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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Hi everyone.
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Great, that worked better than when I do it in class. So that's. Thank you for that. Hi everyone. Welcome to this LSE event. It's wonderful to see all of you here and also welcome to our online audience as well. I'm Sara Salim. I'm co Director of LSE Human Rights and an Associate professor in the Department of Sociology. And I'm really excited to be welcoming Dr. Nasreen Alamein to LSE to speak about the politics of hunger in Sudan. A special thank you to Maddie Giles and Yedna Rahman and the LSE Events team for making this event happen, and also to our co sponsors, the Firoz Ralji Institute for Africa. This lecture is our annual Human Rights Day lecture, part of our Human Rights program in the department, where we aim to speak to critical and transformative notions of justice and resistance in relation to or against certain notions of human rights. So today's lecture touches on one of the most urgent crises of our contemporary moment unfolding in Sudan. And the talk will explore how, as millions of Sudanese face starvation, global markets are also experiencing a surge in the value of key Sudanese commodities, such as gold, gum Arabic and livestock that are smuggled out of the country to places like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Kenya. This talk situates Sudan's current famine within a broader historical context of neoliberal economic restructuring and U.S. aid policies, foreign land investments and resource extractivism. It traces how the history is connected to the current dismantling of rural livelihoods and agricultural infrastructures and to the ongoing resource extraction facilitated by this war. Using food insecurity and hunger as a lens, the talk will examine the role of foreign, and in particularly in particular, Gulf, actors in fueling and sustaining the war. So this lecture will be delivered by Nasreen Alameen, who is an Assistant professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 2020 and is currently writing a book tentatively titled Stratified.
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Land, Capital and Empire Making in Central Sudan, which focuses on Saudi and Emirati land grabs and community resistance to land dispossession in the Ghazira region of Sudan, and she's also a member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective. So we'll first hear our lecture from nasreen for about 40 to 45 minutes, followed by about 40 minutes for Q and A. So please join me in welcoming Mr. Into Alessi.
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Hi, everyone. I'm a little overwhelmed by how many people decided to come out on a Wednesday evening to hear me speak. So thank you for being here. I want to thank Dr. Salim for. And the Sociology Department of LSE for all the labor and care that went into making this event happen and for inviting me to be here.
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Before I begin, I want to take a moment to honor the countless people in Sudan, Palestine, Congo, right here on this island and elsewhere who have lost their lives due to colonial violence, militarized state violence, war and genocide, not only over the past few years, but over the past decades as well. The purpose of this talk is to try to answer why over half of Sudan's population of 48 million is currently at risk, at great risk of hunger, in a country that could easily feed itself in the entire region. A country that has millions of acres of fertile land situated along the White and Blue Niles and over the Nubian Aquifer.
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Did I just turn this off?
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Sorry.
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War is, of course, part of the answer here. The current war has caused the world's largest humanitarian crisis and has displaced over 12 million people within and beyond Sudan's borders. But the roots of this famine extend to the colonial legal framework that governs land and to decades of privatization policies. No, okay, sorry. To decades of privatization policies that have undermined the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and herders. And so today, I'm going to try to contextualize the current famine by looking at how years of neoliberal restructuring of the agricultural sector and even US Aid policy created the conditions for food insecurity, the food insecurity people are currently experiencing, which are then greatly exacerbated by the current obstruction of food aid and the use of hunger as a weapon of war by the warring parties. I also want to challenge the idea that this all began with Al Bashir. By starting with the 1984 famine. I will look at foreign and domestic land grabs in Central Sudan, which I study as a more recent phenomenon that has undermined people's ability to feed themselves. I will end by highlighting some of the work of the Jazeera and Managil Farmers alliance and others to mitigate hunger in the midst of this war, and tell you how you can support their work. Before I start the official part of this talk, I want to provide some very brief and basic context for this war through the lens of the trade in commodities. The current war started in April of 2023 between two factions of a military regime that grabbed power in a coup in October of 2021. Attempting to crush a powerful revolution which overthrew the dictatorship of Amr al Bashir after 30 years in power. I would describe this as a multiscaler, counter revolutionary war that continues partly because of the ways local and foreign elites are fueling it to protect their financial and political interests. To put it very simplistically and without getting into too much nuance. On one side of this war, we have the United Arab Emirates supporting the rapid support forces with weapons in exchange for Sudanese gold which they sell to Russia and other countries. Egypt provides critical support to the army, partly in an effort to protect its interests with regards to the Red Sea and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Evidence suggests that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are also supporting the army for strategic and economic reasons. In 2013, the Janjaweeds were turned into the RSF by Al Bashir as part of a coup proofing strategy against the army. They were also legitimized by something called the khartoum process in 2014, a process through which the European Union is externalizing its border to the region between Sudan and Libya. At the time, it funneled 200 million to the RSF through the former regime to militarize this border in order to stem the migration of East Africans into Europe. This Khartoum process has absurdly been revived earlier this year to prevent Sudanese refugees from reaching Sudan to through Egypt and Tunisia, who are essentially getting paid by the EU to deport Sudanese refugees. The scholar and writer Mohammad Salah, who has written an excellent book on gold in Sudan, recently showed me how to track the trade of gold and other key Sudanese commodities like gum Arabic and livestock from my phone. He also showed us at a previous, at a conference, an image of a simple Toyota truck filled with 10 kilos of gold crossing from Darfur in Western Sudan into Libya, destined for the uae. And it's kind of similar to this image here. This is a Nubian aquifer. Sorry. Here you go. Much of Sudan's gold is mined artisanally and its production is often not captured through official statistics. What we do know, however, is that over 90% of Sudan's gold ends up in the UAE. The rest of Sudan's gold goes to places like Cairo and Istanbul. And you can see here a kind of map of where the gold, the routes of the gold. People generally know that this is how the RSF is funding much of its war effort. But the army is also increasingly smuggling gold out of Sudan through Egypt to the gold markets of the UAE and elsewhere in order to help sustain its war effort. More than A million Sudanese are involved in artisanal mining in large open air mining zones and across 12 of Sudan's 18 states, working under extremely dangerous conditions. For the UAE, the profit margins from this gold have risen exponentially since the war began. The official numbers are that 1 kilo costs the foreign buyer 10,000 USD who then sells it at 65,000. But unofficially the margin is much larger. Similarly, one unit of gum arabic, a commodity used in soft drinks, candy, makeup, Sudan produces about 80% of the world's gum arabic. One unit is sold by the Sudanese trader for $500 and by the time it arrives in the UAE, it becomes worth $5,000. And this number comes again from Mohamed Salah, who's tracking the trade of these commodities through traders in Sudan. If you look at the official statistics, gum Arabic exports have decreased since the war started. But curiously, gum arabic exports in countries like Kenya have risen exponentially despite the fact that they produce little gum arabic exports. Little gum arabic.
