With the first light of morning, people begin gathering outside subsidized sorghum depots in Kadugli and Ad-Dalang. Some carry empty sacks; others clutch smaller bags sized to whatever cash remains in their pockets. The queues stretch quietly along the roadside, every eye fixed on the horizon, waiting for the truck carrying the day’s grain.
For those waiting in Kadugli, the truck’s arrival depends on a fragile reality: whether the Kiega Al-Kurgul road to the north or the Habila–Kortala road to the east remains open. Whenever fighting erupts or either route is cut, sorghum deliveries stop. Residents are left with a single alternative—buying grain from local markets at prices far beyond their means.
For decades, Habila ranked among South Kordofan’s most productive sorghum-growing areas. Today, those same fields are divided by front lines.
Less than 10 kilometres east of Ad-Dalang, the plains of Habila stretch across the landscape. For decades, they ranked among South Kordofan’s most productive sorghum-growing areas, supplying markets across the region and beyond. Today, those same fields are divided by front lines. Clashes between rival armed groups repeatedly sweep across the farmland, transforming vast agricultural plains into military terrain—soil that once produced food now absorbed into the geography of war.
The contrast raises a broader question: how did South Kordofan, home to one of Sudan’s largest sorghum-producing regions, descend into famine in 2024 and 2025, leaving thousands unable to secure enough food for their families? And how did Habila, long synonymous with sorghum production, become one of the areas hardest hit by hunger during the war?
The answer lies in more than the conflict itself. While the war has disrupted farming, severed transport routes and paralysed trade, it has also exposed a much older crisis rooted in South Kordofan’s history of mechanized agriculture. The way land was allocated, owned and cultivated reshaped local communities’ relationship with the land, gradually transforming many farmers who once relied on subsistence agriculture into labourers on large mechanized schemes owned by others.
Land Ownership and the Mechanization of Farming
The famine that engulfed South Kordofan cannot be explained by war alone. The legacy of land ownership established during the expansion of mechanized farming also deepened the crisis.
According to The Nuba Mountains: Ethnic Politics and the Peasant Movement by Dr. Atta El-Battahani, Habila was selected as the site of one of South Kordofan’s largest mechanized farming schemes because of its fertile clay plains and reliable rainfall, conditions ideally suited to cultivating sorghum, sesame and other cash crops. The schemes expanded in two phases, beginning in 1958 and later in 1964.
In April 1958, the United States established an economic aid mission in Khartoum after the Sudanese government, led by Prime Minister Abdallah Khalil (1956–1958), announced an agreement with Washington on American assistance. The agreement, however, remained dormant until Ibrahim Abboud seized power later that year. On Nov. 29, 1958, the military government ratified the treaty, paving the way for a broader flow of foreign support to Sudan’s agricultural sector.
Under Abboud’s ten-year development plan, the government earmarked major investments to develop 300,000 feddans of mechanized farmland across the Nuba Mountains. The Sudan Agricultural Bank was tasked with finding ways to finance the expansion, laying the foundations for one of the country’s most ambitious agricultural projects.
Following the return to parliamentary rule in 1964, declining returns from the Nile’s pump-irrigation schemes prompted the state to encourage private capital—previously concentrated in riverine agriculture and trade—to shift toward mechanized farming. The transition required substantial investment. American assistance and World Bank financing became central to meeting the sector’s most immediate needs, particularly the costly work of clearing trees and preparing land for cultivation.
In 1965, the Ministry of Finance and Economy signed a loan agreement with the World Bank worth 9,483,037 Sudanese pounds to finance land clearing in Gedaref and the Nuba Mountains. The foreign currency component of the loan amounted to 75 percent of its local counterpart.
Yet from the outset, the mechanized farming schemes carried a contradiction that would shape the region for decades. While they were presented as part of a national strategy to expand commercial agriculture, the allocation of vast tracts of land became closely tied to political, administrative and military patronage. In 1958, four major schemes were established at Um Jarko (Ad-Dalang), Barwab (Talawdi), Kiwakiya (Rashad) and Al-Zalatiya (Kadugli). In Habila alone, authorities allocated 10,000 feddans to mechanized schemes during the 1959 agricultural season.
