Earlier this year, the Central Bank of Sudan published the first foreign trade statistics since the start of the current war. Mohammed Elkamel’s article gives an excellent overview of wartime trade.[1] This article looks back over the connections between Sudan’s export trade and its wars over the past few decades.
In the 1990s, the wars in South Sudan, Kordofan and Blue Nile came at a time of major changes to the export trade. At the start of the decade, cotton made up almost half of exports, as it had for most of the 1970s and 1980s.
World Bank (2003) Country Economic Memorandum, Statistical Annex, page 47
Most cotton was produced in Al-Jazirah, the triangle of land to the south of Khartoum, which meant that most export production took place near the centre of the state. Cotton declined in importance between 1990 and 1998, and sheep and sesame became more important. A fall in global cotton prices coincided with a huge rise in demand for sheep in Saudi Arabia. In the process, the spatial organization of Sudan’s export production shifted away from the geographical centre of the state. Although sheep production takes place all over the country, many pastoralist groups in western Sudan began playing a bigger role in export trade.
This beautiful sheep map from 1974 gives a picture of the enormous role of animals in Sudanese life.
Sudan Archive, Durham University
By the end of the 1990s, Sudan’s export trade was transformed by oil. Over the next decade, oil totally dominated exports, and sesame, sheep and cotton contributed only a trivial proportion of total export value. Oil transformed the spatial organization of production too. Almost all the exportable wealth of the country came from a few muddy pastures in South Sudan. The Khartoum government drove off the agro-pastoralist groups who called these pastures home by setting up new militias.
Militias from Unity State were drawn from sections of Nuer and Baggara groups who shared pastoralist livelihoods and cultures with the people whose lands they were clearing. The Khartoum government set pastoralist sections against each other, setting off a war of neighbours still being fought in Unity State today. But the government also created militias from its ruling party, the Popular Defence Forces, and from the patronage networks of senior political leaders. The oil police mostly came from the home areas of the oil minister and the intelligence chief, in Merowe, Northern Sudan.
This militia system, organised around natural resource enclaves, was a vital part of the transition from the cotton export economy to new, more demanding global markets, and a global order which was built around unrestricted international trade.
The militias are sometimes called ‘tribal’ or ‘Islamist’, but it might be more accurate to describe them as neoliberal militias, militias which helped Sudan’s production systems to transition away from the government-organised cotton plantations inherited from the colonial era, and towards a new system of privatised, deregulated, and expanded production of wealth that could respond more quickly to signals from global markets.
Government social services were all but abolished in poorer areas, and militia coercion was able to manage the dissent caused by the privatisation of schools and health centres, and the destruction of agricultural extension programmes.
The Sudanese version of privatisation was led by the army, and the first thing they privatised was the security system. This helped to create new possibilities for economic growth and social violence in Sudan. Oil created a new, multi-billion-dollar export economy, which marginalised all other export sectors, until 2011, when South Sudan became independent.
Oil exports declined sharply, and the government began looking for other sources of income.
Chart 1: Oil exports (green) and total exports (blue) 2004-2024, ‘000s of US dollars
Central Bank of Sudan, Foreign Trade Statistical Digest
The government needed new sources of income because the oil boom had led to an enormous increase in imports. Sudan spent nearly all its export revenues on new kinds of consumption, making the value of imports just about the same as the value of exports.
Chart 2: Sudan’s balance of payments, 2004-2024, billions of US dollars
Central Bank of Sudan, Foreign Trade Statistical Digest
When South Sudan became independent, Sudan lost a third of its territory, a fifth of its population and most of its oil reserves.
Exports collapsed. But the value imports remained at record high levels for the next decade.
These two facts, dramatically lower exports, unchanged imports, indicate that the neoliberal militia system was able to move the locus of production away from central Sudan, but it did not move the locus of consumption away from the heartland of the state.
None of the wealth that came from the natural resources of the southern hinterlands had benefited the people who lived there.
To keep financing import consumption levels, the Khartoum government needed new exports.