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Another important commodity for both warring parties is livestock. The livestock trade has boomed amidst this war. Livestock exports to Saudi Arabia officially increased by 77% in 2023. The RSF and Army have both created safe corridors for livestock traders to move thousands of often looted animals across their territories to export terminals along the Red Sea and border with Egypt, while deliberately obstructing such corridors for humanitarian aid and people fleeing violence. When the RSF besieged the agricultural Jazeera region, committing horrific massacres as they currently are in Darfur, they are estimated to have looted 60% of the area's 11 million livestock. As Sudanese people starve, livestock exports to Saudi Arabia and Egypt are becoming an important source of revenue for both warring parties. For Egypt in particular, the influx of Sudanese livestock has enabled the Sisi regime to keep meat prices low as they contend with growing resentment and dissent at home. The reason I highlight the gold, gum Arabic and livestock trade and the absurd profit margins they they have produced is because it tells us partly why and how this war is continuing to get funded by countries like the UAE and Egypt. Because it has allowed them to extract and trade Sudanese commodities with much higher profit margins than before the war. And this is of course not new. In the 1950s, when the post colonial state was first forming, the central governments in Khartoum, who had essentially subsumed the south as a quasi internal colony, used crash crops like cotton to fund its repressive campaign against South Sudanese, demanding political representation, equitable resource distribution and regional autonomy. And when the state elites waging this war against South Sudanese resistance fighters were met with Resistance from cotton tenant farmers in the center demanding better wages and a greater share of profits as world cotton prices plummeted. They responded with extreme violence, suffocating over 300 striking farmers in poor, poorly ventilated detention cells precisely because they were threatening capitalist labor relations that reproduce an extractive war economy that serves elite interests by any means necessary. Is everybody still with me? Yes. Okay. Okay, so that's good, because I'm going to start the official part of my talk now.
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In the early 1980s, a severe drought hit north Darfur. North Darfur, north Kordofan and the Red Sea hills and reducing food production by 75%. 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. The governor of Darfur, Ahmed Diraj, who see a picture right here, wrote a letter to the Nimeiri regime in November of 1983 warning of a looming famine. When the regime refused to respond, Diraj flew to Khartoum to deliver the message in person. Instead of making an arrest warrant. Sorry. Instead of making an appeal for food assistance from the international community, Nimedi issued an arrest warrant for Dhiraj, 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 river region in order to attract foreign investments in agriculture. Declaring famine would undermine his sales pitch and threaten potentially lucrative Gulf finance projects and mechanized farming. For Nemedi, 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 where they appealed to local residents. For the support. Students and ordinary people began organizing weekly food drives and delivered meals to people in IDP camps at the edge of the capital. By August of 1984, Nimedi could no longer cover up Sudan's deepening hunger crisis and found himself appealing to the Reagan administration for assistance.
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In March of 1985, U.S. vice President Bush flew to Khartoum with an entourage of 250 people, among them moral majorities Jerry Falwell and televangelist Pat Robertson to pledge 21 million in U.S. food aid. The trip alone required six aircrafts and cost a total of $20 million. Gail Smith described it as the, quote, relatively quiet entry of America's religious right wing into Africa, trying to win the hearts and minds of hungry Africans and against the Quote, creeping communism, which prevented them from traveling to neighboring, drought stricken Ethiopia under socialist rule at the time.
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So here you see Bush pouring milk into cups for Ethiopian refugees in Sudan because he refused to cross the border. And as a side note, how many of you remember the We Are the world single in 1985? People, people remember, okay.
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Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie. It raised around $80 million in aid for Ethiopia, which is about double what the Reagan administration had spent on aid to Ethiopia the year before. Live Aid celebrities like Paul McCartney, Madonna and Queen took to the stage here in London and Philadelphia and raised another 100 million. A year later, though, the Reagan administration raised its AIDS significant, but funneled it mostly through private charities like World Vision and Mercy Corps as part of a broader plan to fight the domino effect of communism in the region by positioning themselves as US saviors vis a vis the ussr. So back to Sudan that same year. Alex De Waal, who I think is in the audience.
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Writes that, quote, aid workers had to adjust to being hailed as Reagan by grateful villagers as they distributed sacks of U.S. wheat in western Sudan. But U.S. food aid had arrived too late, and Nimeri's deliberate neglect and denial of famine ultimately killed over 240,000 people, mostly children. The influx of US food aid had also tarnished Sudan's image as a potential breadbasket of the Middle East. And as Namiri cozied up to Washington after switching allegiances from the Soviet Union, he began to face increasing resentment and resistance at home. Between 1979 and 1985, the Nimeir regime implemented five 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. Sudan had also, under his rule, become the US's largest recipient of foreign aid, much of which was either pocketed by Nimeiri and his inner circle or pumped into mismanaged agricultural megaprojects in rural areas impacted by drought and decertrification. 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, which also is a great paper that has been written by Eddie Thomas, who's also in the audience. The ful or falafel 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% 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, Nimedi was overthrown by a popular uprising as he was returning from this trip to Washington. Here he is meeting with Reagan on the 1st. On the 1st of, I guess.
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On the 1st of March. No, sorry.
