Harvard University | Nov 2025

The Politics of Hunger in Sudan

by Nisrin Elamin

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.

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.

Structural Adjustment and Nimeiri's Downfall

Mohamed Suliman in his article, "Civil War in Sudan: The Impact of Ecological Degradation" recounts that between 1979 and 1985, the Nimeiri regime implemented 5 IMF structural adjustment programs that forced Sudan to devalue its currency in order to promote exports, reduce public spending and withdraw critical subsidies on fuel and food. These policies plunged Sudan further into debt and failed to stop the country's accelerating inflation, according to Tim Niblock's article, "Sudan's Economic Nightmare" (1985). Roland Marchal and Einnas Ahmad, in their joint article, "Multiple Uses of Neoliberalism: War, New Frontiers, and the Reconfiguration of the State in the Sudan" (2010), note how Sudan had also, under Nimeiri's rule, become the US's largest recipient of foreign aid after signing the Camp David Accords in 1979. Much of this US aid was either pocketed by Nimeiri and his inner circle or pumped into mismanaged agricultural megaprojects. In rural areas impacted by drought and desertification like Darfur and Kordofan, these megaprojects sowed the seeds of conflict between herders and farmers now competing for dwindling land and water resources. Moreover, the dumping of US wheat onto Sudanese markets during this period was seen by farmers I spoke with during my research as a key factor in accelerating a shift in diets away from locally produced sorghum to wheat. The sandwich, for instance, became a popular breakfast food during this period, symbolizing and facilitating the accelerated pace of capitalist work life As the urban appetite for wheat grew, however, so did wheat imports, which increased annually by 15%, according to A. H. Abdelrahman's working paper, "Trends in Sudanese Cereal Production, Consumption, and Trade" (1998).

By 1985, everyday life for the majority of Sudanese was marked by soaring prices of essential foods such as bread and sugar, frequent cuts in electricity and other basic services and an increasingly repressive state apparatus. Just a few weeks after Bush's trip to Sudan in March, Nimeiri was overthrown by a popular uprising as he was returning from a trip to Washington. Among the many factors that led to the uprising, Nimeiri's deliberate refusal to acknowledge famine and to feed Sudan's drought-stricken farmers and herders, was perhaps the most damning.

Hunger as a Weapon of War

Forty years later, famine denial is once again resurfacing, albeit in a different, more violent context where hunger is being weaponized on the battlefield. A year into this current war, on August 1st of 2024, the United Nations warned that over half of Sudan's population was facing "crisis levels of hunger" and declared famine in various parts of Darfur including the ZamZam displacement (IDP) camp near El Fasher, which is home to over half a million people. The INGO Médecins Sans Frontières confirmed that a child was dying of hunger every two hours in ZamZam (2024). That same month, the New York Times published a series of stories on the ways starvation is being used as a weapon of war by the RSF and army as they vie for political and economic control of the country. The army, positioning itself as Sudan's de facto government, responded to the UN's official declaration of famine in North Darfur's ZamZam IDP camp by "categorically rejecting its description of the situation in Sudan as a famine" (2024).

In the 1980s, Nimeiri's famine denial was politically motivated to ensure the continued flow of foreign investments in Sudanese agriculture. Today, the army's denial of famine in the midst of a war that has produced the world's largest humanitarian crisis, appears far less strategic. But here too, denial has served a political purpose. Both sides have weaponized hunger and food aid in their efforts to starve and turn civilians against their adversary in a battle for legitimacy and power. In A. F. ElTayeb's essay, "Famine Denial in Sudan: Not Only Irrational but Also Irresponsible" (2025), the RSF has rightfully been described as the architects of famine as they "intentionally poison water sources, destroy irrigation channels, block water flows, loot agricultural machinery and contaminate fertile soil, rendering vast stretches of land in central Sudan unusable." They have also used starvation as a coercive tool to force youth into recruitment (ElTayeb, 2025).

