Will the new agricultural season spare Sudan hunger and economic deficit?

Khartoum – Sudan is awaiting the summer agricultural season, which officially begins in the first week of July, to alleviate the suffering of the majority of citizens after a UN warning that more than 25 million Sudanese (representing more than half the population) are facing severe levels of food insecurity.

About 80% of the workforce in Sudan works in the agricultural sector, both plant and animal, which contributes 32.7% of the gross domestic product, which amounted to $34.3 billion at the end of 2021, according to the World Bank.

Despite the secession of South Sudan in July 2011, which took with it more than two-thirds of Sudan’s oil reserves and more than 70% of the country’s forest cover, the area of ​​arable land was not significantly affected, as it was around 200 million acres and has decreased to 170 million.

Sudan has five irrigated agricultural projects (from the Nile or wells) that it relies on to build a strategic stock of food grains such as corn and millet, in addition to cash revenues from exports of cotton, peanuts and sesame, and to secure part of the country’s wheat needs.

The largest of these projects is located in Al-Jazeera State in central Sudan, which is also the largest project in Africa irrigated by flooding from the Blue Nile, in addition to the Suki, Wadi Halfa, Rahad, and Tokar Delta projects in the east of the country.

In these projects, farmers rely on bank financing or partnerships with businessmen in a way that divides production after they finance all stages of the agricultural process, from seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, and agricultural machinery, all the way to the bags for packing the produced crops.

The situation for rain-fed farmers in the regions of Kordofan and Darfur in western Sudan seems better than the reality of the irrigated sector, as most of them depend on their own money in farming operations, which are done manually in a traditional way. However, the contribution of this sector to the total production is small, as farming is done in limited areas to meet the needs of farmers.

According to a report issued by the Agricultural Bank of Sudan, which specializes in financing agricultural activity, the cultivated area it finances in the country has decreased by 60% compared to previous years.

A study prepared by the United Nations Development Programme and the International Institute for Economic Policy Research says that half of rural families suffer from the cessation of agricultural activities from which they live, a percentage that rises to 68% in rural Khartoum State.

An official report by the Council of Ministers, seen by Al Jazeera Net, showed that the production of corn last summer amounted to about 3 million tons compared to 5 million tons in the previous season before the outbreak of the war, and 633 thousand tons of millet compared to more than 2 million tons in the previous season, while wheat decreased from 476 thousand tons to 377 thousand tons.

The report attributed the decline in production to the decrease in cultivated areas from more than 46 million acres according to the plan to about 35 million acres, due to the deterioration of the security situation in the states of Al-Jazeera, Kordofan and Darfur, the difficulty of transporting production inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and fuel and their high prices, weak bank financing, and the failure to harvest about 7 million acres due to the security situation. The country’s grain exports last season amounted to about 1.6 million tons, compared to imports of 2.3 million tons of food commodities.

It is noteworthy that there is no food gap in Sudan, as the production of corn and wheat amounts to more than 3.3 million tons, with more than 2.5 million tons of strategic stock and what farmers save, compared to consumption of 5.5 million tons, but the challenge lies in delivering the production to citizens, according to the official report.

Last March, the World Food Programme estimated the production of sorghum, millet and wheat for the year 2023 at about 4.1 million tons, a 46% decrease from the output achieved in the previous year, and a 40% decrease compared to the average for the past five years.

Sudanese displaced by war in their country face food and security disasters

The World Food Program, with funding from the African Development Bank, implemented a successful experiment in wheat cultivation last winter season, which led to a 70% increase in wheat production in the targeted project sites in 5 states: Al-Jazeera, Kassala, River Nile, White Nile, and Northern, according to a report issued last month.

The African Bank’s Country Director in Sudan, Mary Munyu, explained that wheat production reached 645,000 metric tons, which makes the Bank’s intervention crucial to respond to crises for internally displaced persons, adding that more than 30% of the beneficiaries in the Northern State are displaced.

In turn, the World Food Programme Representative and Country Director in Sudan, Eddie Rowe, said that the project aims to distribute wheat seeds and climate-adapted fertilizers to more than 170,000 smallholder farmers in the five states.

Eddie Rowe explained that the production of 645,000 metric tons of wheat represents 22% of the total wheat consumption needs in Sudan. About 16,000 of the farmers who received the support were newly displaced due to conflict in the past 13 months.

The summer agricultural season faces challenges that threaten to shrink areas due to weak financing and production inputs, in addition to fuel scarcity and high prices, despite the early rainfall at the end of June and the beginning of July.

The security situation in the areas of armed conflict also represents the most prominent threat to farmers in the irrigated agriculture sectors in Al-Jazeera and Matariya states, in Kordofan and Darfur states.

