezira scheme with its 1500 canals could easily feed the entire country and broader region. In the late 1970s, on the heels of a twin oil crisis in the Gulf, former President Nimeiri touted it as a breadbasket with the potential to feed the entire Middle East. The Gezira is not the only region in Sudan with the capacity and potential to produce enough food to stave off famine. Gedaref in the East is known for its vast fields of wheat, sesame, peanuts and sunflowers cultivated through mechanized farming. To the west, Darfur’s mountainous Jebel Marra region is known for its immense potential to produce a wide variety of fruits including grapes, figs, peaches, pears, oranges and apples, in addition to wheat, root vegetables and spices like cumin, turmeric, coriander, and cardamon. Today, hunger and starvation are used by the RSF and army as a strategic weapon of war as aid trucks are systematically diverted, looted and barred from reaching civilians most in need of food. The RSF massacred Gezira farmers and laborers attempting to plant or harvest during their siege of the region and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands from their land. But these deadly tactics of obstruction, displacement, and starvation alone cannot account for the crisis levels of hunger people are currently facing. To fully contextualize the current man-made hunger crisis in Sudan and to recognize that it has been decades in the making, we must turn to history. Specifically histories of famine denial, structural adjustment, the weaponization of hunger, empire-making, and the politicization of aid.

To fully contextualize the current man-made hunger crisis in Sudan and to recognize that it has been decades in the making,
we must turn to history.

Famine Denial

In the early 1980s, a severe drought hit North Darfur, North Kordofan and the Red Sea Hills, reducing food production by 75 percent. By late 1983, it was clear that parts of the country would face a devastating famine if the Sudanese government did not appeal to the international community for support. In his book, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (2011), Gerard Prunier reveals how the governor of Darfur, Ahmed Diraige, wrote a letter to the Nimeiri regime in November of 1983, warning of a looming famine. When the regime refused to respond, Diraige flew to Khartoum to deliver the message in person. Instead of making an appeal for food assistance from the international community, Nimeiri issued an arrest warrant for Diraige, who then fled to Saudi Arabia and publicly resigned from his post as governor. Nimeiri’s refusal to declare famine in Darfur was by all accounts shaped by his desire to uphold an image of Sudan as the breadbasket of the region in order to attract foreign investments in agriculture. Declaring famine would undermine his sales pitch and threaten potentially lucrative, Gulf-financed partnerships and projects in mechanized farming. For Nimeiri, this deliberate denial of famine marked the beginning of his downfall. Drought-stricken farmers and herders began to abandon their rural communities in Kordofan and Darfur and migrated to Khartoum’s twin city Omdurman, where they appealed to local residents for support. Students and ordinary people began organizing weekly food drives and delivered meals to people in IDP camps at the edge of the capital. As the authors of an African Rights publication in 1997 put it, “the famine had come to town and the government could no longer ignore it.” By August of 1984, Nimeiri could no longer cover up Sudan’s deepening hunger crisis and found himself appealing to the Reagan administration for assistance. In March of 1985, Vice President Bush flew to Khartoum with an entourage of 250 people, among them Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell and Televangelist Pat Robert- son, to pledge 21 million USD in US food aid, as noted by Gayle Smith in her article, “George Bush in Khartoum” (1985). The trip alone required six aircrafts and cost a total of 20 million dollars. Smith described it as “the relatively quiet entry of America’s religious right wing into Africa” trying to win the hearts and minds of hungry Africans against a “creeping communism” (US disdain of communism prevented the delegation from traveling to neighboring drought-stricken Ethiopia under socialist rule) (Smith, 1985). Alex De Waal (2024) writes that “aid workers had to adjust to being hailed as ‘Reagan’ by grateful villagers” as they distributed sacks of US wheat. But US food aid had arrived too late and Nimeiri’s deliberate neglect and denial of famine ultimately killed over 240,000 people, mostly children across Sudan (De Waal, 2024). The influx of US food aid had also tarnished Sudan’s image as a potential breadbasket of the Middle East, and as Nimeiri cozied up to Washington (after switching allegiances from the Soviet Union), he began to face increasing resentment and resistance at home.

[READ THE REST]

, , , ,
Views: 24
More content from this blog
, , , ,