When the RSF retreated from Khartoum in late March of 2025, gruesome images and videos of severely malnourished, tortured prisoners of war were circulated on social media. Hundreds were found languishing in what can only be described as concentration camps across the city. Several of them were barely recognizable to their own relatives and some died in the process of rapid refeeding efforts. The images captured what life under the RSF's rule had been like for many and stood in stark contrast to the videos of joy and relief ordinary civilians shared as they celebrated their newfound freedom of movement as the army reclaimed the capital. Army soldiers captured and used these images and videos of starving prisoners of war strategically to position themselves as liberators of Khartoum.
If the RSF are the architects of the current famine in Sudan, then the army is complicit in its execution. Four days after the UN's announcement of famine in parts of North Darfur, the army dropped bombs on ZamZam in an attempt to eliminate the evidence for it. In their New York Times article, "As Starvation Spreads in Sudan, Military Blocks Aid Trucks at Border" (2024), Declan Walsh and Ivor Prickett report that the army also continued to block UN food trucks from entering Sudan at the Adre crossing, which borders Chad, essentially "cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of already starved people." In the months leading up to the UN declaring famine, the Adre border crossing had been shut by the army, leading "the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger to jump from 1.7 million to seven million" (Walsh and Prickett, 2024).

The army has a long history of controlling and obstructing food aid as a counterinsurgency tactic in the many wars it has waged against civilians in Darfur, South Sudan, and the Nuba Mountains, according to John Kifner in his New York Times article, "Sudan War: Starvation is a Weapon" (1986). During the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, it used this tactic in collaboration with the RSF (then known as the "Janjaweed") to weaken armed resistance groups.

Since May of 2024, the RSF, with the backing of the UAE, has besieged the capital of North Darfur, El Fasher, cutting off access to food supplies and aid. As a result, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been trapped for over a year, facing extreme hunger with some resorting to animal fodder to survive. In South Kordofan, the army and RSF have both blocked aid and food supplies from reaching civilians. While the RSF has been responsible for the majority of war crimes against civilians in this war, including genocide, the army cannot be viewed as a defender or protector of civilian lives. Instead, we are seeing civilians, particularly in communities long affected by state violence, being used as pawns in a struggle for power and territorial control between military elites and factions. Famine denial and the weaponization of hunger have reemerged as strategies in this deadly game of chess.

Structural Adjustment on New Terms

When the Bashir regime first came to power in 1989 through a military coup, they pursued a similar path of neoliberal austerity and structural adjustment that had previously led to Nimeiri's downfall. After the Clinton administration-imposed sanctions on Sudan in the early 1990s for, as Gary Clyde Hufbauer writes in Economic Sanctions Reconsidered (2007), "supporting international terrorist activities" and harboring Osama bin Laden, the US gradually lost its influence over Sudan, leading to strained diplomatic relations and limited economic engagement. US aid to Sudan also drastically decreased along with these sanctions. The Gulf states, which had previously invested in Nimeiri's breadbasket endeavor, stepped in to fill the void along with Canada, China, and other countries in the Middle East and Asia, through investments in infrastructure, agriculture, mining and oil. The timing of US sanctions coincided with significant developments in Sudan's oil industry. Although oil was initially discovered by the US multinational Chevron in 1978 in the Bentiu and Heglig districts of southern Sudan, oil production and export truly began in the early 1990s, driven by a consortium of Chinese, Canadian and Malaysian companies. This created an opening for Gulf states to reinvest in Sudan's agricultural sector, at a time when other countries were focused on exploiting Sudan's oil resources. The influx of Gulf capital into Sudan was in turn facilitated by the expansion of multiple Islamic banking systems beyond the Saudi-owned Faisal Islamic Bank (FIB) established in 1977, according to Khalid Medani in his book Black markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (2022). FIB played a key role in consolidating an Islamist commercial elite by allowing Al-Bashir's National Islamic Front (NIF) to gain significant control over Sudan's economy as they plotted their 1989 coup, noted again by Khalid Medani in his article "The Struggle for Sudan: A Primer" (2024). The subsequent growth of the Islamic banking sector in the 90s notably attracted the UAE as a major banking partner and shareholder.

Soon after their 1989 coup, the Bashir regime began implementing privatization policies that transformed Sudan's agricultural sector to facilitate new opportunities for corporate agribusiness investments. Under the ideological vision of tamkeen, the Arabic word for empowerment, the regime aimed to purge "its rivals from government, civil society and the economy," replacing them with ruling party loyalists, writes Harry Verhoeven in Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building (2015). According to the studies of Osman Suliman in 2007 and Elkreem in 2025, they confiscated fertile farmlands and expanded the military's control over Sudan's economy through a system of governance by patronage. Vast areas of land were handed over to military elites and businessmen loyal to the National Islamic Front (later known as the National Congress Party) to establish mechanized farming schemes.

