caco500
08-10-2008, 06:28 AM
Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells Food
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettleman/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: August 9, 2008
ED DAMER, Sudan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sudan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) — Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sudan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) barely have enough to eat.
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Farmers plowed a field last month before planting sorghum in Gezira, south of Khartoum, Sudan. Although Sudan receives food aid, it exports many of its crops.
Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.
But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?
African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ethiopia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo), Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.
But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.
Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston.
Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to United Nations (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org) officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/smith_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly “one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime’s domestic policies.” It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government’s strategy to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”
“Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_food_program/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”
Sudanese officials say that is precisely their goal, and they deny that Sudanese agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people. They reject accusations that they are neglecting far-flung areas like Darfur, much less waging a war of hunger and deprivation against them.
Instead, Sudanese officials say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by American sanctions for more than a decade. And it could get worse, with Mr. Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_criminal_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in connection with the massacres in Darfur.
“Sanctions are never far from our mind,” said Al-Amin Dafa Allah, chairman of the National Assembly’s agricultural committee. “We’re trying to minimize our reliance on the outside.”
In fact, part of the reason relief agencies bring their own food into Sudan stems from the American policy of giving crops, not money, as foreign aid.
Many European countries, by contrast, just give the World Food Program cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the program bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. United Nations officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.
Sudanese officials seem more interested in doing business with their new partners in the Middle East. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, nearly one million square miles. It has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated. The Sudanese government is striking deals left and right with Arab countries just across the Red Sea: the Arab countries bring the money, the soil scientists and the $200,000 tractors. Sudan supplies the land. Skip to next paragraph (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=world#secondParagraph)
“Our country is small and dry and mountainous,” said Man Shuqwara, the Jordanian director of a Jordanian-run farm in northern Sudan that grows wheat, beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, oranges and bananas. “By logic we would come to Sudan.”
The same logic is attracting big money from Saudi Arabia. About an hour’s drive north of the Jordanian farm, near the town of Ed Damer, is a huge new $200 million project to grow wheat in what now looks like a 10-mile-wide sandbox. Some of the wheat will stay in Sudan; some will be shipped to Saudi Arabia. A fleet of new John Deere tractors is already lined up for harvest time. A worker on the farm whispered that the tractors had been sneaked into Sudan through Saudi Arabia because of the American trade sanctions.
Sudan’s overall economic strategy is to diversify from oil, which it began exporting in 1999, and to focus more closely on the traditional engine of the country’s economy — agriculture. More than 80 percent of the work force is engaged in raising animals or farming of one sort or another.
“Our sesame oil is the best in the world,” said Mr. Al-Amin, the agriculture committee chairman. “And it’s organic!”
But make no mistake about it: much of Sudan is still a blazing hot, cruelly barren landscape, with specterlike figures in impossibly white gowns tramping through the dust.
But at certain nodes, especially along the Nile River, this country is as green and lush as Florida. It boasts three crucial ingredients for growing things: land, labor and, most important, water.
The Nile and its tributaries flow more than 2,000 miles across Sudan, bringing the silt-rich water right to the fields. The British colonial government was the first to capitalize on this in a big way, building a dam in 1925 on the Blue Nile, one of the two main sources of the Nile River, and a network of canals. Today, that project, called the Gezira Scheme, has thousands of miles of canals irrigating nearly 2.5 million acres of farms. The genius is that it is all done by gravity, which means water flows from the dam through capillaries of canals to seedlings in the field, all without using a watt of electricity.
“We have water 24-7,” said Siddig Eissa Ahmed, the director of the Gezira Scheme, which is government-run, like much of Sudanese agribusiness.
The dark side of all this development is displacement. The conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, is largely about grazing rights and watering holes — and the government’s brutal counterinsurgency policies in response to an armed rebellion. So far, the most ambitious agricultural projects have avoided the area altogether, and instead are concentrated in the central and northern parts of the country.
Even so, development in Sudan often means uprooting other rural subsistence farmers for large-scale commercial projects, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar at the Social Science Research Council in New York.
“Smallholder food production goes down, commercial food production goes up, and food relief serves as a subsidy to this transformation, keeping the displaced alive,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=world
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettleman/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: August 9, 2008
ED DAMER, Sudan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sudan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) — Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sudan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) barely have enough to eat.