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On the 1st of April. On the 6th, he was overthrown. Among the many factors that led to the uprising, Nimedi's deliberate refusal to acknowledge famine and fear Sudan's drought stricken farmers and herders was perhaps the most damning. Fourteen years later, famine denial is once again resurfacing. Forty years later, sorry, famine denial is once again resurfacing in a 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 camp near Al Fashir, Sudan's largest IDP camp, which was home to over a million people at the time. This is the revolution that overthrew Nimeri. The Ingotiere confirmed that a child was dying of hunger every two hours in Zamzam. The army, positioning itself as Sudan's de facto government, responded to the UN's official declaration of famine in North Darfur, Zamzam IDP camp, by categorically rejecting its description of the situation in Sudan as a famine. Four days later, after the UN's declaration announcement of famine in parts of North Darfur, the army dropped bombs on Zamzam camp in an attempt to eliminate the evidence for it. It also continued to block UN food trucks from entering Sudan at the Adreal crossing with Chad, essentially leading the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger to jump from 1.7 million to 7 million. The RSF, on the other hand, have, quote, intentionally poisoned water sources, destroyed irrigation channels, blocked water flows, looted agricultural machinery and contaminated fertile soil, rendering vast stretches of land in different parts of Sudan, like the Dazeera, unusable. They've also obstructed and looted food aid, bombed nutrition or grain storage facilities, and used starvation as a coercive tool to force youth into recruitment. When the RSF retreated from khartoum in late 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 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, however, of star prisoners of war strategically to position themselves as liberators of Khashtum. If the RSF are the architects of the current famine, then the army are complicit in its execution. As it has been for decades, 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. During the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, it used this tactic in collaboration with the RSF, formerly the Janjaweed, to weaken armed resistance groups. In the current moment, the army's twisted logic behind starving civilians in Darfur while trying to position themselves as liberators in Khartoum demonstrates that civilians, particularly communities long affected by state violence, are being used as pawns in a struggle for power and territorial control. Between military elites and famine, denial and the weaponization of hunger have reemerged as strategies in this deadly game of chess. 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 Nemedi's downfall, albeit with new terms and different partners. After the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on Sudan in the early 90s for supporting, quote, international terrorist activities and harboring Osama bin Laden, the US gradually lost some of 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 the Meiri'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 and agriculture, mining, and oil. 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 umbrella of Tamkin, or empowerment. The regime aimed to purge quote its rivals from government, civil society and the economy, end of quote. Replacing them with ruling party loyalists. 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, often in partnership with Gulf investors. The regime also established a Technical Committee for the Disposal of Public Enterprises with the aim of privatizing over 100 state owned enterprises to strengthen the political and economic power of the ruling party. Among the numerous enterprises targeted for privatization, the Jazida scheme, which at the time was still one of the world's largest centrally managed irrigation schemes, was arguably one of the most significant before this war. It produced half of Sudan's wheat and provided a livelihood for almost 2 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. The implementation of the Jazida 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. Following the World Bank's recommendation, the dissolution of the scheme was also accompanied by the withdrawal of state extension services and essential inputs like seeds, fertilizers and tractors for small farmers. 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. The staff of the Jazeera Board, comprising engineers, researchers and inspectors, was drastically reduced from over 7,000 to just 74 within a year. These policies drove thousands of small farmers into debt by reducing their output and yields. The only beneficiaries were wealthy farmers who through their membership in the ruling party affiliated Farmers Union, were able to borrow large sums of money from the agricultural banks to establish service providing companies. These companies took advantage of ordinary farmers who were left to fend for themselves after the regime abandoned them. But farmers got organized through the Jazira and Managhal Farmers alliance and through a combination of civil disobedience, public education, cooperative farming and legal advocacy went were able to help farmers hold onto their land and fend off a large scale land grab by the state. For the Bashir regime, the mid to late 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 75% that would accompany South Sudan's likely independence. The Jazida schemes land has always been attractive to investors because of its fertile clay soil, proximity to the Niles 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. Instead, state elites sold investors on the next best option, land located on the other side of the scheme, just an hour's drive from the capital Khartoum. Land at the edge of the scheme along the Blue Nile is mostly customary land which the state conceives if it is deemed unproductive according to a set of land laws we inherited from our British colonizers.
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Okay. This aerial photograph depicts two such farms, a domestic one owned by the Dal conglomerate. Anyone who knows Osama Dawood owns a Dal conglomerate called Al Waha and now a defunct Emirati owned farm called Zayd Al Khair, where these are two farms that I did my research around. Both farms were established in the early 2000s in the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Jazeera Act. That kind of ushered in the changes that I was just talking about. From the early 2000s to the outbreak of the current war, Saudi and Emirati investors have leased an estimated 2 million acres of Sudanese land primarily to cultivate water intensive high yield alfalfa and rodust grass which is animal feed and controlled more Sudanese land than all of Sudan's large domestic investors combined. These crops were exported to the Gulf to support the expansion of their growing dairy and meat industry. So that I think challenges this idea that this is only about food security, right? Because they're mostly actually not growing food for human consumption, but for animal consumption. 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 Al Waha 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 pastoralists abandoned herding for petty trade and brick making or joined the lower ranks of the expanding security states. The RSF and army have in fact 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 store 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 the region in rural areas where the war was still distant. In those first weeks of the war, people ventured out into the area 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. But they've also been gradually disappearing through the environmental devastation that agribusiness practices have wrought on soil and water. The privatization of the Jazida scheme in Central Sudan tells one particular story that 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 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 Numerian and Bashir regimes, the key players shifted, but the financialization and privatization of Sudan's economy continued under a new ideological cloak. And Sudan's vast rural population continued to bear the brunt of capitalist extraction. And by new ideological cloak here I'm talking about the Islamists. While the US led embargo on Sudan that began in the 90s isolated the country from its previous previous Western allies, it created an opening for Gulf capital to embed itself more deeply in Sudan's economy. Under the guise of boosting domestic food security in exchange for political backing and revenue streams, the Bashu 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 10 years, no restrictions on exporting produce, and the freedom to employ foreign labor. These Incentives turn Sudan into one of the 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 control over circuits and networks of food production and distribution across the region. I just wanted to. This is one of the farms.
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I'm going to get back to this. This process should be viewed as part of a broader strategy.
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Of really controlling, again, circuits and networks of food production and distribution across the region.
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And is reflected, I think, in the ways that the US sought to far relations with Sudan in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, aiming to invest in Sudanese agriculture in direct competition with Gulf interests. So I think one of the things I want to try to argue is that this is not just about food security, but about a kind of regional strategy of empire making, essentially, even if it's not super successful. And that is, I think, distinct from, yet entangled with, US imperialism. And here we have a deal that was signed right before the war between the Emirates for a port that is about 200 km north of Port Sudan, which is the national port that would have included an airport, a private toll road linking this port to some of the UAE's agricultural projects inland, et cetera. And here's a map of other such ports that the UAE has acquired over the last couple of years. On February 15th of 2023, exactly two months before the current war erupted, David Beasley, then head of the World Food Program and former Republican governor of South Carolina, posted a video on Twitter. Standing in a wheat field in Sudan. So I'm going to switch now to the us Let me see if I.
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A
Can play this amazing, beautiful wheat field here in the middle. What you see behind me is an amazing, beautiful wheat field here in the middle of Sudan. Well, why is this important? Because we've got a food crisis around the world. Ukraine, the bread and basket of the world, feeds. 400 million people shut down. We're running out of food, we're running out of time. And we have got to solve problems in Sudan so we can maximize production. This is a country that has 210 million acres of arable land and only 25% of it is being used. And I can assure you we're going to have a food availability problem. But 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. And that's what's Got to happen. It's got to happen now.