The regime also established the Technical Committee for the Disposal of Public Enterprises, with the aim of privatizing over a hundred state-owned enterprises to "strengthen the political and economic power of the ruling [Islamist] National Congress Party" (Suliman, 2007). Among the numerous enterprises targeted for privatization, the Gezira scheme was arguably one of the most significant. The implementation of the Gezira Scheme Act in 2005 accelerated the process of privatizing the scheme, by dissolving its central management and transferring the responsibility for water management to tenant farmers. Farmers were suddenly tasked with the responsibility of cleaning hundreds of irrigation canals with minimal resources through the establishment of over 1,500 water user associations, as reported in Radio Dabanga's news piece, "Farmers of Sudan's El Gezira Agricultural Scheme discuss unionising," in 2022. Following the World Bank's recommendation, the dissolution of the scheme was accompanied by the withdrawal of state extension services and essential inputs like seeds, fertilizers, and tractors for small farmers (Radio Dabanga, 2022). All publicly owned assets of the scheme, including heavy agricultural machinery, tractors, harvesters, the railway, research centers, and administrative accommodations, were sold to private investors (Elkreem, et. al. 2025). The staff of the Gezira Board, comprising administrators, engineers, researchers, and inspectors, was drastically reduced from over 7,000 to just 74 within a year (Elkreem, et. al. 2025).

These policies drove thousands of farmers into debt by reducing their output and yields. The only beneficiaries were wealthy farmers, who, through their membership in the Islamist farmers union and broader system of governance by patronage, were able to "borrow large sums of money from the agricultural banks to establish service-providing companies" (Elkreem, et. al. 2025). These companies took advantage of ordinary farmers who were left to fend for themselves after the regime withdrew its extension services. To cope, farmers diversified their income sources. However, the impact of the Gezira Scheme Act forced many to consider giving up their tenancies or selling their land at far below market value to state elites who were eager to attract foreign capital.

For the Bashir regime, the early 2000s was filled with uncertainty. As the decades-long war against South Sudan was coming to an end, the regime had begun a new genocidal campaign of counterinsurgency against non-Arab communities in Darfur. Attracting agribusiness investors through large-scale land leases would allow them to finance this new war and offset losses in oil revenue that would accompany South Sudan's likely independence. Seventy five percent of Sudan's oil revenue was derived from South Sudan's oil fields. Ironically, the only obstacle to this plan was the unique land tenure system the British colonial regime had established within the Gezira scheme. Under the Gezira Land Ordinance of 1921, the government either bought or leased land from its owners. While 60% of the scheme's land is owned by the government, 40% of it belongs to title-holding landowners who were forced to lease it to the state when the scheme was first created, according to Gowaria Dafa Alla Abd-Elgadir Ali in her article "Multidimensional Poverty among Sudanese Farmers: Evidence from Gezira Scheme" (2024). The scheme's land has always been attractive to investors because of its fertile clay soil, proximity to the Nile's system of irrigation by gravity and readiness for cultivation. Because a significant portion of it is officially registered however, the scheme has largely been off limits for large-scale land investments. By contrast, much of the land outside the scheme, which is primarily used for rain-fed farming and herding, is not officially registered with titles, but is considered customary land. Under the 1970 Unregistered Land Act, the state has the authority to claim this land if it is deemed unproductive or unused. In the northern part of the Gezira, the Blue Nile forms a natural boundary between the land encompassed by the scheme and customary land that government elites have claimed in order to attract foreign and domestic agribusiness investors. The aerial photograph below depicts two such farms: a domestic one owned by the DAL conglomerate called Al-Waha and a now defunct Emirati-owned farm called Zayid Al Kheir.

Both farms were established in the early 2000s, in the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Gezira Scheme Act when small farmers began to abandon farming. The organized resistance of farmers prevented a large-scale land grab within the scheme. Through a combination of mass mobilization, civil disobedience tactics, legal advocacy in the courts, and collective resource sharing, farmers were able to retain their land, some facing state repression for the first time in their lives as they confronted those responsible. However, two things remained true: farmers continued to endure the adverse effects of the 2005 act, and domestic and Gulf agribusiness elites started leasing lands along the eastern edge of the scheme on the other side of the Blue Nile, as well as in other regions north and south of Khartoum. Because state elites were unable to grab land within the scheme, state elites sold investors on the next best option: land located on the other side of the Blue Nile, just an hour's drive from the capital Khartoum.

