EVEN as it receives desperately needed food aid from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries.
The Khartoum regime is capitalising on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.
In the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fi
elds suddenly materialise. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Aubergines. They are all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanised farms that rise out of the sand.
But how much of the bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?
African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.
But in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian army. Now the government is ploughing £2.5bn into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.
Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the US government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston. Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to UN officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in the United States and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly "one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime's domestic policies". It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government's strategy to manipulate "national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalised regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty".
Aid groups gave up long ago on the Sudanese government helping the people of Darfur. The nation's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been accused of masterminding genocide in Darfur – UN officials have said that if they do not bring food into the region, the government surely will not.
That leaves the United Nations and western aid groups feeding more than three million residents of Darfur. But the lifeline is fraying. Security is deteriorating. Aid trucks are getting hijacked nearly every day and deliveries are being made less frequently. The result: less food and soaring malnutrition rates, particularly among children.
On top of this is the broader problem of trying to find affordable grains on the world market when prices are higher than they have been in decades.
"Sudan could be self-sufficient," said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the UN World Food Programme in Sudan. "It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa."
Sudanese officials say that is precisely their goal, and they deny that Sudanese agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people.
They say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by American sanctions for more than a decade. And it could get worse, with Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court in connection with the massacres in Darfur.
"Sanctions are never far from our mind," said Al-Amin Dafa Allah, chairman of the National Assembly's agricultural committee. "We're trying to minimise our reliance on the outside."
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 Programme cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the programme bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. UN officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.
"We don't get discounts," said Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme.
For now, Sudanese officials seem more interested in doing business with their new partners in the Middle East. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, at nearly one million square miles. It has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated. The Sudanese government is striking deals with Arab countries just across the Red Sea: the Arab countries bring the money, the soil scientists and the $200,000 tractors. Sudan supplies the land.
"Our country is small and dry and mountainous," said Man Shuqwara, the Jordanian director of a Jordanian-run farm in northern Sudan that grows wheat, beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, oranges and bananas. "By logic we would come to Sudan."
That same logic is attracting big money from Saudi Arabia. About an hour's drive north of the Jordanian farm, near the town of Ed Damer, is a huge new £100m project to grow wheat in what now looks like a 10-mile-wide sandbox. Some of the wheat will stay in Sudan; some will be shipped to Saudi Arabia.
A fleet of new John Deere tractors is already lined up for harvest time. A worker on the farm whispered that the tractors had been sneaked into Sudan through Saudi Arabia because of the American trade sanctions.
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% of the work force is engaged in raising animals or farming of one sort or another.
"Our sesame oil is the best in the world," said Al-Amin, the agriculture committee chairman. "And it's organic."
But make no mistake – much of Sudan is still a blazing hot, cruelly barren landscape. Yet at certain places, especially along the Nile River, it is as green and lush as Europe, with the three crucial ingredients for growing things: land, labour and, most important, water.
The Nile and its tributaries flow more than 2,000 miles across Sudan, bringing the silt-rich, chocolate-coloured water right to the fields. The British colonial government capitalised on this, building a dam in 1925 on the Blue Nile, one of the two main sources of the Nile River, and a network of canals. Today, that project, called the Gezira Scheme, has thousands of miles of canals irrigating nearly 2.5 million acres of farms.
"We have water 24-7," said Siddig Eissa Ahmed, the director of the Gezira Scheme, which is government-run, like much of Sudanese agribusiness.
Another dark side to all the 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 centre 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.
The last time the government gave the World Food Programme any food for Darfur was in 2006. It was 22,000 tons of Sudanese-grown sorghum. It was a fraction of what the people needed, UN officials said, and some of the grain was rancid and infested with weevils.
