Great Hunger: Sudan’s Suffering and the “Norm of Indifference”

Layers Upon Layers

Alex de Waal is the one of the world’s foremost famine experts, and, indeed, it is his writings that have most informed this series’ contention that contemporary famines are manmade. The executive director of the World Peace Foundation, and a research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, de Waal is the author of many books and, crucially for the purposes of this particular article, he has spent time in, and become an expert on, Sudan, where he has observed firsthand how the very nature of famine has changed over recent decades.

“When I first went to Sudan, which was in 1983,” he told me over the phone, as he walked to work to begin a new university semester, “the famine that was unfolding then was probably the last major famine that had a natural calamity—that is, drought—as the most important factor, along with a bunch of others like economic mismanagement. If we went back a couple of hundred years, you would see a much higher proportion of the underlying factors, the immediate triggers for famines, being drought or potato blight or floods or whatever. But over the last two centuries, and especially in the period from, really, the ’60s to the ’90s, all those other factors fell away and we were left with famines that were either deliberately or indirectly manmade, and particularly war-related—atrocity famines, if you like.”

This is not to suggest that natural phenomena have no bearing upon a hunger crisis’s onset—they obviously do—nor that a location’s history is irrelevant, either. Famines occur because of a confluence of all sorts of factors, past and present, all of which feed into each other over time. “There are places where you have a legacy of past famines from which people have not fully recovered,” explained de Waal. “So in Sudan you have a really complex layering of historical factors. The famine there that I researched in the ’80s, although probably the single most important factor was a really severe drought, that, in turn, contributed to later calamities.”

De Waal has personally witnessed how these crises spiral through the generations. “I have a very vivid recollection about staying at the desert edge with an old Arab sheikh,” he said. “He was describing how his way of life was coming to an end because of the drought and the hunger, and how the relations between communities were getting strained. Then his son, 20 years later, was the head of the Janjaweed, the notorious genocidal militia that unleashed a new humanitarian crisis that qualifies as a famine… In turn, the legacy of that is that between a quarter and a third of the population of Darfur was forcibly displaced into I.D.P. [internally displaced persons] camps.”

It is within these I.D.P. camps that the present food crisis is at its most severe. “If you look at the maps produced by FEWS NET, the U.S. Famine Early Warning System, what you see is little squares, which are the I.D.P. camps that were still reliant on World Food Program food as of two, two and a half years ago,” said de Waal. “They turned from yellow—stressed—to red pretty much overnight—red being emergency—because of the legacy of that [war in Darfur]. So you can see how you have this sort of layering of underlying vulnerabilities on top of each other in a way that is not linear. These things interact.”

A Dysfunctional Food System

Sudan’s dysfunctional food system, as de Waal explained, has long been reliant on large-scale, commercial farming, which has been badly hit by the civil war. “The food system, as of three years ago,” he said, “was very much founded upon large-scale commercial agriculture in parts of eastern and central Sudan. Gezira [otherwise known as Al Jazirah, a state in the east-central region] was massive for irrigated farming and large-scale imports of wheat, which were paid for, really, out of the proceeds of the urban economy. The war knocked out the urban economy. It knocked out a huge amount of the commercial farming economy—not all of it, but a huge amount. The Gezira scheme was very badly hit because of the occupation of the R.S.F.”

While the picture for commercial farming is profoundly bleak, there are small areas of food production that have lately been doing better than might have been expected. “What is kind of interesting,” said de Waal, “is the extent to which other food systems that have been neglected over the years—which are the smallholders, small-scale village farms and livestock—have actually not gone so badly. They’ve always historically been disadvantaged. One of the problems in the Sudanese food economy was precisely that they were discriminated against—couldn’t get credit, didn’t have markets, et cetera, because what was in the market was the cheaper food [that came] either from subsidized imports or from the large-scale commercial farmers. You knock those out, and, actually, the rural production, in a very patchy way, has rebounded somewhat and is also helped by good rains and helped by the fact that there’s actually quite a good, thriving livestock export business which crosses the battle.”

But while this rural rebound is positive, it is evidently nowhere near enough to sustain the country, and the good rains, too, come with severe problems. Only a day before I spoke to de Waal, torrential rains caused a massive landslide in Darfur that killed hundreds of people—some reports even suggest up to a thousand. Sudan needs rain to benefit its crop yield, but the flooding that will result can cause devastating landslides that destroy infrastructure, take lives, and increase the likelihood of water-born diseases spreading. The cycle is vicious.