From the early 2000s to the outbreak of the current war, Saudi and Emirati investors have leased an estimated two million acres of Sudanese land primarily to cultivate water-intensive, high-yield alfalfa and Rhodes grass (animal feed). These crops are exported to the Gulf to support the expansion of their growing dairy and meat industries. Many of the land deals signed with Sudanese government elites over the past two decades have not resulted in active or particularly productive projects. They have however enabled Gulf and domestic investors to enclose and fence off hundreds of thousands of acres of mostly customary land as future placeholders against uncertainty; land that small farmers and pastoralists had been using for rain-fed farming and herding for generations.

Engineering Food Insecurity

These large-scale land leases to Gulf and domestic agribusiness investors have undermined rural livelihoods by cutting off grazing routes and limiting access to land, primarily used for cultivating sorghum and other staple food crops. The local dairy industry has been devastated by the large-scale farm projects enabled by these leases. In a 2013 interview, a manager of a major domestic agribusiness company revealed to me that their company's objective was to drive the local milkman, who delivers raw milk to village and neighborhood stores via donkey, out of business. Over the years, the local milkman's customer base has shrunk as people began relying more on pasteurized factory produced dairy products. At the same time, pastoralists cut off from grazing land, have abandoned herding for petty trade and brickmaking or joined the lower ranks of the expanding security state. The RSF has found some of its most willing recruits among these struggling and dispossessed pastoralists.

In a parallel trend, rural diets have continued shifting away from sorghum consumption towards processed wheat flour, mass-produced and packaged in factories in Khartoum and other areas. In the early days of this war, these trends were evident in the long lines that formed at local bakeries and in the stench emanating from stores across central Sudan, where fridges were stocked with pasteurized dairy products and halal frozen foods produced domestically or in the Gulf. During the nationwide electricity blackout, these products began rotting in defunct freezers across Khartoum and neighboring rural areas. The stench epitomized how the current famine has been many years in the making. The first acts of solidarity we witnessed within hours of Khartoum turning into a war zone were people procuring a few bags of bread and then distributing them up and down their neighborhood blocks. In rural areas where the war was still distant, people ventured out into the areas surrounding big agribusiness farms, in search of wild greens. In my grandfather's village, those greens became one of the few fresh foods people consumed in those early days of the war. The war had disrupted supply chains, making people acutely aware of their dependence on imported produce. For millions of Sudanese, particularly in rural areas, this war has brought into sharp focus the ways the Bashir regime engineered food insecurity, by decimating the small-scale agricultural sector leaving people more reliant on subsistence foods that are no longer produced locally.

The privatization of the Gezira scheme in central Sudan tells one story that is part of a larger, decades long process of the restructuring of Sudan's agricultural sector. Similar stories of capitalist extraction often accompanied by violent state-driven processes of forcible displacement and repression, could be told from other rural parts of Sudan. This particular story, from Sudan's agricultural heartland, highlights a continuity between the Nimeiri and Al-Bashir regimes, both of which were willing to sacrifice the livelihoods of small farmers and pastoralists to secure foreign capital and investments. Between the Nimeiri and Al-Bashir regimes the key players shifted but the financialization and privatization of Sudan's economy continued under the ideological cloak of Islamism. And Sudan's vast rural population continued to bear the brunt of capitalist extraction.

While the US-led embargo on Sudan that began in the 1990s isolated the country from its previous Western allies and donors, it created an opening for Gulf capital to embed itself more deeply in Sudan's economy, under the guise of boosting domestic food security. By the 2010s, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates had positioned themselves as the Bashir regimes key foreign backers and investment partners, edging out China which had primarily focused on oil exploration and shifted its focus to South Sudan after 2011. As Selma Elobeid writes in her piece, "Gulf States: A Paradoxical Economic Lifeline for Sudan" (2024), in exchange for political backing and revenue streams, the Bashir regime offered incentives to "Gulf investors, particularly in the farming sector, including custom exemptions for machinery and agricultural inputs, profit transfers, tax exemptions for periods as long as ten years, no restrictions on exporting produce, and the freedom to employ foreign labor." These incentives turned Sudan into one of most attractive investment havens in the region, offering Gulf states fertile land and water resources at a negligible cost. Beyond food security, investments in land and ports in Sudan and the Horn of Africa have facilitated and expanded Gulf Arab particularly Emirati control over circuits and networks of food production and distribution across the region. This process should be viewed as part of a broader strategy of empire-making which is distinct from, yet entangled with, US imperialism. One indication of this distinction is reflected in the ways the US sought to thaw relations with Sudan in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, aiming to invest in Sudanese agriculture in direct competition with Gulf Arab interests.

