THE two armed factions devastating Sudan built sprawling business empires in the country’s food and agricultural sectors before their war broke out in April 2023, according to new research that argues economic rivalry over those assets was a significant driver of the conflict now threatening to become the world’s largest hunger crisis.
Writing in The Conversation, researchers from CGIAR — the global agricultural research network — describe how both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) systematically embedded themselves in key agricultural industries, from livestock exports to wheat milling to horticulture, in the years preceding the war.
“Economic competition between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary RSF was a major factor in the outbreak of the April 2023 war,” the authors write. “Identifying these strategies expands insights into the political and economic roots of large-scale conflict.”
The study, based on interviews with more than 50 Sudanese insiders — including executives from major agribusiness firms, former officials from the civilian-led government that was ousted in 2021, and representatives of governance watchdogs — maps the companies each armed actor controls and traces how each sought profit across Sudan’s agricultural economy.
The researchers identify four distinct tactics the two factions used. In low-complexity sectors with little private competition — particularly the livestock trade, which is Sudan’s largest export earner after gold — both forces focused on extracting revenue without investing in improvements. The SAF, the authors write, drew profits from livestock demand from the Egyptian military, while the RSF exploited ties with pastoralist communities in Darfur and Kordofan and demand from Gulf states.
In the wheat-milling sector, the military tilted the competitive playing field in its favour. A milling company transferred to the army after the 2019 ouster of longtime president Omar al-Bashir received preferential exchange rates and import subsidies that, the authors write, “almost put the private sector out of business.”
In more technically sophisticated industries, however, the armed actors fared less well. The army attempted to enter the lucrative spray-drying segment of Sudan’s gum arabic industry — the country supplies roughly 70 percent of the world’s gum arabic — but lacked the technology and expertise to compete with established private firms and ultimately abandoned the effort.
The army’s Zadna corporation, currently under sanctions by both the United States and the European Union, took a more entrepreneurial approach in horticulture, establishing tissue culture laboratories and conducting research on new seed varieties in a sector where private investment had been thin.
The findings land as Sudan’s humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate sharply. An estimated 21 million people face acute food insecurity, and roughly two-thirds of Sudan’s population — some 33.7 million people — are expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2026. The UN has described the situation as the world’s largest humanitarian emergency.
The researchers argue that the economic dimensions of the conflict have been underappreciated in international peace efforts. “Peace efforts in Sudan cannot just be about negotiations over ceasefire conditions and reconciliation processes,” they write in The Conversation. “They also need to address who retains access to the country’s valuable resources and at what cost.”
For businesses operating in conflict-affected agricultural economies more broadly, the study offers a counterintuitive finding: moving into more technically complex segments of a value chain may offer some protection against displacement by armed actors, who tend to favour sectors where profits can be captured quickly and easily.
The war, now entering its third year, has displaced more than eleven million people and given rise to what the UN describes as the worst displacement crisis in the world. Mediation efforts have so far failed to produce a ceasefire.