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C
Okay.
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Okay.
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Invoking the colonial discourse of terra nullius, Beasley extends an invitation in this video to private agribusiness investors in and beyond Sudan to invest in arable Sudanese land that is presumed empty, waiting to be transformed into fields of wheat. What appears to be an innocuous request by Beazley 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 billion dollar US Farm bill. As pandemic era food stamps were being cut by by the Biden Administration for 30 million Americans. These policies would help pave the way for these investments once Sudan is released from the shackles of a 30 year US sanctions regime that began with Clinton. 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 World Food Program. Today, the Food for Peace program buys around $2 billion worth of American farm commodities and distributes it around the world. 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 Tracey Mann and Kansan farmers who participate in the Food for Peace program, Beasley described the program as addressing famine around the world while creating new markets for our commodities and bolstering our agricultural economy. End quote. Congressman Mann also co crafted the American Farmers Feed the World act to ensure that all funds for non emergency food aid are spent on US Commodities. The proposal stalled under Biden but was reintroduced this February with an added twist. To move the Food for Peace program from the now defunct USAID to the commodity focused usda, the US Department of Agriculture, in order to provide American farmers with additional market opportunities. If passed, this new legislation will allow U.S. 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 Beazley's invitation for the US Private sector to invest in Sudan seems logistically and politically impossible. It raises questions, however, around why the dazeeda had become such a focal point 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. New York Times journalist 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. Within days, hundreds of communal kitchens were shut down, exacerbating the country's hunger crisis. The USAID cuts cut come on the heels of a severely underfunded UN 2005-2025 Sudan humanitarian response Plan, which as of March had only received 26% of its required funding. 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 agricultural sector. USAID has in fact been Sudan's largest food aid donor since 2004, around the same time the Jazida act was co crafted with the World Bank. The revamped Food for Peace program could extend this process of restructuring because wars often serve as pretexts 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 at the moment as they struggle to survive this war. But linking this aid to opening new markets for US and other agribusiness investors will almost certainly cause more hunger and food insecurity in the future. In light of US cuts, 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. Collectives that emerge from the structure of the resistance committees that were the backbone of the December revolution. 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're also converting defunct schools into shelters, repairing and restoring public services such as water and electricity, and retrieving and burying dead bodies. Over the last two years, the communal kitchens have fed millions across Sudan with minimal resources or overhead. Many of these kitchens are now shutting down due to lack of external sources of funding. Some emergency response rooms are also beginning to partner with Sudan's farmers to address the deepening food crisis. In North Darfur, where we're currently witnessing a genocide happening caused by the rsf, people are also organizing clandestine food drives and continuing to run communal kitchens in areas that people are fleeing to. In Darfur, there are also some agricultural response rooms that are are growing food for Subsistence and survival. In January of 2025, the Jazida and Menagh 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, people began to grow food for nourishment and recovery on it. Families across the Jazeera are now growing subsistence food foods within their compounds. And last Ramadan created entire iftars with the food they grew and bartered with each other. 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. Well beyond the immediate benefit of feeding people. The Farmers alliance and others are 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. 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 Jazida, 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. It 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, while also ensuring its sustainability.
- [42:15]
In recent months, reports have also emerged that SAF affiliated militias have been targeting Kanabi communities of non Arab farm workers. 130 communities are reported to have been attacked and for 50 of them there are satellite images to corroborate this. In some of these communities, people have been rounded up in the hundreds and shot dead under the pretense that they've collaborated with or supported the rsf. There is evidence of mass graves. There have been long standing tensions between Jazeera small farmers and non Arab farm workers, many of whom come from more displaced communities over the land the latter live on. These tensions have purposefully been exacerbated by elites in the past seeking to make farming no longer viable in order to attract domestic and foreign investments in land that require a very different type of labor. The We Must Plant campaign seeks to address some of these tensions and includes several Kanabi communities, one of which, as I mentioned, used the excess produce they grew to purchase school supplies for children to support the Farmers Alliance. And here you can see some of their work.
- [43:21]
To support the Farmers alliance and the communal kitchens of emergency response rooms and other grassroots mutual aid efforts across the country. You can go to sudansolidarity.com through your solidarity, our collective, and we have one member here, Lena Badri, we have managed to raise about a million dollars for mostly small monthly donors with no overhead costs besides transfer fees. Even $10 can go a very long way. Thank you very much.
- [44:00]
Before, before I forget, I also just want to mention our Workshops for Sudan series, which you can give what you want, but it's generally on a sliding scale from $40 onwards. We've had people like Ruthie Gilmore, Safi Al Hilu, Ala Khair, who's a photographer, Yasmin Abdel Majid. Lots of people have given workshops. They're not only about Sudan, but feel free to check them out on our website, sudansalidair.com thank you.
- [44:36]
A
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell.
- [44:38]
C
You about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts.
- [45:01]
A
Now back to the event.
- [45:02]
B
Amazing. Thank you so much, Nasreen. That was so rich. And I think you also touch on so many different dimensions of what's happening now and going to open it up to audience Q and A. But maybe I can get us started with one question, because I think in both the lecture today, but also in your writing, what I'm really struck by is the way you both kind of center this question of history, kind of moving us away from these more presentist analyses that don't necessarily look for these continuities, as you're saying, between political regimes, but also in your analysis of history. I really appreciate the way you kind of make space for movement. So talking about revolution and counter revolution rather than this idea that the revolution failed, but rather that we're in a longer historical process and linked to that. I was also really struck by how you really invite us to think about political economy, economy as such a generative lens through which to understand contemporary events. I think even the tracing of different products, different commodities allows us to also map out a very different almost cartography of violence, but also shows us these entanglements that you Talk about between Sudan, but then Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, then the way US Empire is entanglement entangled. And so thinking about that approach, it also reminded me of how Gulf capital investments kind of also map out this cartography of empire today. And I wanted to ask what we can learn as people that might be interested in empire from these kind of maybe quote unquote newer developments or newer actors.
- [46:59]
When you spoke about the Gulf's investments in Sudan, it also has these land grabbing and infrastructural investments and supply of weapons in other places across Africa. But also I'm thinking about its role in Israel's colonial project. And so is there a cartography here through political economy that we can also think of in relation to resistance and global justice? I mean, I guess I want to get hear more about this. What political economy opens up in terms of these kinds of cartographies and ways of tracing entanglements and connections that might not always appear clearly when we use other kinds of approaches. Should we take a few more questions or do you want to.
- [47:46]
C
It's up to you if you want to open it up.