Much of that land was appropriated from farmers’ customary holdings. The pattern was particularly pronounced in Um Jarko and Habila, where communities were compelled to surrender ancestral land in exchange for compensation that fell far below its value. In the northern hills, the Mertij and Nyamang communities lost land they had cultivated for generations. Similar dispossession unfolded in Habila, Wata, and Fayo, as ownership passed to investors, traders, and government officials from outside the region. Researchers, most notably Dr. Atta El-Battahani, describe this period as a turning point in the history of the Nuba Mountains, when many local people ceased to be independent farmers and became wage labourers on mechanized schemes owned by others.
The famine that engulfed South Kordofan over the past two years cannot be explained by war alone. Siege conditions, closed roads, insecurity and the collapse of agricultural activity all played decisive roles. But the legacy of land ownership established during the expansion of mechanized farming also deepened the crisis. When fighting broke out, many scheme owners and outside investors fled the region, leaving vast areas of farmland abandoned and idle.
Those historical shifts in land ownership also weakened communities’ ability to revive agricultural production once conditions improved. Over the past two years, areas beyond the immediate front lines, particularly the Six Hills region, including Kortala and Kururu, have remained relatively stable, allowing limited movement and cultivation to continue. Even so, only a fraction of the available land has been cultivated, underscoring how decades of changes in land ownership and farming systems have undermined local communities’ ability to bring farmland back into production.
The shifts land ownership underwent since the expansion of mechanized farming also weakened local communities’ ability to return quickly to agricultural production. Over the past two years, some areas lying outside the direct front lines — particularly the Six Hills region (Kortala, Kururu) — have retained enough stability to allow movement and farming activity, compared with other areas. Even so, cultivation has been confined to a limited share of the available land, reflecting the scale of change in residents’ relationship to the land and in the farming patterns that prevailed across the region for decades.
Habila’s Years of Plenty
During the years of abundant harvests, the contours of this underlying imbalance faded behind the sheer scale of the crop and the breadth of farming activity. The fields once produced enormous quantities of sorghum, enough to cover the needs of local and regional markets, with Habila alone supplying roughly 72 percent of South Kordofan’s strategic sorghum reserve and contributing nearly 25 percent of Sudan’s total production of the crop. The agricultural schemes also furnished seasonal work for thousands of residents and stood as a primary source of income for broad segments of the local population.
Habila’s harvest seasons rippled directly through South Kordofan’s markets: as production rose, sorghum flowed into the markets of Ad-Dalang, Kadugli and Abu Jibeha, then continued onward to markets in North Kordofan and other parts of Sudan. For thousands of families, the sorghum grown in Habila meant more than a crop — it was tied to daily food, seasonal income, and the ability to finance the next planting season, standing as one of the central pillars underpinning the region’s food security for decades.
At this time each year, Habila’s plains would fill with the sound of tractors, and teams of laborers would spread across the fields preparing for the season’s second stage, known as tirab. The farming cycle begins in March, when farmers start clearing weeds — locally known as “cutting um bahti” — and through April these weeds are gathered into piles at the edges of the fields to dry, then burned in May ahead of sowing. Tirab then begins in June if the sorghum variety is wad ahmed (red sorghum); if the variety is tabat (white sorghum), planting starts in July instead, since it needs less rainfall.
Tirab unfolds in two stages known locally as kasr and zira’ breaking and sowing. A farmer who has already finished clearing “um bahti” and preparing the land in prior months can bring the tractor straight to the sowing stage, where the seeding implement plants the seed directly in the soil. Land not yet cleared of weeds begins instead with the breaking stage, in which the disc blade is lowered deeper into the soil to uproot the remaining “um bahti” and turn over the earth, before the machinery returns for the sowing stage to plant the crop.