US Food Aid with Strings Attached

On February 15th of 2023, exactly two months before the current war erupted, David Beasley, then head of the World Food Program (WFP) and former Republican governor of South Carolina, posted a video on X urging the world to address an impending food availability crisis through private sector investments in land. Standing in a wheat field in Sudan, he proclaimed: "This is a country that has 210 million acres of arable land and only 25% of it being used . . . if we can get the private sector in here working with the smallholder farmers, while we can grow the food we need, not just feed just Sudan, but actually feed the whole world. That's what's gotta happen and it's gotta happen now (sic)." Invoking the colonial discourse of terra nullius, Beasley extended an invitation to private agribusiness investors in and beyond the US to invest in arable Sudanese land that is presumed empty; waiting to be transformed into fields of wheat. His words encapsulate a common myth, touted as a panacea for food security in the Horn of Africa: that large-scale land investments will turn the region into a breadbasket capable of feeding not only itself, but the entire world.

What appears to be an innocuous request by Beasley for the US private sector to help Sudan feed itself and the world was strategically timed to align with a set of congressional policies tied to the US farm bill. These policies would help pave the way for these investments once Sudan is released from the shackles of a thirty-year US sanctions regime. At the time of Beasley's invitation, Republican lawmakers proposed an overhaul of the Food for Peace program. Established in 1954, the program uses US agricultural surpluses to provide food assistance around the world through organizations like the WFP. Today, the Food for Peace program buys around two billion dollars' worth of American farm commodities and distributes it around the world (Morris, 2025). The disposal of these surpluses helps US agribusiness farmers keep the price of staple crops sufficiently high to derive a profit. In a 2022 meeting with Republican Congressman Tracy Mann and Kansan farmers who participate in the Food for Peace program, David Beasley described US farmers as "active participants, leaders, and shapers of global food security" (US Congressman Moran Press Release, 2022) through their partnership with the World Food Program. Kansan Senator Jerry Moran similarly described the Food for Peace program as capable of "addressing famine around the world while creating new markets for our commodities and bolstering our agricultural economy." (Moran Video, 2025) Together, Moran and Mann crafted the "American Farmers Feed the World Act" to revamp the Food for Peace pro- gram in 2023 to ensure that all funds for non-emergency food aid are spent on US commodities. The proposal stalled under the Biden administration but is now being reconsidered with an added bonus. The most recent proposed legislation, introduced in February of 2025, suggests moving the Food for Peace program from the now defunct USAID to the more "com- modity-focused" USDA. The rationale behind this proposal is to make the administration of the Food for Peace program "more efficient" and in-line with American priorities, while also "providing a market for Kansan [American] farmers" (Senator Jerry Moran Press release and Video 2025). If passed, this new legislation will allow US agribusiness farmers to secure larger contracts to "feed the hungry" while crucially opening up new markets for their products in food insecure, conflict affected regions of the world: countries like Sudan that are currently in desperate need of food aid.

Today in the midst of war, David Beasley's invitation for the US private sector to invest in Sudanese land seems logistically and politically impossible. His invitation raises questions, however, around why the Gezira has become such a focal point in the battle between the army and the RSF and around who might try to gain access to its land once the guns are silenced. The Gulf states are the most likely candidates, particularly countries like the UAE who have invested billions in Sudanese land and infrastructure over the last two decades and are now the biggest suppliers of weapons to the RSF. But the revamped Food for Peace program could pave the way for US investments in the future by giving US agribusiness farmers access to already volatile Sudanese markets.