- [47:49]
B
I think we already have one. Maybe we can take three. Yeah. Okay. So please, it would be great if you could say who you are once you have the mic. And please be mindful of time. Keep if possible, the questions as short as you can so that we have time for multiple ones. So I'll start here with Sunil.
- [48:23]
Oh, maybe a bit louder.
- [48:32]
A
Sorry again. Sunil Kumar from Social Policy. Just following on from that question of entanglements. When you lay bare those entanglements, do you face kind of refutals and refusals of that, of those entanglements? In a sense that the political economy.
- [48:50]
B
You speak about is involving very powerful actors.
- [48:54]
A
And I just wondered if there was resistance in the work that you're doing.
- [49:03]
B
Any other questions? Or we can hand it back to Nasreen maybe.
- [49:07]
C
And then I think there's a question.
- [49:11]
My name is Desmond Thorpe and we.
- [49:15]
A
Involve international investments into Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. I'm just concerned about what has been.
- [49:22]
C
The attitude of the African Union and.
- [49:25]
B
There'S also the regional East African.
- [49:29]
A
Organization. What has been the attitude towards what's going on in Sudan?
- [49:36]
B
There was another question.
- [49:39]
A
Thank you very much for speaking to us today. I wanted to ask what were the biggest, what were the biggest blockers you faced to your research and what are the biggest blockers you find to information flow out of Sudan terrible towards us?
- [49:54]
B
Could you repeat that question?
- [49:55]
A
So the second question being what are the biggest blockers to information flow towards us from Sudan.
- [50:04]
C
I can't hear very well. It's not what you're saying. It's more just the.
- [50:07]
A
Yeah. So information towards us from Sudan.
- [50:10]
C
Okay.
- [50:11]
A
Does that make sense?
- [50:12]
C
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
- [50:13]
A
So what are the biggest preventers? I guess.
- [50:18]
C
Okay, so I guess I'll start with political economy.
- [50:22]
I mean, I think I was actually, I'm. I just wrote a piece with. With Lali Khalili, who's, I think, at Exeter about kind of following the money in this war. And I think it's one way of understanding things. But I do think it's important to follow the money in part because it's also partly what links us here in the global north to what is happening in Gaza, what's happening in Sudan. And so in following the money, we see some entanglements that. That sometimes I think people aren't willing to see. Right. In the ways that, as I mentioned, like livestock are allowed to move across RSF and SAF territories without any obstruction, but they're not willing to come to an agreement around food aid or people fleeing violence. And that's unfortunately now a controversial thing to say, but I think that's. That's why it is important to follow the money and to look at the ways that people are benefiting from this war and to try to interrupt those profit flows. At the University of Toronto, we recently passed a divestment motion where we divested our pension plan from companies that were implicated in the genocide in Palestine, but also. And it was mostly weapons manufacturing companies, but that were also supplying the UAE and the Rwandan Defense Forces. And so we were able to kind of make the link between Sudan, Palestine and Congo in that way. So I think political economy gives us those tools. Right. It allows us to kind of think about that following the money. I know that's a crude way of putting it, but that's partly why.
- [52:06]
I like the method in. Of terms. In terms of resistance. I mean, I think part of why I call what the United Arab Emirates is doing empire making. And a lot of people, especially on the left, will say there is nothing but US Empire.
- [52:21]
And I think there is, of course, a dominance of US empire, but I think we have to be attentive to these emergent forms of empire making that are, as I mentioned, entangled with US empire but not necessarily determined by it. And that might look very different from US empire. And I think part of the reason I like the word empire making is because it means that it's also not a Done deal in a way that it's something that is continuously unsettled, that is challenged through resistance. I do think that one of the reasons this war is so brutal is because it's a counter revolutionary war. And I think it's about foreclosing the possibility of a kind of popular democracy in ways that we, we haven't really necessarily seen in the region. So I think that's why it's important to always center resistance and social movements and.
- [53:11]
Campaigns like the We Must Plant campaign. I don't think there's a need for us to ever be inventing from the global north solutions per se, but rather to be supporting what is happening on the ground. And the emergency response rooms are generally seen as kind of apolitical actors and often strategically position themselves as such. But really in many ways they are a continuation of the revolution. They're running a country more or less in the absence of a functioning state and also a sort of weak international aid response. And to me, it's been actually in many ways, despite the devastation and the kind of violence and threats that everybody's facing, it's been quite inspiring to see the level of organizing that is happening with very little resources. And so again, I want to just emphasize, if you leave today, don't feel despair, you know, but try to plug in by supporting the emergency response rooms, for example. Because it's partly, I think.
- [54:13]
If I think about peace building, I think about the high level peace negotiations that have happened in Jeddah, in Washington, et cetera, that prop up the perpetrators. I mean, we have.
- [54:24]
You know, really the perpetrators of genocide, right? The RSF top brass getting wined and dined in Washington as people are getting massacred in Darfur.
- [54:36]
And they're being propped up as potential reformists, as people who could potentially make peace when really the only people building peace are not making peace on the ground are the emergency response rooms, are the ordinary citizens who are helping people stay alive, right. And helping people survive, the Farmers alliance, et cetera. So to me, that's where I put my faith.
- [54:57]
Let's see, African Union and igad. I feel like other people in this room are better positioned to talk about them. But I, I don't put much faith in those mechanisms, I think in part especially in relation to Sudan, because of who has been leading the difference.
- [55:16]
You know, whether it's IGAD or the African Union. And again, I think I just, if I've learned anything over the years of sort of studying Sudan is that military elites have become experts at.
- [55:30]
Negotiating or. Yeah, Negotiating peace without ever implementing it. And, and so these, I think high level negotiations, especially those that don't center civil society, and I'm not talking here about civilian elites that are affiliated with either side, but really like civil society. The people who are kind of bearing the brunt of this violence.
- [55:51]
Yeah, I just, they haven't been working.
- [55:54]
So. Yeah, sorry. That's the only answer I can give you. I think that's, I guess, just another note on empire. I think part of the way that we see, you know, a lot of people will describe the UAE's investments, for example, in Sudanese land as driven by food security needs. And of course, that's part of the story. They don't have much land or arable land in the sense or like, you know, water resources.
- [56:23]
But I do think that especially if you look at that map of the ports, that they're engaging in a form of empire making that is partly territorial in terms of the land that they're acquiring, but also deterritorial in the ways that they're also kind of trying to control these nodes and circuits of production and distribution across the Horn of Africa and the kind of, you know, continent of Africa more generally. And I think we have to pay attention to that and also link the struggles.