Lean Years After the War
The tracks of military vehicles have replaced those of tractors, and wide stretches of land now sit waiting for a growing season while front lines pass repeatedly over them.
The scene greeting a visitor today looks nothing like that. The tracks of military vehicles have replaced those of tractors, trenches now line the scheme’s edges, and wide stretches of land sit waiting for a growing season while front lines pass repeatedly over them.
Last week, Musa Jibreel, a farmer from Ad-Dalang who owns an agricultural plot in Habila, reached the edge of his farm to find weeds covering large sections of the field he had planted with sorghum year after year. Speaking to Atar, Jibreel said the farming season had always been tied to the start of the rains and to preparations for work and production. Over the past three years, though, it has instead become tied to news of battles, to which areas turn into combat zones, and to which roads remain passable to reach the fields.
He added that losing a single season’s harvest carries consequences into the season that follows, since a farming family depends on its crop to secure food, buy seed, meet its obligations and cover basic needs. With seasons disrupted again and again, returning to production has grown steadily harder, amid rising farming costs, closed roads and stalled trade.
Before the war, Jibreel says, he cultivated about 18 makhamas on his land in the Fayo area. (A makhamas is a traditional Sudanese measure of rain-fed farmland, equivalent to about 1.75 feddans, or 0.42 hectares.) The harvest fed his family and generated enough income to buy seed for the following season. Today, he farms less than a single makhamas west of Al-Tawamat in Ad-Dalang, dividing it between sorghum and beans. It yields barely enough to feed his family for a short time, delaying, if only briefly, the day he must once again buy sorghum from the market.
The Toll of the Conflict
The war that erupted in Khartoum on April 15, 2023, reached South Kordofan in June 2023, preceded from mid-May by attacks the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North/Al-Hilu (SPLM–N (al-Hilu) launched on Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) bases in the state.
In Habila itself, clashes began on the morning of Dec. 5, 2023, when a Rapid Support Forces unit engaged (SPLM–N (al-Hilu) forces stationed in the At-Takamah area, roughly 7 kilometers east of Ad-Dalang. The following day, Dec. 6, the fighting spread into Habila itself.
These developments struck while crops still stood in the fields, forcing dozens of farmers to abandon their plots before the harvest was complete, leaving wide stretches of sorghum and other crops to rot ungathered. In under three years, large portions of the Habila agricultural scheme turned into contact lines between the warring forces. The effects spread quickly into markets and homes across South Kordofan’s towns. In Kadugli and Ad-Dalang, where thousands of families depend on sorghum as their staple food, the grain available in markets began shrinking as farming seasons were disrupted and roads closed, while prices climbed without pause.
As the war stretched into a second and then a third growing season, South Kordofan endured one of its harshest waves of hunger since the region’s last recorded famine in the early 1980s. Residents turned to wild plants and tree leaves that earlier generations had relied on in years of scarcity, and foods such as irq al-nabi, khadija koro, baobab leaves and other local plants became dietary staples.
Sweeping waves of displacement from rural areas and combat zones piled further pressure onto South Kordofan’s main towns, especially Kadugli and Ad-Dalang, which absorbed large numbers of families fleeing Habila, At-Takamah, Kortala, Buram, and the rural outskirts of Kadugli and Ad-Dalang, alongside other areas that saw repeated military clashes.
According to Sulaiman Ahmed, an activist with the emergency response rooms in Kadugli, the city holds four main shelter centers. He said no precise count of the displaced exists, since their numbers keep climbing, particularly after Ta’sees forces attacked villages west and east of Kadugli, such as Barno, Al-Kuwaik, Kiega al-Khail and Kiega Juru. He added that all four shelter centers sit in the city’s northern sector: the dry-port center, the international migration center, the poultry-farm center, and a fourth site. This overcrowding has swelled the ranks of consumers within the towns while pulling thousands of families out of the farming cycle altogether, turning them instead into households dependent on buying food or on humanitarian aid — a shift that has upended the balance between production and consumption, moving large numbers of families from the producer column into the consumer column.