New York Times journalist and Chief Africa correspondent Declan Walsh writes that the stark consequences of Trump's aid cuts and the dismantling of USAID "are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan" ("Trump's Aid Cuts Hit the Hungry in a City of Shellfire and Starvation," 2025). Within days, hundreds of communal kitchens were shut down, exacerbating the country's hunger crisis. The USAID cuts come on the heels of a severely underfunded United Nations Sudan humanitarian response plan, which, as of March 2025, had only received 6.2% of its required funding, as released by Relief Web in their update, "Sudan's humanitarian crisis worsens amid conflict and sharp funding cuts" (2025). The devastating impact of these cuts on Sudan reveal the structural dependency embedded within the funding streams created by USAID that have often served as a temporary band-aid for the deadly consequences of the decades-long restructuring of Sudan's agricultural sector. USAID has in fact been Sudan's largest food aid donor since 2004. The revamped Food for Peace program could extend this process of restructuring, because wars often serve as pretext for state land grabs to facilitate foreign investments in mining and agriculture. To be clear, people in Sudan are in desperate need of international food aid as they face catastrophic levels of hunger and struggle to survive this war. People are dying of malnutrition and disease across the country, while people in parts of Darfur and the Nuba Mountains have had to boil leaves to survive. Linking this urgently needed international aid to opening new markets for US and other agribusiness investors, however, will almost certainly cause more hunger and food insecurity in the future because it will undermine the livelihoods of millions of Sudanese small farmers.

Towards a Food Sovereign Future

In light of USAID cuts and a dismal international aid response, millions of Sudanese are increasingly relying on each other to survive. The Trump administration's aid cuts have exposed how the current relief effort on the ground is largely being sustained by Sudan's emergency response rooms--grassroots, neighborhood-based mutual aid collectives run by volunteers across the country. In the absence of an adequate international aid response, they are leading food and medicine distribution efforts, organizing communal kitchens, coordinating evacuations and protection activities, setting up ad-hoc emergency clinics, rape crisis centers and women response rooms. They are also converting defunct schools into shelters, repairing and restoring public services such as water and electricity, and retrieving and burying dead bodies. In one emergency response room in Sennar, volunteers used diaspora support to purchase an entire pharmacy and distributed vouchers so people could obtain their medications for free. In Darfur, agricultural response rooms have emerged, where people are growing food to combat hunger. Over the last two years, their communal kitchens have fed millions across 18 states, with minimal resources or overhead. Many of these kitchens are now shutting down due to lack of external sources of funding. This presents an opportunity for the emergency response rooms to expand their partnerships with Sudan's farmers, who are organizing to address the deepening food crisis.

In January of 2025, the Gezira and Managil Farmers Alliance launched a "We Must Plant" campaign, distributing vegetable seeds to 2,421 families in central Sudan as the RSF was retreating from the areas. Just weeks after the RSF committed massacres on the land with the financial backing of the UAE, people began to grow food for nourishment and recovery on it. Families across the Gezira are now growing subsistence food within their compounds and have created entire iftars with the food they grew and bartered with each other during Ramadan. In one community of agricultural workers, people planted vegetables like okra and greens on the land encompassed by a local school and bought school supplies with the excess produce they sold.

The We Must Plant campaign is allowing people to feed one another while reducing their dependency on food aid. If the campaign is scaled up, it has the potential to feed people in other parts of the country as well. The Gezira and Managil Farmers Alliance is already connecting with nearby resistance committees and emergency response rooms for instance, to explore how they can support one another's food security work. They also hope to expand their efforts beyond the Gezira by supporting displaced and war-impacted farmers elsewhere in launching similar "We Must Plant" campaigns. Beyond the immediate benefit of feeding people, the farmers alliance is enabling Sudanese farmers to remain on or return to their land at a time when the risk and potential for foreign and domestic land grabs is high, particularly once the guns are silenced. This campaign builds on a long history of organized resistance led by farmers, against the extractive violence of colonial and post-colonial state elites and their international partners. In the Gezira, farmers and agricultural workers have been organizing against the impact of the 2005 act for two decades now, as they build towards a food sovereign future. This includes the freedom to return to subsistence farming and to define their own food and agricultural systems. In other parts of the country this also includes the ability to return to one's land after decades of war and the right to benefit from what the land has to offer, both above and below its surface. These grassroots efforts lack the capacity to fulfill the vast needs of Sudanese civilians as hunger spreads, and should not be seen as a replacement for a desperately needed international aid response. Rather, they can be seen as charting a new path towards a food sovereign future.

As children playing in my grandfather's courtyard among the bats and stray cats, we were oblivious to the ways the Gezira served as the economic backbone of the country. My grandfather's larger-than-life trees, however, gave us a glimpse of its immense potential to feed the entire country and region-a potential that could protect and preserve the lives of millions of Sudanese civilians currently caught up in the catastrophe of this war.