Notes

5 W Main: Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy. In December, the Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that Sudan is slipping into a ”widening famine crisis.” The FRC estimates that some 24.6 million people—roughly half Sudan’s population—is suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, while there’s outright famine in at least five areas. And it’s only getting worse: The FRC projects famine will have spread to five more areas by May. Why?

Sudan has been in a state of civil war since April 2023. There are two warring parties, each supported by competing foreign powers: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan leads the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF); his erstwhile partner, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as “Hemedti,” heads up the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Both sides use starvation as a weapon of war. The overwhelming majority of the hungriest people live in territory controlled by the RSF, but the UN recognizes Burhan as the de facto Sudanese head of state, which means he gets to veto the entry of humanitarian convoys—effectively enabling the SFA to block food from entering RSF-controlled territory. For its part, the RSF is ransoming food aid for money, keeping its own soldiers fed while starving the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

SAF bombardments, coupled with RFS massacres, have forced some 11.5 million people to flee their homes, which represents one-fourth of the total Sudanese population. Many have fled from the breadbasket region of Gezira, south of Khartoum, to escape the RSF’s pillaging. Now, most livestock is owned by cartels, while Sudan’s agricultural output has contracted by nearly half.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese economy has largely collapsed. Burhan’s finance minister estimates that it shrank by 40 percent in 2023. And even before the outbreak of civil war, Sudan hadn’t recovered economically from the secession of oil-rich South Sudan in 2011. It’s exposed longstanding vulnerabilities in Sudan’s food production. Historically, the Sudanese government has imported wheat to make bread for its urban population; but now it lacks the requisite hard currency, leaving people in the cities without food.

As Willow Berridge, Alex de Waal, and Justin Lynch write in Sudan's Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People's Revolution, bread subsidies were the Sudanese government’s way of mollifying the people of Sudan. But when the economy collapsed in 2016, bread prices shot up; in late 2018, people took to the streets, and in 2019 military officers—including Burhan and Hemedti—eventually overthrew the long-term president Omar al-Bashir. In other words, Sudan’s overreliance on wheat imports is a consequence of Bashir’s regime combatting democracy, a trigger for Burhan’s and Hemedti’s rise to power—and a major cause of today’s famine crisis.

—Gustav Jönsson