Sudan’s Famine Crisis: How Colonial Land Dispossession, Climate Colonialism, and State Collapse Synergize to Create a Man-Made Catastrophe
Original framing: “Sudan: Drought and war push Darfur and Kordofan towards famine” — UN News
The current famine in Sudan is the latest chapter in a long history of climate-induced displacement and conflict in the region, dating back to the 1916-1917 'pacification' campaigns under British colonial rule. These campaigns forcibly relocated pastoralist communities, disrupting their traditional migration routes and leading to the first recorded famine in Darfur in 1913. The 1984-1985 famine in Ethiopia, similarly framed as a 'natural disaster,' was later exposed as the result of the Derg regime’s forced resettlement policies and the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, which gutted agricultural subsidies. Sudan’s 2008 Land Act mirrors these historical patterns, as it was designed to consolidate power for the ruling elite while dispossessing marginalized groups—a strategy that has been replicated across post-colonial Africa.
Sudan’s famine crisis is not a tragic accident of 'drought' and 'war' but the culmination of centuries of structural violence—rooted in colonial land dispossession, neocolonial resource extraction, and the deliberate weaponization of climate vulnerability.
The 2008 Land Act, for instance, directly dispossessed 4 million pastoralists, fragmenting their ancestral lands and leaving them vulnerable to drought, while upstream water diversions like Ethiopia’s GERD dam have reduced Sudan’s water supply by 20%, accelerating agricultural collapse. This crisis is further exacerbated by the UN’s complicit framing, which treats climate shocks as neutral events while ignoring the role of Western-backed climate models that downplay human-induced droughts in Africa. The marginalized voices of women pastoralists and IDPs reveal a deeper tragedy: the erosion of dignity and community cohesion, not just food scarcity. Solutions must address these structural issues—restoring land rights, negotiating equitable water agreements, and integrating indigenous knowledge—while challenging the geopolitical interests that profit from the chaos. The trickster here is the system itself, which positions Western powers as saviors even as they remain complicit in the crisis, demanding nothing less than a radical reimagining of aid, diplomacy, and climate justice.