Before the war, a large share of the towns’ food needs came from the surrounding villages and agricultural schemes. Today, those same towns instead receive the residents fleeing those very villages, even as farm output declines — driving demand for sorghum higher just as supply keeps shrinking, and piling further pressure onto markets and the grain reserves that remain.
Can the 2026 Season Succeed?
On Jan. 26, 2026, the SAF regained control of Habila, a development that helped lift the siege on Ad-Dalang, reopened the road linking South and North Kordofan, and allowed trucks and agricultural inputs to reach the area once more. It also brought a measure of security stable enough to encourage farmers to consider returning to their fields after three seasons battered by the war.
Speaking to Atar, Munaim Al-Zein, a member of Habila farmers’ steering committee, said the committee held a meeting with farmers in May to discuss arrangements for entering the growing season, given the relative improvement in security and the reopening of the road to Habila. He added that discussions centered on how to secure financing and production inputs, alongside addressing the liquidity problems farmers face. Al-Zein explained that fuel costs have become one of the biggest hurdles facing the season: a four-gallon container of fuel, known locally as a baagha, now costs roughly 470,000 Sudanese pounds when paid through the Bankak app, and 420,000 Sudanese pounds in cash — a cost beyond the means of many farmers, especially after three consecutive seasons of diminished production.
Any setback in the current growing season would drive sorghum production down still further and could plunge all of South Kordofan back into a food crisis.
Munaim Al-Zein, member of Habila farmers' steering committee
Al-Zein added that the committee is seeking a meeting with South Kordofan’s governor to raise these challenges, chief among them securing financing, fuel and production inputs, along with reviving the Agricultural Bank’s role in supporting farmers before the season begins. He closed with a warning: any setback in the current growing season would drive sorghum production down still further, at a time when the region already faces a sharp decline in food reserves and rising demand — a combination that could plunge all of South Kordofan back into a food crisis resembling what it endured over the past year.
Food security indicators in areas held by the SPLM–N (al-Hilu) look no better. Since the war began, these areas have absorbed successive waves of displaced people arriving from Kadugli, Ad-Dalang and villages along the front lines, until some areas now hold numbers of newcomers approaching or exceeding their original populations.
The crisis deepened further following events in Heiban locality in recent months. Fighting first erupted on March 12 between the Otoro and Shawaya communities before escalating in April into clashes between Otoro and the SPLM–N (al-Hilu). The violence displaced thousands of families at the height of preparations for the planting season, disrupting cultivation before it could begin.
According to the Otoro community’s chief, more than 50,000 people were displaced from 14 villages in Kauda, Heiban and Debi — displacement that struck at a highly sensitive moment, since the mountainous Heiban areas begin preparing their land in May and plant sorghum with the onset of the rains in June, weeks ahead of the growing season in the clay plains west of the Nuba Mountains.
Thousands of families abandoned their land before clearing their fields or sowing a single seed, turning an entire growing season into a season of flight instead — meaning a substantial share of the sorghum expected from these areas is now at risk of falling short, just as the number of people who depend on that harvest for their daily food keeps climbing. These developments coincide with a shrinking role for organizations working in the agricultural sector across SPLM–N (al-Hilu)-held areas. In past years, Samaritan’s Purse and its partners ran farming projects in areas such as Ar-Rujul, Al-Hadra and Al-Warl, supplying seed and production inputs and creating seasonal work for hundreds of families during land preparation, planting and harvest. Part of these projects’ output also went toward distributing sorghum to the neediest families during the summer months, when the need for food peaks.
Over the past year, these projects were scaled back in areas such as Ar-Rujul and Al-Hadra, and with them went the seasonal work opportunities, while the quantities of sorghum distributed to the neediest families shrank — even as the circle of people needing food assistance widens because of continuing displacement and disrupted farming.
These developments point to a food crisis in South Kordofan that transcends the lines of military control. And so South Kordofan stands before a new season carrying hope for a harvest, even as fears mount that any fresh setback could bring back the famine its people endured over the past year.