- [56:52]
A
Right.
- [56:52]
C
Like if we think about, you know, the Horn of Africa, what's happening in Kenya, for example, resistance in Kenya. Right. To some of the ways that people are also resisting in other parts of the continent. So. Yeah.
- [57:06]
B
Thank you. Some more questions. We have one here at the back.
- [57:16]
A
Thank you so much. My name is Zhuanghan and I'm from the Department of Social Policy. I really appreciate your informative talk and also your effort to put this conflict forward for people to know more about it. Thank you so much.
- [57:37]
My question, please correct me if I'm wrong, but my question starts with the knowledge that even though the level and the lens of struggle and conflict in South Sudan is no less compared to any other regional conflict all around the world, but the kind of attention from the media and from the rest of the world is much less compared to a lot of other conflict we know ongoing for a shorter time.
- [58:18]
So I just want to hear your opinion based on your research.
- [58:24]
Why is that the case? And what are some efforts we can do to help people realize there are more ongoing wars and conflict, but violation of human rights.
- [58:38]
Happening in some marginalized part of the world?
- [58:49]
C
I'm just going to go over here so you can see me. Hi, my name is Milky. I'm a human rights student here. Thank you so Much for your talk. Sudan is very near and dear to my heart, so it's refreshing to hear your research. I wanted to ask, I wanted to ask, what role do you think corporate conglomerates like the Dal Group have played in either supporting or destroying the Farmers Alliance? And also, do you think that they can be an active presence or do you think that they would play a destructive presence in a post war Sudan? Yeah. Thank you so much.
- [59:32]
Hi, my name is Avanshi. I'm a recent grad and I think my question is a combination of these two, so you can just answer that through it.
- [59:39]
B
But.
- [59:40]
C
So you spoke a lot about, you know, the regional empire making process that comes with this type of food production and food extraction system that's being put into place. And I'm just wondering because the. There's a lack of political will to move towards a solution that actually, you.
- [59:56]
B
Know, values a humanitarian response that's, you.
- [60:00]
C
Know, empowering rather than just capitalistically empowering and focusing more on industries for making a person individualistically powerful whatsoever. How do you imagine the future of.
- [60:10]
B
The situation to go in a positive note?
- [60:12]
C
Like if there's a lack of political.
- [60:14]
B
Will, what's the response that's going to.
- [60:16]
C
Undo the systemic, you know, food production extractivist system that's being put into place that's basically leading all the way out of Sudan. Nothing's being left for the people. So what, what's the future looking like at this point? Okay, so I think I. Sorry, I forgot to answer your question about the information coming in and out. Apologize for that. I mean, I think it's been hard in part because of what you were mentioning is there's not much attention on Sudan.
- [60:46]
I think I've been, you know, getting information from people, my own relatives. Right. People who are on the ground, the farmers alliance, the emergency response rooms tend to be coordinated. Some of the coordination work happens outside of the country. Uganda, you know, Kenya, Egypt. So it's a little bit easier to communicate, but yeah, generally I think. And there's also a lot of problems. Propaganda that sort of has to, you know.
- [61:14]
Yeah, you have to sort of parse, you know, figure it out yourself, essentially. But so I wanted to just talk about the media attention piece. I think it's a combination of things. I mean, I think to one, on one hand, I think obviously anti blackness, you know, anti black racism, the ways that sort of wars on the African continent get naturalized.
- [61:36]
There's also a logistical issue of not very many journalists being able to report from on the ground.
- [61:44]
But also, I mean, I'm based in Canada, and there's been a virtual media blackout. But then recently, one of our sisters in the Sudan, Saudari collective, Shahid Al Faqi, broke the story about Canadian weapons being used by the RSF as they commit genocide in Darfur. And it's allowed. It came at a moment where there was also a little bit more media attention given what has happened in Al Fashir, what is continuing to happen in Al Fashir.
- [62:17]
And I think. So that was a moment where the media was doing the right thing in the sense, right. Where that exposure then led to, to senators now trying to look into, well, why are there Canadian weapons in the hands of the rsf? It's because of there's a loophole that allows Canadian weapons to be rerouted through the US to the UAE and then, you know, to the, to the rsf. So, and also the same loophole, allow, is how Canadian weapons end up in Israel. So, you know, activists are now using that to try to close the loophole.
- [62:53]
And I say all this to say that I don't think all media attention, in fact, most media attention is not necessarily positive, right? In the sense that we've watched, we've witnessed, you know, live streamed on our phones, on our, you know, a genocide in Gaza and it's continued, right. It's not like it actually did anything. And so I think, you know, similarly for Sudan, part of the way that I've seen the media attention be negative is that it's been that we've. That famine is depoliticized, right. That the external actors like the uae, which is probably the most significant actor in fueling the war, is never sort of, it's never talked about. Right. Whereas really, I mean, at a very basic level, if the weapons were to stop flowing, then things would look different on the ground. So to me, it's not just the. About more attention, it's about the right kind of attention. And part of the reason we're not seeing that as certainly in Canada is because people are making a profit, right? And it's US Allies or Canadian allies that are making this profit. And there's also, I think, an interest in maintaining the Abrams Accord, which during the transitional period when there was a partnership agreement after Al Bashir was ousted between kind of civilian and military elites, you know, in 2020, the government signed like a normalization with Israel agreement, right, the Abrams Accord. And you know, the uae, there's other countries that are part of this. And so I think there's an interest in maintaining that in relation to the UAE and to kind of make sure that, you know, US and Canadian allies in the region are. Are still good, to put it bluntly, which then means that Sudan is sort of not seen as important or as seen as potentially threatening that, if that makes sense. And I know Alex Dawal, for example, has written about this, and, you know, the kind of relationship between. I don't know if you want to say something about that, maybe about kind of Israel and. Yeah, I'd actually be curious to hear what you think on that. Yeah.
- [65:09]
A
Thank you. So I think we're seeing a. Is this on? Yeah, we're seeing an extraordinary reconfiguration of really the drivers of.
- [65:25]
What constitutes a. A conflict, a shift from what we might call geopolitics to geo kleptocracy. And in that shift, there is an extraordinary sort of normative collapse, especially notable around this issue of starvation. So there is a permissiveness towards the use of hunger and as a weapon, not just to gain military advantage, but actually to dismantle entire societal structures. So the implication of what Israel has been doing in Gaza is not so much to kill people, but to kill the society. And I think we see something comparable to that unfolding in Sudan in the. What this war is doing is so shredding the social fabric that maybe the majority of the Sudanese people as individuals will survive, but the dismantling of that social fabric will be so far reaching that there is an opportunity then to, as it were, impose a new.