Between 2012 and 2022, Sudan’s import costs gradually rose above oil-boom levels, around 10 billion US dollars a year.
In the same period, export income flat lined, around four billion US dollars a year.
This mismatch increased pressure on producers of exportable wealth. And it once again required a spatial reorganisation of production, and a new militia system.
In the decade after 2011, four main categories of exports accounted for over 90 per cent of revenues: minerals (mostly gold), crops (mostly sesame and ground-nuts); animal products (mostly live sheep) and petroleum products.
Chart 3: Sudan’s main exports, 2012-2024, ‘000s of US dollars
Central Bank of Sudan, Foreign Trade Statistical Digest
Petroleum products came from South Sudan and West Kordofan, sheep and groundnuts came mostly from the west, gold came from remote areas across the country, with significant amounts coming from the north, east and Darfur.
Only sesame came from the central areas of the country (Darfur produces sesame too, but it is red sesame made into oil for domestic use).
Export production was scattered across the country.
The militia system, which began in South Sudan, was replicated in Darfur during the insurgency there, which was active from the start of the twenty-first century until 2016.
In those chaotic years, militias took control of rural governance and resource extraction.
Mohammed Hamdan Daglo (Himedti), formerly a livestock trader, commanded a militia which eventually became known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which by 2016 had defeated most of the insurgencies in Sudan.
In 2019, an RSF English-language publication ‘Successes in the Work of the RSF’ gave an idea of how the RSF was extracting surpluses from Darfurian farmers.
Here is a direct quote:
CHAPTER 05. Securing The Agricultural Season In Darfur
In 2019, at the initiative of Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, one of the priorities of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was the insurance of the safety of the agricultural season in Darfur. To accomplish that task, the RSF formed duty points and begun to work. The points were located on the main routes of the nomads. 34 points were organised in Northern Darfur, 42 in Southern Darfur, 15 in Central Darfur, 19 in Western Darfur and 12 in Eastern Darfur. In addition, the RSF duty vehicles constantly patrolled the main conflict areas. All RSF soldiers who participated in this work underwent special training in conflict resolution. The campaign had 2,500 RSF soldiers
Daglo’s militia had a powerful capacity to extract surplus from remote areas, but it also directly controlled production of gold, and by 2021 took a majority share in the Animal Resources Bank and the Gulf Bank.
The Sudan Armed Forces also directly controlled livestock and crop production through companies associated with the Defence Industries System.
The transitional government set up after the 2019 revolution attempted to dismantle these companies, and this attempt to end private military control over natural resources led directly to the counter-revolution of 2021, which led in turn to the war of 2023.
This war has ended Sudan’s trade deficit. Imports, which were largely consumed in and around the capital, have fallen, because the capital itself has been incinerated by war. Sudan now has its lowest trade deficit in 20 years: imports were 4.9 billion US dollars, exports were 3.1 billion US dollars, and the trade deficit was 1.8 billion dollars.
Food, primarily wheat, flour, and sugar, made up about a third of imports, and fuel about a fifth.
But although imports have contracted, exports remain pretty much constant: for the last ten years, the value of exports has fluctuated between three and five billion dollars, and the war years of 2023 and 2024 were at the lower end of that range.
In 2024, gold made up about a half of exports by value, crops about a third, and livestock about a sixth.
Central Bank of Sudan (2024) Foreign Trade Statistical Digest, page 6
Here are two ways of approaching this data.
The first is to say that the data is an exercise in misrepresentation. The customs data on which the Central Bank bases its figures probably fails to capture most gold exports, because the gold trade is still largely controlled by security actors who can evade customs dues.
Customs data also omits arms imports, which in the past couple of years have included ammunition, small arms, infantry vehicles, drones and drone jammers.[1] Commenting on the crop data, one Sudanese representative of an agricultural export firm argued that agricultural export figures lacked credibility. How could 358,844 metric tonnes of groundnuts, more than 100,000 Hino Ranger trucks, be moved from farms in places like Darfur or Kordofan to Port Sudan? How could a tonne of groundnuts be bought and transported all that distance, for an average cost of 816 US dollars per metric tonne, about half the global market price? How was it possible to move 3,152,350 head of sheep from the interior to the coast and the Egyptian border, more than twice the number exported before the war in 2022?
