The main topic of the article is set out in its first two paragraphs:
Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat
Here in the bone-dry 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.
I suppose the first question that came to mind is why are they growing all these crops in the desert? Is that really an efficient use of water? Well, perhaps it is. Thanks to the Nile River and an impressive, gravity-driven series of canals built by the British early in the 20th Century, Sudan has impressive agricultural potential. It has 208 million acres of arable land, only 25% of which is currently being used.
Of course, there is a difference between farming by a lot of smallholders, and the giant agrobusinesses being developed by the Sudanese government:
Sudan's overall economic strategy is to diversify from oil, which it began exporting in 1999, and to focus more closely on the traditional engine of the country's economy - agriculture. More than 80 percent of the work force is engaged in raising animals or farming of one sort or another....
The dark side of all this development is displacement. The conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, is largely about grazing rights and watering holes - and the government's brutal counterinsurgency policies in response to an armed rebellion. So far, the most ambitious agricultural projects have avoided the area altogether, and instead are concentrated in the central and northern parts of the country
Even so, development in Sudan often means uprooting other rural subsistence farmers for large-scale commercial projects, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar at the Social Science Research Council in New York.
"Smallholder food production goes down, commercial food production goes up, and food relief serves as a subsidy to this transformation, keeping the displaced alive," he said.
The Sudanese government is widely blamed for running many of the displaced people in Darfur off their farms, making them reliant on handouts. Still, the government has been slow to feed them.
So although Sudan does have great potential in improving its economy through agriculture, the way the development is being promoted is undermining the capacity to better the lives of the majority of the population, in favor of agribusiness that will benefit the elite.
A lot of the new development is funded by other countries, with the production designated for the funding countries. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are among the countries that are essentially renting farmland in Sudan to supply their own needs.
Meanwhile, millions of people in the Sudan are starving to death, and are reliant on international food assistance that is becoming increasingly expensive as well as more difficult to transport to the people in need. That brings up a second point that the article touches on in passing: the controversy over US food assistance:
In fact, part of the reason relief agencies bring their own food into Sudan stems from the American policy of giving crops, not money, as foreign aid.
Many European countries, by contrast, just give the World Food Program cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the program bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. United Nations officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.
The United States, while fairly generous about international food assistance, does also use its charity as a form of subsidy for US agriculture, since it donates crops rather than cash. As the article points out, and as many others have complained, this undercuts local agriculture and can serve to prolong the economic problems that led to famine in the first place. Still, the Sudanese government wants to have it both ways. It doesn't want to sell to aid agencies locally, because there is more money to be earned through exports.
I found the article to be interesting and tragic in the subject it was covering. But I also found it interesting how woven throughout were these reference to other food policy topic like organics, agribusiness versus smallholder farming, US food assistance and how countries are increasingly making deals to earmark the food production of other nations for their own use.
It's all interconnected, folks... |
