In 1946, the British colonial administration commissioned a study of Sudan’s agricultural potential. The findings were unambiguous: Sudan possessed more cultivable land than any country in Africa, fed by the Nile and its tributaries, with a climate capable of producing cotton, sorghum, sesame, groundnuts, gum arabic, fruits, and vegetables at commercial scale. The report concluded that Sudan could, with proper investment, feed not just its own population but much of the African continent and the Arab world.
Eighty years later, Sudan imports food.
This is not a geographical paradox. It is not explained by climate, by soil chemistry, or by the character of the Sudanese people. It is explained by two centuries of deliberate policy choices — first by a colonial power, then by successive post-independence governments, then by international institutions — that structured Sudan’s agricultural economy to export raw commodities rather than feed its own people or build a processing industry capable of capturing the value its land produces.
Understanding this is not an exercise in historical grievance. It is the necessary starting point for any honest analysis of what Sudan must do differently.
What Sudan Actually Has
Sudan’s agricultural endowment is not modest. It is extraordinary.
The country has approximately 175 million cultivable acres, of which fewer than 20 million are currently under cultivation — roughly 11% of the potential. The Nile and its two main tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, provide a guaranteed water supply that the majority of African agricultural systems do not have. Annual rainfall across the central and southern regions averages between 400 and 1,600 millimetres — sufficient for rain-fed sorghum, millet, sesame, and groundnut cultivation without irrigation.
Sudan produces approximately 80% of the world’s supply of hashab gum — the raw material for gum arabic, used in food manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, printing inks, and cosmetics. It is the only country with the ecological conditions to produce hashab at scale. This is not a marginal advantage: it is a structural monopoly position in a globally traded commodity. Sudan’s gum arabic position is roughly equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s position in oil — a natural resource advantage that no other country can replicate.
Sudan’s sesame output places it among the world’s top three producers. Its sorghum production, when the Gezira scheme functions, is among the largest in Africa. Its livestock herd — estimated at over 100 million head of cattle, sheep, goats, and camels — is one of the largest on the continent, representing both a food production asset and an export potential that remains almost entirely unrealised.
And yet: Sudan imports wheat. It imports sugar. In crisis years — which, since 2023, describes every year — it imports sorghum, the grain it produces in the Gezira. The paradox is not geographic. It is institutional.
How the Gezira Became a Monument to Wasted Potential
The Gezira scheme, irrigated by the Sennar Dam completed in 1925, was the centrepiece of British agricultural development in Sudan — and the clearest illustration of the colonial agricultural logic. One million hectares of Nile silt soil, one of the most fertile agricultural environments on earth, were structured as a managed tenancy system producing long-staple cotton for British textile mills in Lancashire.
The institutional design was explicit: Sudanese tenant farmers received plots and grew the crop they were assigned under a tripartite system splitting profits between the government, the tenants, and the Sudan Plantations Syndicate (a British private company). They did not own the land. They did not choose what to grow. They did not process the cotton. They did not set the export price. They grew the raw fibre and handed it over. The cotton left Sudan and returned as manufactured cloth — Lancashire’s cloth — at prices set by markets entirely outside Sudanese control.
Joe Studwell’s analysis of East Asia’s agricultural development revolutions identifies land reform — the transfer of real ownership and decision-making power to smallholder farmers — as the foundational precondition for agricultural productivity growth. The Gezira’s design was the systematic opposite: it concentrated control, denied ownership, and restructured incentives to serve commodity export rather than food production or farmer welfare.
Post-independence governments inherited this structure and, with some modifications, maintained it. The 1950s and 1960s saw the diversification of the crop rotation to include sorghum and groundnuts alongside cotton, and the progressive buyout of the Syndicate. But the fundamental structure — centrally managed, export-oriented, tenant-based without real ownership — persisted.
Then came the IMF.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, structural adjustment programmes required Sudan to reduce state involvement in the Gezira, liberalise crop choice, cut subsidies for inputs, and open agricultural markets to global price competition. The Gezira, which had survived colonial management and early post-independence stagnation, collapsed under premature liberalisation. Without subsidised inputs, organised extension services, or state coordination of the crop rotation, tenant farmers rationally abandoned cotton — for which world prices were declining — and shifted to whatever subsistence crop they needed to feed their families. Yields fell. Infrastructure deteriorated. The irrigation canals, not maintained at scale, silted up. By the 2000s, the scheme was operating at a fraction of its potential.
The World Bank’s own assessment, in its 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, acknowledged that agricultural technology transfer in Sudan reached only 30% of research-station yields in field conditions — a gap explained not by farmer incompetence but by the systematic failure to maintain the extension services, input supply chains, and cooperative infrastructure that make yield transfer possible.
The Commodity Export Trap
Gum arabic is the most instructive case of Sudan’s commodity export trap.
Sudan produces 80% of the world’s gum arabic. The raw gum — harvested from hashab trees by rural communities across Kordofan and Darfur — is exported largely unprocessed. The processing that converts raw gum into the refined, spray-dried, and emulsified forms used by Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and pharmaceutical manufacturers happens almost entirely in France, Germany, and the United States. The value added in processing is enormous: refined gum arabic trades at three to five times the price of raw gum.
