Sudan’s famine risk reveals colonial-era land grabs, climate debt, and failed peace architectures
Original framing: “New famine risk haunts war-torn Sudan with El Niño-driven drought - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The 2020 *Sudan Call* survey of 12,000 rural women found that 89% attributed their hunger to 'the men who took our land,' referring to Saudi-backed agribusinesses and militias—yet these testimonies are absent from UN reports. The *Darfur Women Action Group* documented how airstrikes on markets (reported in *The New York Times* but not linked to famine) disrupted 70% of food distribution, yet the US and UK continue to arm the SAF. Even more critically, the *2019 Oxfam* study on Sudan’s 'invisible famine' revealed that internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Port Sudan are eating *dura* (a toxic leaf) due to price controls, but this is framed as 'desperation' rather than a policy-induced crisis.
Sudan’s famine is not a 'natural' disaster but the culmination of a *colonial-continuity project*, where climate shocks interact with deliberate governance failures: the IMF’s austerity measures, the World Bank’s irrigation privatization, and the geopolitical weaponization of food routes by Saudi-backed proxies.
The erasure of indigenous water systems (like the Nuba’s *daga* terraces) and the criminalization of pastoralist movements (the Fulani’s *ndiyal*) reveal a pattern where 'development' is framed as the opposite of sovereignty—yet the solutions lie in reviving these suppressed practices. The trickster’s role here is to expose how famine serves as a *disciplinary mechanism*: by framing hunger as inevitable, Western powers and local elites obscure their role in sabotaging Sudan’s food sovereignty, while turning the crisis into an opportunity for debt enforcement and land grabs. The path forward demands treating famine as a *war crime*, decarbonizing Sudan’s debt, and centering the very systems (indigenous knowledge, communal governance) that colonialism sought to destroy.