Country grows and sells abundant food crops as people in war-torn Darfur face starvation
Jeffrey Gettleman
New York Times
Here in the desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.
But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?
African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.
But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around.
The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian army.
Now, the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.
Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the U.S. government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tonnes of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston.
Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to UN officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly "one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime's domestic policies."
It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government's strategy to manipulate "national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty."
Aid groups gave up long ago on the Sudanese government helping the people of Darfur. After all, the nation's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been accused of masterminding genocide in Darfur. UN officials have said that if they do not bring food into the region, the government surely will not.
That leaves the United Nations and Western aid groups feeding more than 3 million residents of Darfur. But the lifeline is fraying. Security is deteriorating. Aid trucks are getting hijacked nearly every day and deliveries are being made less and less frequently. The result: less food and soaring malnutrition rates, particularly among children.
Sudanese officials say their goal is self-sufficiency, and they deny that the agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people.
They reject accusations that they are neglecting far-flung areas such as Darfur, much less waging a war of hunger and deprivation against them.
Instead, Sudanese officials say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by sanctions for more than a decade.
And it could get worse, with Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court in connection with the massacres in Darfur.