Adaptation Is Not Recovery
Marhaba, This is the 59th 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 war is changing more than the country’s political map. It is reshaping who controls institutions, who produces food, where markets operate, how people preserve their savings, and how communities understand belonging.
This issue of examines some of these changes, from the farmers’ organizations of Al-Jazirah to the fields of Darfur, the markets of Karari and the memories of displacement.
We begin in Al-Jazirah Scheme, where the election of a new farmers’ organization leadership exposed the political struggles surrounding agricultural representation. The process was shaped by the politics of the post-April 15 period, with support for the popular resistance becoming an important criterion for representation. Critics alleged interference by political and security actors, while others objected to the exclusion of women and the greater influence afforded to large landowners.
The timing was revealing. As delegates gathered to determine who would represent farmers, crops across the scheme were suffering from a lack of water. The assembly focused on leadership and future promises while an immediate agricultural crisis received little attention. The question, therefore, is not only who represents farmers, but whether farmers themselves retain meaningful control over the institutions that claim to represent them.
In Darfur, women are building alternatives where established systems have failed. With formal agricultural finance disrupted by the war, agricultural emergency rooms and women’s associations have mobilized seeds, tools and other support. Women are experimenting with dry-season cultivation and adapting their agricultural calendars to a landscape transformed by conflict.
They do so amid water shortages, fuel scarcity, expensive inputs, insecurity and disrupted trade. Yet their stories are not simply stories of survival. They are about maintaining livelihoods, communities and dignity. One displaced farmer insists that she would rather be known as the woman who farms her land than simply as a displaced person.
Al-Manasir Agricultural Scheme offers another measure of what the war is doing to agriculture. A scheme established with modern infrastructure has seen its productive capacity decline amid unreliable electricity and irrigation. Farmers are now paying heavily for alternative water and solar systems to protect their crops, while some are considering selling their land or turning to artisanal gold mining.
The choices facing these farmers show that agricultural collapse does not require the destruction of land. It can happen when the infrastructure and financing that make cultivation possible become too unreliable or expensive.
The same pressures are visible in Sudan’s monetary system. The money supply increased from 4.93 trillion pounds at the end of 2022 to 37.05 trillion pounds by June 2026. At the same time, banking-sector claims on the public sector expanded much faster than claims on the private sector.
These figures reflect a wartime economy increasingly dependent on borrowing and monetary financing. In 2025, roughly 90 per cent of the increase in the monetary base corresponded to new financing between the Bank of Sudan and the government. The cost of financing the war is therefore increasingly transmitted into the wider economy through prices, the exchange rate and purchasing power.
Gold offers another window into this transformation. In Karari, goldsmiths displaced from central Khartoum have reopened in residential neighbourhoods, while buying gold by the “grain”, one-tenth of a gramme, has emerged as a new form of saving. As the pound loses value, gold offers households a way to preserve wealth outside the currency. Social media is simultaneously reshaping how that gold is marketed and traded.
But the war is changing more than economic systems.
In “Mary: A Name for Every South Sudanese Woman”, Dominica Amet traces the memory of a woman who became part of her family and the broader story of South Sudanese displacement in Khartoum. The name “Mary” became a generic label for South Sudanese women, reducing individual identities to a presumed category of origin and religion.
The essay also connects today’s war to Sudan’s longer history of conflict. Mary was displaced by an earlier war; decades later, the author experienced war herself on April 15, 2023. The continuity is stark: Sudan’s wars do not simply displace people once. They reproduce displacement across generations.
Our Price Bulletin brings these transformations back to everyday life. Prices vary sharply across states, exchange rates fluctuate throughout the day, and the cost of food, fuel, medicines and construction materials reflects an economy fractured by disrupted production and trade.
Taken together, these stories show a country being reorganized by war. Political institutions are contested, agricultural systems are adapting or breaking down, economic activity is moving, gold is replacing the currency as a store of value, and old questions of displacement and belonging are being carried into a new generation.
But adaptation is not recovery.
A woman cultivating land because there is no other livelihood, a farmer buying solar equipment because electricity has failed, or a family saving in gold because the pound is losing value are not signs that systems are functioning. They are signs of people compensating for systems that are failing them.
The question facing Sudan is therefore not simply what will be rebuilt when the war ends. It is what the war will have left behind, and who will have the power to shape what comes next.
The struggle is already taking place in farmers’ assemblies, on fields, in markets, inside banks, in gold shops and in the names by which Sudanese people choose to remember one another.
Atar Editorial Team