However, the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Abu Bakr Omar Al-Bishri, reassured farmers that production inputs would be provided, obstacles would be removed, and a suitable climate would be created for the season to cultivate 35 million acres, focusing on corn and millet, given that the majority of Sudanese depend on these crops for food security.

Al-Bishri said, during a press conference last Tuesday, that the states affected by the war will not be completely out of the production cycle because agricultural projects are concentrated in rural areas and not cities, in addition to the farmers’ insistence on increasing the areas.

Regarding financing, the Minister of Agriculture indicated that the Agricultural Bank had reached a stage close to bankruptcy due to the failure to recover the money it had given to farmers during the last season, as the armed conflict had contributed to the majority’s failure to pay.

In contrast, the Farmers’ Association criticized the new financing policy for the summer season announced by the Agricultural Bank, describing it as “defective and destructive to the sector, leading farmers towards insolvency and imprisonment, and threatening the failure of the season.”

He held the Agricultural Bank management and the Supreme Committee responsible for any failure that occurs during the agricultural season, especially in the production of corn, which is considered one of the most important crops in rain-fed agricultural areas.

The group said in a statement that the Agricultural Bank had set the price of corn at a significant difference from the prevailing market price, and complained about the high cost of production due to the high prices of production inputs, especially gasoline, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds and machinery.

He pointed out that this coincides with the state completely withdrawing its support for production, and imposing exorbitant fees and taxes that burdened farmers and caused many of them to be imprisoned, and some of them to be out of the production cycle.

Farmer Hamid Ibrahim from Gedaref State in eastern Sudan told Al Jazeera Net that poor marketing and low prices of corn and sesame had caused them to incur huge losses.

He rejected the Agricultural Bank’s setting of 35,000 pounds ($58.24) for a bag of corn, considering it an unrealistic price due to the high cost of production, which makes farming unprofitable. Ibrahim expected many people to refrain from farming this season.

In North Kordofan State, farmer Abdullah Hamidan told Al Jazeera Net that he did not find financing from banks and did not obtain seeds. He will plant a limited area of ​​corn and millet that is sufficient for his family and will seek to partner with traders who have liquidity to plant export crops such as beans and sesame because he depends on his income from agriculture. He expressed his fears of the military confrontations spreading to his region.

The production and export of gum arabic from Sudan faces several challenges due to the war and the high cost of transportation due to security tensions on the roads linking Port Sudan to the production areas, at a time when truck drivers are reluctant to work in the production areas in the states of Kordofan in the west of the country.

Sudan produces 80% of the world’s total gum arabic.

The head of the Gum Arabic Exporters Division, Ahmed Al-Anan, said in a press statement last Saturday that Sudan’s gum Arabic exports before the war ranged between 120 and 150 thousand tons, but declined after the war in 2023 by 60%, expecting a further decline this year to record between 40 thousand tons and 50 thousand tons.

Regarding the difficulties facing gum production, Al-Anan pointed out that the most prominent of these is the lack of security in most areas of the belt, in addition to the reluctance to work due to the security conditions and the lack of funding.

For his part, agricultural expert Othman Al-Aghbash says that the agricultural season is threatened by the spread of war from the Darfur region in the west to the states of Khartoum and Al-Jazirah in the center of the country, reaching the state of Sennar in the southeast of the country, which was preceded by the disappointment of farmers due to the previous season that witnessed a decline in production and a drop in prices and the subsequent recession that led to farmers failing to pay their obligations to banks after obtaining financing.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, Al-Aghbash expected the activity of major rain-fed farmers to stop and the cultivated area to be reduced to reduce spending on production inputs and move towards traditional agriculture in limited areas that only meet the needs of the farmer and his livestock, as a result of the security threats affecting equipment and machinery, in addition to weak marketing and exports.

Most farmers are likely to focus on small areas of food production, while export farming in the traditional sesame and peanut areas in the west of the country will not be large even if they find funding, because exporters have been reluctant to buy the previous season’s produce due to the RSF’s road closures, imposing fees on trucks, and looting some of them.

The International Monetary Fund had expected the Sudanese economy to shrink by 18.3% due to the war, which destroyed the industrial base, took large areas of agriculture out of production, halted economic activity including commercial and financial services and eroded state capacity.

The World Health Organization also said in its latest report on Sudan that more than 25 million Sudanese (more than half of the country’s population) are facing acute levels of food insecurity, according to the latest Integrated Phase Classification analysis of acute food insecurity conducted between late April and early June 2024.

Some 755,000 people are facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity, while 8.5 million people are suffering from severe food shortages and high levels of malnutrition.

There are 14 areas at risk of famine, including areas in Darfur, Khartoum and Al Jazirah states, and communities of internally displaced persons and refugees. These are the worst levels of acute food insecurity ever recorded by the Integrated Phase Classification in Sudan.