The second possible interpretation is more sinister. Sudan’s militiaised system for extracting rural wealth can continue functioning during a period of total war and total economic and social collapse, because its profit rate depends primarily on violence, and not on stable production systems or markets.
It is not so surprising that imports have contracted: the real surprise in the trade data is that exports have stayed so high during the war.
Sudan is often presented as a backward country, and the violence its population endures as a symptom of that backwardness.
The opposite is true. Sudan is the cutting edge of global change. Its twentieth-century regimes pioneered the use of rural or ‘tribal’ militias, conscripting soldiers from rural, kinship-based communities to reorganize rural governance and resource extraction. The government of former President Omar Al-Bashir can legitimately claim to have improvised this system of using militias to set neighbouring rural populations against each other to get oil or other mineral resources to global markets: it existed in Sudan for several years before it began to organize export production in the Middle East, North Africa, or the Great Lakes.
Today, across the chaos zones which stretch from Afghanistan to the Sahara and the Congo, militias have schooled rural populations to supply global markets by fighting against themselves.
These neoliberal structures, usually mis-described as tribal or sectarian, are vital for the global consumers of today. The militias bring to market hydrocarbons, lithium, cobalt, cocaine, heroin, gold, trafficked or immiserated migrant workers, and a host of other resources that are indispensable to modern life.
Omar Al-Bashir’s neoliberal militia brought Sudan’s rural wealth to global markets by adapting key elements of the neoliberal policy programme. He privatised production and security systems, he allowed markets to regulate themselves, and he eviscerated trade unions and social services.
It wasn’t exactly what the International Monetary Fund had in mind, but they could work with what he and his security men offered.
In 2025, the neoliberal trade regime which helped to create Sudan’s militia system is being replaced by tariffs, trade blocs, limits on technology transfer, and limits on labour migration.
Universal free trade is being replaced by a new kind of mercantilism. Mercantilism is an old word for economic nationalism, which seeks to maximize exports and minimize the imports of a country.
Mercantilism seeks to accumulate wealth within a country’s borders, and to use trade to dominate other countries. It was the economic doctrine which backed the first European wars of plunder and the rise of the European colonial system.
Sudan played an important role in interpreting neoliberal policy prescriptions in the African context. What role will it play in a new mercantile order?
Again, the foreign trade statistics can help us understand this.
One single country was the destination for over half of Sudan’s exports in 2024, and the same country supplied a fifth of all Sudan’s imports: the United Arab Emirates.
The Sudanese government accuses the UAE of providing military support for the RSF, and in 2025, has accused the UAE of supporting genocide in Sudan.
But at the same time, the government sends the wealth created by Sudanese people from Sudan’s natural resources to the UAE’s market. The UAE wins every bet in Sudan.
The UAE is already playing a special role in the transition to a mercantile order in Africa. It is a special kind of state: tiny, outsized, rentier, authoritarian, expansionist, and mercantilist. It is the fourth biggest investor in Africa and its huge sovereign wealth funds operate about twenty ports around the continent.
In a prescient article published by Atar last year, Arif Elsaui argued that the UAE’s support for the RSF is linked to this network of control over African ports.
Just as Omar Al-Bashir needed militias to bring oil and gold to international markets, the UAE needs militias to protect its investments and its supply lines.
The RSF, or perhaps its successor, works as a kind of Wagner or Blackwater, securing markets for its international patrons.
Sudan’s foreign trade statistics suggest that this system of confiscating African wealth, processing it through foreign-controlled African ports, and accumulating it in faraway city states, can work for the UAE.
Exports are stable, and the UAE is able to maintain rates of extraction and profit, no matter what the cost to Sudan’s people, who own and create this wealth.