- [66:43]
Social order. I mean, as you know from Raphael Lemkin's theory of genocide, the first part is destroying. The second part is building the new, imposing the new order. So in different ways, in Gaza and in Sudan, we see that. We see that dynamic at work.
- [67:03]
C
Well, and I think part of. Thank you. I think that's why I put my faith in the emergency response rooms and the sort of grassroots civil society that is doing the opposite to some degree, you know, And I mean, if you think about the janjaweed now, the RSF, part of their strategy was in the early 2000s to not only.
- [67:25]
You know, to destroy irrigation ditches, for example, right. To uproot trees, to not only destroy life but livelihoods and the sort of. Of viability of returning to land. And we saw something similar in the Jazeera, in certain parts of the Jazeera as well, that it's part of the sort of strategy of.
- [67:43]
Part of their genocidal strategy, I guess, you know. Okay, in terms of corporate conglomerates, that was a very good question.
- [67:52]
Thank you for that question. I'm going to get in trouble, I think, answering some of this. But.
- [67:59]
I was in Sudan when the war started.
- [68:02]
And this is potentially rumor, but one of the things that people complained about was that some of the large conglomerates had been hiring private security for their farms, especially farms, because this is like land that people are upset for having lost because the state takes the land away based on this kind of colonial legal framework that we inherited. The Unregistered land Act of 1970 is what it became eventually.
- [68:34]
And so, you know, people would sabotage the farms by, you know, breaking into the fences and allowing their. And I'm talking here about the Dalwaha farm, for example, to graze their animals or, you know, destroy the water pumps, etc. So there's a lot of tension between the community and the farm. And in the early days of the war, the farm became.
- [68:57]
One of the headquarters of the RSF in the region. And part of the reason, and again, this is rumor, I'm not saying this is fact, but part of the reason people said that that was the case was because some of them had been hired prior to the war as private security. So I mention this to say that I think again, in understanding this war as a counter revolutionary war, I think that elites, including business elites, have always been complicit in certainly the kind of neoliberal restructuring of the agricultural sector in the ways that people's livelihoods, rural livelihoods, have been undermined to facilitate further investments and privatization.
- [69:39]
And in many ways, yes, the domestic farms are better in that they employ people from Sudan and money circulates within the country. But.
- [69:51]
Even in terms of labor, I mean, there's. The way that these farms operate is that they need technical labor. You don't need that much to run a very big farm because it's mostly machinery. And so a lot of the farms, the foreign owned ones, will get laborers from Yemen, from Syria, from other parts of the region, and people lose their livelihoods as part of that. And so this thing for, I mean, again, Dal is those of you who have been to Khartoum and have been to, what is it called? Ois, Ozone.
- [70:24]
You know, know that it's a fairly popular company, people like working for them, et cetera. But what concerns me is this kind of desire, as I mentioned in the talk, to put the local milkman out of business, you know, and, you know, they'll explain it by saying it's more hygienic to have pasteurized, you know, refrigerated dairy products, et cetera. But, you know, the electricity cuts a lot. It doesn't actually. I mean, it's. To me, the livelihoods of these pastoralists is more important than having, you know, fancy yogurts that are refrigerated. So, yeah, I think there's a way in which domestic elites facilitate foreign resource extraction by partnering with, you know, I mean, they can't do it by themselves. And I think. I'm not. I don't want to single out Dal in particular, but I think it is. I mean, he was signing that port deal, right? So I think. And then there's also a way that I've been wondering, I don't know other Sudanese people, how they feel about this, but I've also been wondering, like, where are our millionaires, Right? Where are they in this moment in terms of providing aid, you know, evacuating people? I mean, you know, some of them have lots of funds. So I generally don't believe in elite power and in sort of glorifying elites and. Yeah, and the Dal company is not an exception to that.
- [71:56]
B
So I think we have time for one more round. I know there's someone who's been waiting upstairs.
- [72:03]
C
Hello. Thank you for the talk. My name is Marie and I was a former student of Sarah's. You mentioned during your talk that at some point the.
- [72:17]
Jazeera scheme was once. It was.
- [72:22]
Disillusioned by the World bank that it drove thousands of small farmers into debt. Sorry, I'm hearing myself on the speaker.
- [72:34]
A
Which is hard.
- [72:36]
C
Thousands of farmers into debt. And I was wondering if you could talk about household debt and debt economies. And especially as a region wide phenomenon, I think debt economies in Kenya, in Uganda, in Sudan has become really relevant in conflicts and especially as a neoliberal form of.
- [73:07]
Restructuring. So I was interested in that. Thank you.
- [73:12]
B
Thank you.
- [73:15]
I know we have one, two and then the fourth over here. I think we can start over here.
- [73:27]
A
Hello, my name is Miles. I'm a humanitarian emergencies master's student here at lse. And a few people on my course were actually lucky enough, I think, last week to hear from some representatives from the emergency response rooms. And it seems from everything I've been hearing and reading about them that they're in kind of a unique position that sort of transforming the way that on the ground humanitarianism is done and in a way that is complicating Western actors in conflict affected regions who don't have the same reach. And I was wondering, based on your experience, in your knowledge of the emergency response rooms, if you think that out of all of this chaos. There's a chance that people can tune in to what this group is doing and there can be a kind of acknowledgement of the success of their practices that can be carried into other areas like the conflict that's happening in Gaza where international agencies don't have the same reach to super conflict affected areas.
- [74:26]
B
I think at the back, do we.
- [74:28]
C
Have the last question?
- [74:30]
A
Hi, I'm leon from the LSE's Grantham Institute. Thank you so much for your talk. You've spoken a lot about how the outflow of commodities is a large driver of the continuation of this conflict and especially the role of gold with 90% landing in Dubai's gold markets. And it really reminds me sort of of the role that Antwerp and diamonds played in the Liberia, in Liberia in the early 2000s. And I'm wondering, are you aware or are there any efforts to kind of.
- [74:59]
Highlight that more? If we have that research that is tracking these outflows, are there any efforts to mark that gold as blood gold in that case? Or is that wishful thinking and it just kind of flows into global supply chains and disappears from there? Untraceable.
- [75:14]
C
Thank you.
- [75:18]
Hi, my name is Joe. My name is Ben and I'm a current undergraduate in international relations. Thank you so much for your talk. It was really refreshing to hear. My question is just how much do you think the use of just Sudan's commodities and just famine as a war weapon and empire building will affect South Sudan and Sudan's deep rooted historical tensions and also fight for specific resources such as oil?