Skip to next paragraph (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world#secondParagraph) Enlarge This Image (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/10/world/10sudan_CA0.ready.html',%20'10sudan_CA0_ready',%20'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes'))
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Enlarge This Image (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/10/world/10sudan_CA1.ready.html',%20'10sudan_CA1_ready',%20'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes'))
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/10/world/sudan.02.190h.jpg (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/10/world/10sudan_CA1.ready.html',%20'10sudan_CA1_ready',%20'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')) Joao Silva for The New York Times
Farmers plowed a field last month before planting sorghum in Gezira, south of Khartoum, Sudan. Although Sudan receives food aid, it exports many of its crops.
Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.
But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?
African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ethiopia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo), Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.
But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.
Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston.
Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to United Nations (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org) officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/smith_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly “one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime’s domestic policies.” It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government’s strategy to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”
“Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_food_program/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”
Sudanese officials say that is precisely their goal, and they deny that Sudanese agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people. They reject accusations that they are neglecting far-flung areas like Darfur, much less waging a war of hunger and deprivation against them.
Instead, Sudanese officials say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by American sanctions for more than a decade. And it could get worse, with Mr. Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_criminal_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in connection with the massacres in Darfur.
“Sanctions are never far from our mind,” said Al-Amin Dafa Allah, chairman of the National Assembly’s agricultural committee. “We’re trying to minimize our reliance on the outside.”
In fact, part of the reason relief agencies bring their own food into Sudan stems from the American policy of giving crops, not money, as foreign aid.
Many European countries, by contrast, just give the World Food Program cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the program bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. United Nations officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.
Sudanese officials seem more interested in doing business with their new partners in the Middle East. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, nearly one million square miles. It has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated. The Sudanese government is striking deals left and right with Arab countries just across the Red Sea: the Arab countries bring the money, the soil scientists and the $200,000 tractors. Sudan supplies the land. Skip to next paragraph (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=world#secondParagraph)
“Our country is small and dry and mountainous,” said Man Shuqwara, the Jordanian director of a Jordanian-run farm in northern Sudan that grows wheat, beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, oranges and bananas. “By logic we would come to Sudan.”
The same logic is attracting big money from Saudi Arabia. About an hour’s drive north of the Jordanian farm, near the town of Ed Damer, is a huge new $200 million project to grow wheat in what now looks like a 10-mile-wide sandbox. Some of the wheat will stay in Sudan; some will be shipped to Saudi Arabia. A fleet of new John Deere tractors is already lined up for harvest time. A worker on the farm whispered that the tractors had been sneaked into Sudan through Saudi Arabia because of the American trade sanctions.
Sudan’s overall economic strategy is to diversify from oil, which it began exporting in 1999, and to focus more closely on the traditional engine of the country’s economy — agriculture. More than 80 percent of the work force is engaged in raising animals or farming of one sort or another.
“Our sesame oil is the best in the world,” said Mr. Al-Amin, the agriculture committee chairman. “And it’s organic!”
But make no mistake about it: much of Sudan is still a blazing hot, cruelly barren landscape, with specterlike figures in impossibly white gowns tramping through the dust.
But at certain nodes, especially along the Nile River, this country is as green and lush as Florida. It boasts three crucial ingredients for growing things: land, labor and, most important, water.
The Nile and its tributaries flow more than 2,000 miles across Sudan, bringing the silt-rich water right to the fields. The British colonial government was the first to capitalize on this in a big way, building a dam in 1925 on the Blue Nile, one of the two main sources of the Nile River, and a network of canals. Today, that project, called the Gezira Scheme, has thousands of miles of canals irrigating nearly 2.5 million acres of farms. The genius is that it is all done by gravity, which means water flows from the dam through capillaries of canals to seedlings in the field, all without using a watt of electricity.
“We have water 24-7,” said Siddig Eissa Ahmed, the director of the Gezira Scheme, which is government-run, like much of Sudanese agribusiness.
The dark side of all this development is displacement. The conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, is largely about grazing rights and watering holes — and the government’s brutal counterinsurgency policies in response to an armed rebellion. So far, the most ambitious agricultural projects have avoided the area altogether, and instead are concentrated in the central and northern parts of the country.
Even so, development in Sudan often means uprooting other rural subsistence farmers for large-scale commercial projects, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar at the Social Science Research Council in New York.
“Smallholder food production goes down, commercial food production goes up, and food relief serves as a subsidy to this transformation, keeping the displaced alive,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=world