How much food aid does Sudan receive?
Each year between 2016 and 2023, Sudan received between 500 million and 1 billion US dollars in humanitarian assistance. After the outbreak of the current war, those figures rose sharply: to 2.1 billion US dollars in 2024 and 1.7 billion in 2025, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Much of that money was channelled into food security and nutrition, including the considerable logistics required to distribute supplies across a vast and fractured country.
In 2024, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available, the World Food Programme (WFP) delivered 143,039 metric tonnes of cereals, lentils, cooking oil and salt. Cereals accounted for the bulk of the ration.
The agency also disbursed 56 million US dollars in cash assistance for food that year. Factoring in inflation, high prices in famine hotspots and transport costs, that sum would likely have equated to roughly 50,000 tonnes of sorghum. Taken together, WFP’s total food transfer to Sudanese households in 2024 may have amounted to around 200,000 tonnes.
WFP food aid covered just 2 percent of Sudan’s cereal needs in 2024, about 20 grams per hungry person per day.
Yet this represents only a fraction of national need. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that Sudan required approximately 7.7 million tonnes of cereals to feed its population in 2024. On that basis, WFP assistance accounted for around 2 per cent of total consumption. If the equivalent of 200,000 tonnes were distributed among the 24.6 million people facing crisis levels of hunger that year, each person would have received about 8 kilogrammes over twelve months — roughly 20 grammes a day.
Targeting saves lives
Despite its modest share of overall consumption, food aid has been lifesaving because it is targeted. Assistance is directed towards particular seasons, regions and vulnerable groups — arriving during the lean months or reaching households most at risk. Targeting this food is key to WFP’s capacity to save lives.
In 2024, that targeting mechanism came under immense strain. By the end of the year, food security analysts, including Food security agencies, estimated that 24.6 million people — more than half the population — were facing high levels of acute food insecurity, a direct threat to their lives or livelihoods. For many families, survival meant selling land, livestock or tools; cutting meals; or entering desperate forms of labour that undermined their long-term livelihoods.
Children bore the brunt. Acute malnutrition sharply increases vulnerability to otherwise treatable illnesses. Children under five suffering from moderate acute malnutrition are several times more likely to die from routine infections such as diarrhoea or respiratory disease; those with severe acute malnutrition face even higher risks.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)’s Famine Review Committee, most children under five in North Darfur and South Kordofan in 2024 were affected by respiratory infections, and more than a third suffered from diarrhoea. Figures released in February 2026 suggest the situation has deteriorated further.
Famine is defined by thresholds for famine: extreme food insecurity affecting at least one in five households; acute malnutrition in over 30 per cent of children; and at least two hunger-related deaths per 10,000 people per day. Targeted assistance aims to prevent mortality and stave off such thresholds. In the early twenty-first century, this technical model was widely credited with averting famine in several regions, fostering cautious optimism that famine had been defeated.
Food aid is decreasing
The war, and global events, led to a reduction in food aid. Between 2023 and 2024, in-kind food distribution shrank below 2018 levels.
The contraction has been uneven. Areas affected by intense fighting, including territories controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), are widely believed to be receiving far less assistance than regions accessible from Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. Cash transfers offer one means of overcoming access constraints, but these too have stagnated.
By February 2026, famine conditions had re-emerged in parts of Darfur and Kordofan.
Although 2024 is the last year with complete national figures, indicators point to further deterioration. In December 2025, WFP warned that rations would be reduced. By February 2026, famine conditions had re-emerged in parts of Darfur and Kordofan. The targeted aid system that once helped shield Sudanese communities from mass starvation has been severely weakened.
Targeted food aid is no longer enough
WFP’s technical, impact-maximizing model of targeting food aid no longer prevents famine in the Horn of Africa. Food aid is reducing and war is making it harder to deliver.
Sudan can help explain why this happened – and despite the awfulness of the moment, it may also offer a new way forward.
Sudan has a very harsh food production system. This is how it works: Militias start a war in remote areas with self-sufficient food systems and create hunger which pushes millions of agricultural workers towards commercial farms clustered around the capital, where they make profits for owners, and watch their children go hungry.
WFP bought sorghum from farms in Gedaref, and sometimes distributed it to the famished children of farm workers, a WFP staffer told me a few years ago
In the remote areas, people gradually lose self-sufficiency, and get drawn deeper into markets and traumatic migration to survive.
In 2024 — even as famine spread — Sudan exported approximately 800,000 tonnes of oilseeds and chickpeas, alongside livestock valued at around half a billion US dollars. Critics argue that this model of growth enriched armed actors and commercial elites while eroding subsistence systems.
The phrase “the cultivation of hunger”, coined by Taisier Ali, captures this paradox: food production increases, yet access to food becomes more precarious for the poor. Militias, operating as quasi-private power brokers, have seized land, facilitated exports and contributed to the fragmentation of the state.
They grabbed land in formerly self-sufficient areas, and they began exporting meat, sesame and groundnuts from areas that were already getting hungry. In 2024, when Sudan was engulfed by famine, it exported 800,000 tons of oilseeds and chickpeas, and half a billion US dollars-worth of livestock.