Sudan exports the raw commodity and imports the finished product. A country with a structural monopoly in a globally traded raw material earns commodity rents rather than processing margins. The processing margin — the industrial profit captured by converting raw material into finished good — flows to European and American manufacturers.
This is not a natural market outcome. It is the result of a colonial trade structure that was explicitly designed to prevent Sudanese processing capacity from developing, perpetuated by post-independence governments that lacked the industrial policy sophistication to change it, and reinforced by international trade agreements that penalise developing country attempts to add export tariffs on raw commodities as a way of incentivising domestic processing.
Ha-Joon Chang documents this pattern exhaustively in Kicking Away the Ladder. Every currently rich country that built an agricultural processing industry did so behind protective walls. Germany’s beet sugar industry, developed in the 19th century behind tariff barriers, eventually displaced Caribbean cane sugar in European markets. The United States protected its cotton textile industry until it was globally competitive. Japan’s food processing sector was developed under state direction with explicit export targets. Sudan is being told, by the same international institutions that represent those countries’ interests, to open its raw material exports freely while accepting manufactured food imports — the structural opposite of what those countries did to develop.
What a Different Agricultural Policy Would Look Like
The analytical work exists. The Elbadawi et al. ERF study, the World Bank’s 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, and the more recent 2025 Economic Update all converge on the same structural diagnosis: Sudan must move from raw commodity export to agro-industrial development. The question is not whether this diagnosis is correct — it clearly is — but whether the political economy conditions exist to implement it.
Three policy changes are foundational.
Land tenure reform. Secure tenure for smallholder farmers is the prerequisite for everything else. Without it, farmers have no incentive to invest in soil improvement, tree planting, or irrigation infrastructure. The Gezira’s tenancy system must be converted into cooperative ownership — with tenants becoming member-owners of the land they farm and the processing infrastructure that handles their output. This is the Mondragón logic applied to agriculture: convert precarious wage labourers into member-owners who capture the surplus their labour generates.
Domestic processing investment behind protective walls. Sudan’s gum arabic, sesame, cotton, and sorghum should be processed in Sudan before export. This requires deliberate infant industry protection — tariff barriers on raw exports, subsidised processing equipment, state-directed credit for cooperative processing facilities — maintained long enough for domestic industry to achieve competitive scale. This is exactly what Chang documents every successful industrial country doing. It is not ideologically radical. It is historically normal.
Export discipline. Studwell’s East Asian analysis shows that subsidies and protection without export performance requirements produce rent-seeking rather than development. Sudanese agricultural processing cooperatives must be required to compete in regional and global markets as the condition for receiving state support. The target is not just domestic consumption — it is regional export of processed goods to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the broader African market.
Walter Rodney’s argument in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is not merely historical. The mechanisms he describes — commodity dependency, processing industry denial, trade structure enforcing raw material export — are not relics of the colonial period. They operate today through the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, through IMF conditionality that prevents export tariffs, and through bilateral trade agreements that lock developing countries into raw material supplier roles. Sudan cannot develop its agricultural sector by integrating more fully into this system. It must restructure its position within it.
The Immediate Crisis and the Long Argument
None of this is possible while the war continues. Sudan’s 2023 GDP contraction of 29.4% — one of the steepest in recorded modern history — destroyed agricultural infrastructure, displaced farming communities, interrupted irrigation canal maintenance, and eliminated the institutional capacity needed to design and implement agricultural reform. The World Bank’s 2025 assessment does not project a return to pre-war GDP levels before 2031, assuming rapid peace.
The long argument still matters, because the policy choices made in reconstruction will determine whether Sudan exits the war into a more or less developmental agricultural structure. Reconstruction aid directed at restoring the Gezira to its pre-war extractive form — centrally managed cotton production for raw export — will reproduce the same dynamic. Reconstruction aid directed at cooperative farmer ownership, domestic processing capacity, and regional export of finished goods will begin building something different.
The land is there. The water is there. The crops are there. The agricultural traditions are there — stretching back through the Gezira scheme, through the Ottoman-era Nile trade, through the Funj sultanate’s grain economy, through the Meroitic agriculture that fed the most sophisticated iron industry in sub-Saharan Africa. What has been consistently absent is the institutional decision to structure Sudan’s agricultural economy for Sudanese development rather than for external commodity markets.
That decision must eventually be made. The longer it is deferred, the more expensive it becomes to make.
Further Reading — Kandaka Library
- The Gezira Irrigation Scheme in Sudan: Objectives, Design, and Performance — World Bank. The definitive technical assessment of the Gezira from irrigation design to yield gap.
- Impact of Changing Policies on Agricultural Productivity: The Gezira Scheme — Econometric analysis of how liberalisation affected Gezira cotton, sorghum, and wheat yields.
- Challenges of Agricultural Technology Transfer and Productivity Increase in Sudan — Why Sudanese field yields reach only 30% of research-station potential.
- Cotton Export Performance and Constraints in Sudan — Imad Yousif. Exchange rate instability and yield gaps as the binding constraints on cotton competitiveness.
- Sorghum Value Chain Analysis — FAO. The full sorghum value chain from production to processing to market.
- The Agricultural Potential of Sudan — The baseline assessment of what Sudan’s land and water resources could produce.