The Season Cannot Wait
Marhaba, This is the 58th issue of Atar English, published by the Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It reaches you every two weeks with reporting from across Sudan.
Sudan’s agricultural season has always been more than a date on the calendar. It is the point at which land, labour, credit, fuel, water, markets and state policy are supposed to meet. This year, across the country’s rainfed and irrigated schemes, those pieces are failing to meet one another. Farmers are preparing fields while waiting for financing, fuel and inputs. Others are waiting for canals to be opened, disputes over management to be settled, or roads to become passable. The result is an agricultural economy caught between the promise of production and the machinery required to make that promise real.
The crisis is clearest in the rainfed areas. In Al-Gadarif, Sinnar, White Nile and Kassala, farmers are being asked to carry an enormous burden with inadequate financing and increasingly expensive inputs. Government announcements speak of millions of feddans targeted for cultivation and hundreds of trillions of Sudanese pounds in financing, yet farmers describe a very different reality on the ground. In some areas, sowing has already been delayed by weak rains, while fuel remains scarce and bank financing falls far short of actual production costs. One farmer’s formulation captures the contradiction: “We plough our land with hope, but hope does not bring us fuel or seed, nor does it water the crops.”
The stories from Wakara and Um Jir show that even when land and water exist, agriculture can still be paralysed by the institutions that are supposed to manage them. At Wakara, farmers have been caught in a struggle between agricultural associations, investors and state authorities over who controls financing and who has the right to decide the scheme’s future. At its centre is a basic question of agricultural governance: who speaks for the farmer, and according to what rules is that authority established? One farmer put the problem plainly: “To this day, we don’t know the basis on which the investor is chosen.”
Um Jar presents an older version of the same problem. A scheme established in 1940, once capable of supporting families and sending crops to markets across Sudan, now faces deteriorating infrastructure and a dispute between a company and an agricultural association over management. The canals, pumps and bridges that sustain production have been allowed to deteriorate while institutional authority remains contested. “The Um Jir Scheme is a dead infrastructure, dead equipment, a dead farmer; it has all died,” farmer Abdelgadir Khalid Mohamed told Atar.
Yet the stories of agricultural associations offer another possibility. In Al-Gadarif, farmers have organised themselves into grassroots associations and networks, acquired machinery, secured financing, established agricultural companies and shared technical knowledge. Their experience suggests that collective organisation is not merely a social tradition inherited from the nafeer. It can also be an economic institution capable of reducing the isolation of individual producers and giving farmers greater control over production, financing and marketing. The challenge is that these associations need a regulatory environment that recognises them as institutions of production rather than treating them simply as channels through which financing can be distributed.
The reopening of the Export Road between Omdurman, Bara and Al-Obeid brings the question of connectivity into the same picture. A road cannot restore an agricultural economy by itself, but it can reconnect its broken parts. Farmers in North Kordofan need improved seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and spare parts. Livestock traders need shorter and safer routes to markets. Oilseed processors need machinery to turn local crops into products rather than sending raw produce elsewhere. For farmers returning to Jabrat al-Sheikh, the road is therefore not simply a transport corridor. It is a possible route back into production.
This matters because Sudan’s agricultural crisis is ultimately also a crisis of how the country understands production. The multidimensional poverty survey examined in this issue exposes the limits of viewing people primarily through deprivation rather than through their position as producers. Nomads emerge from the survey as Sudan’s poorest population, with a poverty incidence of 99.9 per cent and an intensity of 65.6 per cent, yet livestock remains one of the country’s major sources of export earnings. The same problem appears in agriculture when a farmer is reduced to a beneficiary of financing rather than recognised as the producer whose access to land, water, credit, prices and markets determines whether the economy functions.
And finally, the prices tell us what all these stories amount to when they reach the household. The latest Atar price bulletin shows wide differences across markets and continued volatility in food, fuel, construction materials, medicines and crops. Sorghum ranges from $28.57 to $77.14 per sack across the surveyed markets, while millet reaches $114.29 in El Obeid. Diesel ranges from $10.29 to $16.29 per gallon. These are not merely prices at the end of the agricultural chain. They are signals from every stage of it: the cost of reaching the field, producing the crop, moving it to market and finally putting food on a household’s table.
The agricultural season therefore cannot be rescued by announcing a target number of feddans. It requires functioning institutions, transparent financing, reliable irrigation, affordable inputs, roads that connect producers to markets, processing capacity and prices that make production viable. Above all, it requires treating farmers not as recipients waiting for the state or an investor to decide their fate, but as the central economic actors whose production sustains the country.
Sudan does not lack land, farmers or agricultural knowledge. What it lacks is a system capable of allowing these things to work together. In wartime, that failure becomes more than an economic inefficiency. It becomes a threat to food security, livelihoods and the possibility of recovery itself.
Atar Editorial Team