- [75:51]
These are all great questions. I hope I can remember everything.
- [75:56]
The question of debt, I think that was the first one, right?
- [76:03]
I mean, I think we're seeing.
- [76:06]
Debt at various levels, right? You have.
- [76:11]
Historically now speaking debt at the kind of, you know, at some point Sudan was, I think, one of the high, most highly indebted countries in the world. And I think what neoliberal restructuring has done is it sort of transferred some of that to the ordinary citizen, right? The ordinary person. And so one of the things we saw with the Jazeera 2005 act, which was, you know, in part driven by kind of World bank recommendations, was for farmers who used to get more kind of low interest, almost no interest loans that that then got transferred to private lenders. So that in and of itself also exacerbated people's own debt situation. In addition to that, as I mentioned, the state was withdrawing its extension services. And if we think about the Jazeera, it's, I think, I want to say it's like a thousand canals or something like that. I don't know the exact number, but it is a fairly intricate sort of irrigation canal system because it's irrigation by gravity. And so cleaning them is a very laborious and kind of. It's a difficult task. And because that was transferred to the farmer, they had to, they kind of formed these water user associations, they had to finance the cleaning of these irrigation canals. To this day, we, as a Sudan Solidarity collective, we've funded some of the Farmers Alliance's seed distribution. But the last kind of funding, you know, most of what we funded has been cleaning of irrigation canals in order to get water onto the fields.
- [77:51]
A
Right.
- [77:52]
C
Because it's such a costly task. So of course all of that puts people into more debt and then you've got a cost of living crisis. People are still relying primarily on agriculture to make a living, but are having to supplement with other forms of, you.
- [78:06]
A
Know.
- [78:09]
C
Making a living. And this is partly how I think we have to think about land dispossession and debt in relation to the expansion of the security state as well, prior to the war, certainly kind of that correlation. When people lose their livelihoods, they get pushed into the kind of lower ranks of the security state. So, yeah, I think debt is a very. I feel. Eddie Thomas, you write about debt, don't you? You should read his work, he's excellent. So I recommend that you, everybody read Eddie Thomas work.
- [78:42]
Let's see.
- [78:44]
I. I can't even read my own writing.
- [78:47]
The errs you'd asked about them.
- [78:51]
I'm glad you got to hear from them. I think they're increasingly dealing with lack of support. Right, Lack of. I mean, a lot of it comes from the diaspora, but also they had gotten quite a bit of support from usaid, especially for their communal kitchens.
- [79:08]
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know the context in Gaza that well, but Gazans are similarly very well organized. Right. I mean, Palestinians in general.
- [79:20]
I feel like Sudanese and Palestinians have one thing in common is they love committees. So there's a way that people organize at the grassroots level through committees. So that does exist. I just don't know to what extent. And I think there's certainly potential for that to be a model. But I also think, I think that probably already to some extent exists.
- [79:39]
So let's see.
- [79:43]
Blood gold. I mean, I think that's a good question. I think there's. There hasn't. I mean, there have been calls from the diaspora to boycott the uae, for example. There is actually. I just want to mention this because I'm at an academic institution. Bayan Abubakr and others just.
- [80:04]
Started a kind of initiative to boycott academic. It's an academic and cultural worker boycott of the uae, essentially. You can sign it, you can find it online, I think it's. Or something like that. But yeah, they have an Instagram and everything, and plenty of people in North America have signed on. I don't know if it's gotten to the UK yet, but it's, it's worth, if you're a cultural worker, an academic, it's worth signing. The idea similar to the boycott of Israeli institutions being that, you know, does something to the, to the sort of PR of the uae, and they do seem to respond to that, I think in terms of the larger UAE boycott, you know, I don't. I think we, as a Sudanese diaspora have to get more strategic about, like, specific campaigns. I think that's one of the things we can learn from, from Palestinian activists is that the Maersk campaign, for example, was successful because it was very targeted. And it also showed the direct link between, you know, weapons getting shipped in and so forth. And so I think there is a need for that. And blood gold could be one. But I also know that, you know, we generally don't eat, like, we don't buy gold in a regular, on a regular basis. So I think it would be good to maybe have a designation for sure.
- [81:18]
A
But.
- [81:18]
C
But like in the case of the Congo, people have found ways around that, unfortunately, and they've learned from that as well. Right. Which is why you have Rwanda and Uganda operating in that case as sort of proxies. And I think similarly with Sudan, you see Kenya, for example, or Chad operating in that way. So then the gold arrives. I mean, the UAE propagandists will tell you that only 1% of their gold comes from Sudan, which is not true because it goes through other countries. Right. So I think that's. I mean, again, I'm not an expert on these things, but I think that's part of the complication is that people have learned from previous efforts. So it just means we have to get smarter and more organized and also make the connections. I think this is a really. If there's anything I leave you with today, I don't necessarily want you to drop everything and become, become an activist around Sudan, but to think about organizing in your own community and linking it to Sudan. Right? Linking it to Palestine, linking it to the Congo. How are we complicit? And what are ways that our pension plans, our university endowments are the Banks, we bank in, you know, whatever it is, we're all connected in some ways to, you know, war economies. And so I think, yeah, just finding a way to connect is what I, you know, I always say, try to educate yourself more. And there's plenty of great writing. Matthew Benson is here and he's written. I think he's currently writing a book or maybe it's out already on Sudan. And, you know, there's Raja Makawi is here as well, who's been writing amazing, great work on Sudan. There's also Moza Nin, who I recommend. There's actually syllabus called Seeing the World Through Sudan, curated by Bayana Boubacar, that you can access and then donate. Right. There's lots of other groups besides the Sudan Solidarity Collective. There's the Sudanese American Physicians association that's doing great medical work. There's a group called HRDDs in the Nuba Mountains that really need support. So there's lots of groups that you can find where you can support mutual aid and then finally organize.
- [83:27]
A
Right.
- [83:27]
C
Like find a way to, you know, join a divestment campaign or, you know, a campaign against the weapons in Canada. I don't know as much about the uk, but I've heard that there's also UK weapons being used, so I'm sure you can find those companies. And, you know, anyway, I didn't say that here, but just. Yeah, there's ways to, I think, get active. Right, so that's it.
- [83:48]
B
I think that also answers actually one of the online questions, which was, what can we do to help? So thank you so much for including that and thank you so much for the talk.
- [84:16]
A
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events Pod podcast on your favourite podcast app.
- [84:21]
C
And help other listeners discover us by leaving a review.
- [84:24]
A
Visit LSE AC UK Events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.