News Article by FT posted on August 21, 2008 at 23:29:30: EST (-5 GMT)
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Past failures temper hopes for Sudan Financial Times As oil-rich Gulf states hunt for overseas land to set up agricultural projects it should come as no surprise that their attention turns towards Sudan. As Africa's largest country, it has vast tracts of land. The White Nile and the Blue Nile, which cross into Sudan from Uganda and Ethiopia respectively - before joining in Khartoum to form the Nile proper - provide plentiful water for irrigation. Sudan is a member of the 22-nation Arab League, Arabic is its lingua franca, and the country sits just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf's most populous state. But putting any plans into practice will throw up a host of hurdles. In spite of being an oil producer since 1999, Sudan is impoverished and hugely underdeveloped, the result of decades of conflict and government mismanagement. The quality of roads, for example, will determine how easily producers can transport their harvests from rural areas to ports. In 2003, the World Bank estimated that just 6,240km of Sudan's 55,000km of roads were tarmacked. And in Sudan and other countries on Gulf states' radar, investors will have to take on the risks of political instability, corruption and dealing with inefficient bureaucracies. Previous attempts by Arab states to involve Sudan in solving their food problems have shown just how easily the grandest of visions can end in failure. During the first oil boom of the 1970s, governments joined forces to set up the Arab Authority for Agriculture Investment and Development (AAAID), with headquarters in Khartoum. The agency's objectives included contributing to Arab food security. Most of its projects were to be focused in Sudan, but officials say they achieved little because of a combination of poor management, insufficient financing and regional politics. History "[The AAAID] was sitting here doing nothing," says Abdul Rahim Hamdi, a former Sudanese finance minister. "The history of the AAAID was the history of bureaucracy, general managers who didn't want to do anything or [who wanted] to keep their offices outside of Sudan, and so it did very little." Sudan's relations with its Arab neighbours deteriorated in the 1990s because of the Islamic regime's support for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, its willingness to host Osama Bin Laden and his followers and accusations that it was involved in the 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Relations have since improved, but the Darfur conflict continues to destabilise Sudan, while Omar Al Bashir, the country's president, is the first sitting head of state to be indicted for genocide by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Still, Hamdi is optimistic, arguing that the needs of food importers will outweigh any political considerations. He adds that projects currently being discussed will differ from those of the 1970s and 1980s because they will involve bilateral government agreements and greater input from the private sector. Under Saudi Arabia's plans, for example, Riyadh hopes it will act as a facilitator for overseas projects, with bilateral agreements to protect investments and to agree on what percentage of produce would be exported back to the kingdom. But it will be looking to the Saudi private sector to invest in and run any schemes. That could create its own set of problems. "Convincing the private sector is not going to be easy," says an analyst based in Saudi Arabia. "Some of these countries are extremely corrupt ... and will they have the political will to improve their infrastructures?" "It's not easy to tell another country to build roads because we want to export things."
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