Photograph by Jerome Sessini / Magnum Photos
WORDS BY OMNIA SAED
A man stands in a debris field in South Darfur, Sudan as black smoke billows around him. “What did the trees do wrong?” he asks, pointing to the wreckage, to the rubble and ruin that surrounds him. “If I am to forgive you,” he cries. “Will the trees do the same?”
Since April, civilians in Sudan have been subjected to indiscriminate air raids and street violence as two military generals leading the country battle for power. Clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, have caused a catastrophic humanitarian disaster.
The United Nations (U.N.) estimates that 9,000 people died in the first six months of conflict—likely a severe underestimate, according to Reuters, because civilians who died outside of hospitals never have their deaths officially recorded. Meanwhile, the U.N. notes that survivors face “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history” as over 25 million people require aid and 70% of hospitals in conflict-stricken regions are defunct.
For farmers, the crisis is particularly devastating, as many mourn not only the loss of loved ones but the loss of their land.
“What I’m feeling is deeper than sadness,” said Mohammed Alsadig Mustafa. The 36-year-old farmer from Gedaref in East Sudan held back tears as he spoke. “To lose our ancestral land, our way of life [and] to lose the traditions that are so deeply tied to the land. There’s nothing worse than this moment.”
Mustafa and his family plan on leaving the country. They will join the more than 10 million people—nearly a quarter of the country’s population—who have been displaced by the conflict, the largest displaced population in the world.
“My grandfather worked on this land,” he explained, where for three generations his family had grown sesame seeds, fava beans, lentils, and potatoes. “He would say, nothing can provide you more than what the land can offer, not even your mother,” he recalled.
“But I have to go.”
19 million children are out of school according to UNICEF. “I’m tired and I’m failing to give my kids the life they deserve.”
Mustafa’s not alone. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), 28% of smallholder farmers have been displaced because of the conflict. Of those still on their farms, 40% did not have a chance to prepare for the summer planting season.
“To lose our ancestral land, our way of life and to lose the traditions that are so deeply tied to the land. There’s nothing worse than this moment.”
“Most farmers depend on the banks,” explained Gazali Ahmed Abdalla, a 50-year-old farmer in Hafir, northern Sudan. The Agricultural Bank of Sudan loans farmers money to rent tractors and supplies and provides them with the seeds, fertilizers, and inputs that many have come to rely on. But Khartoum, the country’s capital, is at a standstill and an epicenter of violence. As a result, governmental agencies have shut down.
Farmers have resorted to farming on only a portion of their land. Without loans from the bank, without seeds, and with the increased costs to rent equipment, “the next harvest season will be extremely difficult,” Abdalla said. “I pray for relief.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 20.3 million people in Sudan face severe hunger, a figure that has nearly doubled in less than a year. That’s striking considering 65% of the country’s population is involved in the agricultural sector, and almost 51.5 million acres of its land is arable.
Sudan’s fertile land and water resources once positioned it as a candidate to become an Arab breadbasket. In the 1970s, substantial investments from Gulf states flowed into the country. But a disregard for subsistence farmers, poor policy making, climate change, corruption, and land grabs have left the nation’s farmers struggling to this day. For many, the civil war was the final straw.
Sudan ranks 8th in vulnerability and 175th in readiness for climate change. This is expected to affect rice, wheat, and maize yields. The country’s vulnerability is exacerbated by limitations in agricultural technology.
“Every time you give the land what it was owed, it gives it back to you,” said Abdulgadir Abdulahi Ibrahim, 68. The wheat farmer in northern Sudan has been farming all his life. “My umbilical cord was cut from a farm,” he says with a smile. “But I can’t deny it. I’ve seen the land change.”
An overreliance on fertilizer has exhausted the soil, depleting it of its natural nutrients, said Ibrahim. He said winters are getting colder and the summers are now unbearably hot. He added that it rains little in the North, a desert area, but it’s rained even less in recent years.
Compounding the problem are inadequate environmental regulations on construction projects. The Merowe Dam, for example, was built on the Nile River in 2003. It doubled Sudan’s electricity generation. But Ibrahim said that the humidity that fumes off the dam brought in pests like aphids, nicknamed “honey” for the sticky residue they often leave behind. “Before Merowe nothing would harm our plants, but the dam changed that,” he said.
Sudan ranks 8th in vulnerability and 175th in readiness for climate change.
The Merowe Dam is just one example of how geography is deeply entangled in the country’s power dynamics. Harry Verhoeven, senior scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, explained that Sudan’s political power is maintained “through control of land and over water.” That’s been true since British colonial rule, when Sudan’s water was used to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton which, for the most part, benefited the wealthy few.
Over the years, a surge of land grabs and dam diversions fueled an inequitable agricultural system that favored exports and profits over subsistence. Time and time again, that’s harmed local communities.
“The environment is quintessentially political,” Verhoeven wrote in a 2011 peer-reviewed article on climate change and conflict in Sudan. Environmental policy in the region has to be assessed through the lens of “by whom and for whom,” he told Atmos.
The land, and its people, are tired. In today’s civil war, just as it was centuries ago, political elites are profiting at the expense of Sudan’s most marginalized. A power struggle between two powerful military generals is causing what the U.N. has called an “unimaginable humanitarian crisis.” Civilians are suffering, and farmers—those who are most in touch with the country’s once-rich resources—are wondering whether the current system can care for the land and its people.
“The best thing we’ve done as Sudanese people, who we are as people, are our farms,” said Ibrahim, whose three children farm with him. “Since they were young, I connected them to the land. Even the college-educated ones, three boys are all connected to the land and to farming.”
“I inherited a love of farming, a love of greens, love of waters, a love of learning from my father and from my brothers,” said Mustafa. “I studied for 18 years and graduated college with honors. But my love of the land and the value of its produce is greater than what I’ve learned in school and I pray my kids feel the same.”
These are those failed by conflict.
Despite the sorrow Mustafa feels on impending departure, somehow, somewhere there is hope of a return.
“Gedaref could feed the world if it wanted to,” he says overlooking his farm in East Sudan. “I believe one day it will.”
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In Sudan’s Civil War, Farmers Are Grieving Their Land and Loved Ones