International Players

The Sudan crisis is not taking place in a vacuum. Each side of the conflict has its international backers with their own interests, foreign-made weapons are flowing into the country, despite a decades-old arms embargo, and billions of dollars are being made by some through the country’s exports of gold, oil, gum arabic, and livestock, which often pass through shady channels. There is always business to be done and deals to be struck, even during a famine. But while international players are involved, they have so far achieved so little in the pursuit of peace.

“Right from the beginning of this war,” explained de Waal, “it was pretty clear that the most powerful power brokers were the Arab states. So you have the U.A.E. banking the R.S.F.—although it still denies it, it’s very well documented. And then you have the Egyptians especially, but then the Turks, the Qataris, and the Saudis lining up on the other side.”

Then there’s Russia and its notoriously brutal Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization which, following its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “mysterious” death in an airplane crash following his revolt against Putin, was merged into a new Africa Corps under the direct control of Russia’s defense ministry. “Interestingly,” said de Waal, “the Russians are on both sides. The Wagner group had close relations with the R.S.F., but Russia also had various other deals going on with the authorities in [the Sudanese government’s wartime capital of] Port Sudan, including gold, including looking for a military naval base. So the Russians are involved, but they’re not strictly speaking backing one side or the other. And China doesn’t really have a dog in the fight.”

The United States, too, is an important player, with huge leverage over the region—yet it has proven woefully unable to wind down the conflict. “Then you have the shutdown in USAID,” said de Waal, “which was providing well over 50 percent of the humanitarian aid. If you look at the level of funding of the U.N. appeal, which was already a scaled-back appeal, it’s only about 25 percent funded and we’re in September now.”

As devastating as Trump’s cuts to USAID have been for Sudan, de Waal also has strong criticisms for the previous U.S. administration. “The Biden administration really screwed it up,” he said. “They started off with getting peace talks, co-hosted between them and Saudi Arabia, between the two main warring parties. Had that succeeded in the first few weeks, everyone would have thought it was wonderful. But it didn’t, and what the Biden administration did was, it just stuck with the same failed formula instead of saying, okay, that didn’t work, we need something else.”

The Biden administration seemed to exhibit a lack of urgency when it came to the crisis. “It was pretty clear that, in order for any formula like that to work, you needed to get the U.A.E. in,” said de Waal. “And the only way of getting the Emirates and the Saudis and the Egyptians to agree on anything had to be at foreign ministers or heads of state level. But there was no interest in doing that in the Biden administration. It was left to the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and, essentially, her instructions were, you solve this. Don’t bother us. Biden, Blinken, Sullivan basically washed their hands of it, and that was a recipe for it to go unsolved.”

The Trump administration at least briefly attempted to address the issue, albeit unsuccessfully. “The one thing I would say for the Trump administration,” said de Waal, “is that [secretary of state Marco] Rubio got this right away and tried to convene the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians at a ministerial level meeting in D.C. It didn’t work. The Emiratis and the Egyptians basically vetoed it. They couldn’t agree, which was interesting because it showed that they—especially the Emirates—were ready to sort of defy Trump. The significance of this is that the war will go on until those three countries agree. And even if they agree, there’s still a long way to go.”

The international community, such as it exists these days, has shown a shocking lack of interest in Sudan. But something needs to change. “One would hope that it would be stabilized and pulled back from the brink by two things,” de Waal said. “One is the political agreement between the parties, which is necessary, and the other is stepped up humanitarian assistance. On that, the U.S. has clearly pulled out, which is terrible. The U.K. has pulled back… The U.K. aid budget is being cut and nobody’s stepping into the gap. Other states that do have [money], like the Emirates and the Saudis, they’re showing no inclination to step in.”

“The Norm of Indifference”

During an interview with the BBC in September 2024, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lamented the lack of global interest in Sudan, and he had his thoughts about why it was happening. “I think,” he said, “race is in the play here.” De Waal, meanwhile, had his own neat term for the world’s lack of attention.

“I think what we see is the norm of indifference,” he said. “The world has decided it just doesn’t care. And that leaves Sudan, the Sudanese people, at the mercy of their own leaders and their own resourcefulness. And I fear we will have a situation in which the extremes of starvation may subside, but we’ll have a situation, as in Somalia, where, yes, you don’t have outright famine raging, but you have a huge population just on the precipice that can be pushed over and will routinely or regularly be pushed over with the slightest shock.” He paused on the line for a moment. “It’s a fairly dismal picture.”