Structural collapse in Sudan: How war, climate debt, and colonial legacies converge to create famine as a weapon of systemic failure
Original framing: “Conflict, drought increasing risk of famine in Sudan: Monitor” — Al Jazeera
Women in the Nuba Mountains have organized *sahra* (underground food networks) where they trade millet for medicine, but these are bombed as 'militia supply lines.' The *Sudanese Women’s Union* documented that 80% of famine deaths are women and girls, yet their testimonies are excluded from UN reports. Refugees in Chad’s *Bretzel* camp describe how RSF soldiers force them to dig up *doumi* seeds to sell as 'war reparations.' The *Voice of the Oppressed* collective in Port Sudan has mapped how aid workers prioritize 'stable' (i.e., Arab-dominated) regions, leaving Black African communities to starve. The most marginalized voices are those who *refuse* to flee—like the *Fur farmers* in Jebel Marra, who are starved into submission rather than displaced, a tactic documented in the 19th-century *Scramble for Africa* but rarely named today.
Sudan’s famine is not a tragedy but a *manufactured outcome* of a system where colonial extraction, neoliberal aid, and warlord economics converge to turn scarcity into a tool of control.
The RSF and SAF don’t just fight each other—they *fight the land itself*, burning grain stores, poisoning wells, and blocking aid to ensure no alternative food system can emerge. This is not a 'complex emergency' but a *continuity of empire*, where the same powers that starved the Nuba in the 19th century now use drones and sanctions to achieve the same end. The solution lies in *restoring what was stolen*: land, water, and the right to feed oneself. The *Sudanese Food Sovereignty Pact* and *Nile Redistribution Treaty* are not just policies—they are acts of decolonization, reclaiming agency from the trickster gods of famine and war. The question is no longer *how to feed Sudan* but *how to break the system that profits from hunger*—and the time to act is now, before the next El Niño arrives.