Sudan’s militia system boosted exports and destroyed the country. Militias were Sudan’s version of neoliberalism – a policy mix which turns most of life into a competitive marketplace, and shrinks the role of the state through privatization. Sudanese privatization turned the state into a fractious coalition of rival militias and security agencies which lived off war, and ensured that food production systems were rigged against farmers and workers.
Sudan is not the only place where neoliberalism hasn’t worked. Across the Global North, many of the political elites became the executive assistants of a new billionaire class. The billionaires found it hard to make big profits from manufacturing and technology. So they privatized housing, schooling, healthcare, and food, and rigged markets in basic necessities to boost their own profits. This system began falling apart after a big financial crisis in 2007-08, when just about everyone who wasn’t a billionaire realized that the system didn’t work. The politicians, who mostly worked for the billionaire’s interests, couldn’t change the system, and couldn’t explain it to their electorates. So electorates voted instead for racist politicians who offered hate as a solution for the crisis. These were the countries which had set up the global aid system, and had invented technical definitions and technical targeting solutions for famine.
All these processes are now bearing down on Sudan’s hungry children. Countries which used to send food aid to Sudan are now run by hate-politics, and they have cut back on food aid and poured money into war. Countries like Sudan are being torn apart by their privatized militias and security forces. Food aid isn’t arriving, and even if it arrives, it can’t get across the country’s front lines, to the people in need.
Can Sudan find a new approach?
Solidarity ideas permeate many institutions in Sudanese society.
Solidarity ideas permeate many institutions in Sudanese society. The takiya, or communal meal provided by Sufi fraternities for free is one example. The nafir is another. The Emergency Response Rooms – democratically organized revolutionary service groups, is a third.
Sudanese solidarity-based food security programmes are very different from the targeted interventions of the humanitarian international. Humanitarians identify those most in need, the children whose arms are wasting away, the breastfeeding mothers with no milk, and the displaced families who have lost their farms. And they give them just enough food to get over a crisis.
But solidarity systems are completely different. They are symbolized by the vast balila or porridge pots stirred by Sufi grandfathers, and given out with no targeting whatsoever. They promise inclusion, shared fates, and belonging. They help people stay alive, and at their best, they can help make life worth living.
Solidarity systems are embedded in Sudan’s old self-sufficient production systems – the ones destroyed by militia export drives. Old food production systems were organized around kinship, neighbourhoods and relationships. These old food systems mostly kept people well-fed, and helped them manage their own resources. But they weren’t based on markets – they were based on solidarity and reciprocity. Instead of paying people to work, they used a system called nafir – at periods of peak labour demand, people would pool their labour in return for a party celebrated with sorghum beer.
Production systems based on kinship and solidarity have been deeply eroded by debt systems, markets and militias. But their principles of solidarity still represents a cultural resource, which many Sudanese seized during the revolution and the war. Communal kitchens have sprung up everywhere. WFP has financed some of these communal kitchens. But many of them are financed from the diaspora.
Diaspora remittances are probably worth significantly more than international food aid.
Diaspora remittances are probably worth significantly more than international food aid. A 2020 UNDP study estimated that remittances were worth around 3 billion US dollars per year – more than three times as much as humanitarian aid that year.
Remittances are the globalized dimension of Sudan’s solidarity systems. They are mostly made up of small contributions. UNDP’s study found that most individual remittances were worth under 500 US dollars, and nearly all were worth under 1,000 US dollars. Nearly all were transferred through unofficial channels, and 91 percent of remittances were spent on consumption, education or health. These small sums represent wealth produced by the labour of global migrants who have moved from Sudan’s crisis zones to labour markets in the Middle East and Europe.
Remittances are not the only source of support for solidarity systems in Sudan. Solidarity systems have their basis in production, not in charitable giving. In the past, Sudanese people organized production around relationships, not around markets. Many people who produced food through these production systems ate well.
The current war has paradoxically revived these solidarity-based production systems. In South Darfur, Agricultural Emergency Rooms were set up at the height of the war. Hassan Abdelmutallab says that the current war has forced many people to start farming together in homes, neighbourhood squares, and repurposed spaces. This past year, farmers in Jebel Marra donated food they produced to people fleeing from the battles in the Darfurian capital al-Fashir – that’s another kind of solidarity. Muzan Alneel argues that producing food together is a way to keep Sudan’s revolution going.
Happy ending
This is not a story with a happy ending. War and famine are deepening, volunteers running solidarity systems are getting older and poorer. Some have postponed marriage, some have become refugees, and some have been dragged away to torture chambers.
International donors have been noticing the role of solidarity systems in keeping Sudan alive and investing in them too. But they view these systems through contract law, or the market logic of cost-effectiveness, which usually erodes the open-ended reciprocity and commitment of solidarity systems. For many years, this process has been underway in solidarity-based food production systems, which have long been under pressure from markets too.
The future is not rosy.
But it seems likely that the food aid which dominated food security policy will continue to decrease, and solidarity systems, backed by the diaspora or local initiatives, will become increasingly important for survival. Solidarity-based food security doesn’t just target the most vulnerable groups. It provided food for everyone and redefines social relationships and political possibility in the process. It is keeping Sudan alive.
