Food Security

In 1925, a single canal changed the history of central Sudan. The Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile and the network of irrigation channels it fed transformed the Gezira Plain — a flat, semi-arid expanse between the Blue and White Niles — into one of Africa’s most productive agricultural zones. At its peak, the Gezira Scheme irrigated over 880,000 hectares of cotton, sorghum, and wheat, generating a third of Sudan’s export revenues and employing hundreds of thousands of families. The concept was simple: bring water to flat land that already had soil. ...

There is a development intervention so well-proven, so cost-effective, and so politically straightforward that it is almost surprising more countries have not made it a universal right. It is not a new technology or a complex financial instrument. It is a meal — a hot lunch, served at school, every day. School feeding programmes are among the most extensively studied policies in development economics. The evidence is unambiguous: they increase school enrollment, reduce dropout rates, improve learning outcomes, and disproportionately benefit girls. When designed well — with food sourced from local farmers — they also serve as agricultural subsidy programmes, injecting cash into rural economies while feeding children in urban and peri-urban schools. The return on investment, according to multiple World Food Programme analyses, averages nine dollars for every one dollar spent. ...

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. ...