Sudan's Generals Are Starving 19.5 Million People to Win Their War

Nineteen and a half million people in Sudan wake up every day in conditions of acute food crisis. Nineteen and a half million. That is more than the population of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso combined. These are not statistics floating in a report. They are children whose growth has stopped, mothers who skip meals so their sons can eat, and old people who die quietly while the men with guns argue over who controls the capital.

Africa is now recording levels of acute food insecurity that should shame every head of state on this continent. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies puts the cause plainly: conflict is the primary driver. Not drought alone. Not bad luck. Not the global market by itself. Bullets, bombs and blockades are doing the starving. When a continent's farmers are chased off their land, when markets are shelled and fields are mined, when trucks carrying grain are looted or never allowed through, hunger stops being a failure of nature. It becomes a policy, even when nobody writes it down.

Consider the sequence of shocks that have stacked on top of one another. COVID-19 disrupted supply chains and drained household savings. Then the constriction of maritime traffic, driven by attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the rerouting of vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, pushed freight costs and food prices higher across import-dependent economies. Now severe El Niño conditions are threatening harvests in parts of the continent, including precisely the countries already torn apart by war. A shock is a bad day. Several shocks landing on a population already under the boot of an armed group is a death sentence delivered in slow motion.

Sudan is the clearest case. Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have fought for control of Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan. The RSF's campaigns in Darfur, including the siege and fall of El Fasher, have been documented by UN investigators and human rights monitors as involving mass killings, sexual violence and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure. Markets have been burned. Water systems have been wrecked. Aid convoys have been blocked. Famine has been confirmed in parts of the country by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global standard for measuring hunger. Let us be precise: this is not an accident of geography. It is the predictable result of two armies that treat civilian food as a battlefield resource, while both claim to be the legitimate government of a nation of 50 million people.

Madagascar tells a different but equally damning story. The island has recorded the sharpest percentage increase in acute food insecurity on the continent. Madagascar has not been bombed by a foreign army. It has been failed by a state that spent years in political crisis, corruption and weak governance, while climate shocks in the south hit communities with no buffer, no irrigation, no roads and no savings. Madagascar is the warning that conflict is not the only thing that kills by hunger. Bad governance does too. Every stolen budget line for rural roads and storage silos is a child who will not reach school.

And we must name the villains who profit from this suffering, because vagueness is cowardice. In eastern Congo, the Rwandan Defence Force has been operating inside the DRC alongside the M23 movement, a pattern that UN Group of Experts reports have documented across multiple mandate periods, including S/2025/446 and later findings. This is a war of aggression. Rwanda's army deploys its own combat units, supported by drones and heavy weapons, while M23 supplies the manpower and political cover. It is the same playbook Moscow ran in Donetsk and Luhansk, and if the world rightly called that an invasion, it must call this one an invasion too. Kigali's forces have helped displace millions of Congolese, and the fields those families left behind now lie fallow, mined or looted. Paul Kagame cannot claim to fight hunger while his soldiers help create it. Rwanda parades its gorilla tourism and hosts global conferences while its army occupies a neighbour's soil. That is sportswashing dressed up as development, and it must be called out every time.

The outside powers have not been idle either. Russia's Wagner network and its successors have traded security for gold and influence in Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali, leaving behind mines, militias and regimes accountable to nobody but their paymasters. China builds railways and then holds the debt. The UAE funds the RSF's supply lines through a web of intermediaries, despite its denials. Turkey sells drones that fly over our battlefields. Qatar and Saudi Arabia buy influence through media, mosques and development money. Different flags, same extraction. This is the new scramble for Africa, and the only thing that has changed since the 1880s is that the tools are more sophisticated and the victims are told they should be grateful.

Here is the question every African leader must answer. What kind of continent accepts that its people can be starved for political advantage? The answer, for too long, has been silence. The African Union issues statements. The United Nations Security Council debates. The Western capitals that lecture us about democracy keep selling arms to the same armies, and then wonder why the humanitarian appeals are only a fraction funded. We are told that the conflicts are too complicated, that the actors are too many, that the situation is beyond anyone's control. That is a lie told by people who benefit from the status quo.

There is a better way, and Africa has already shown it. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable economies by protecting property rights, managing diamond revenues through transparent institutions and refusing to let any single family capture the state. Mauritius climbed from a sugar-dependent colony to a high-income economy by investing in education, opening its markets and keeping its courts independent. Senegal, after years of democratic strain, showed in its recent transitions that a people who insist on the ballot box can change their government without a single soldier marching. These are not perfect countries. They are proof that strong institutions, rule of law and free markets lift people out of hunger faster than any aid convoy.

So here is what must happen. The African Union must stop hiding behind diplomatic euphemism and impose real costs on any army, militia or foreign backer that blocks food aid, besieges civilians or uses hunger as a weapon. The UN Security Council must enforce existing sanctions on the commanders in Sudan and the networks sustaining M23 and the Rwandan forces, and it must stop treating aggression as a diplomatic inconvenience. Regional governments must invest in grain storage, rural roads and irrigation, and they must publish the budgets so citizens can see where the money goes. Independent judiciaries and free press are not luxuries; they are the first line of defence against the kind of looting that turns famine into a business model.

And you, the reader, have a role. Demand that your MP, your governor and your president explain their silence on Sudan and the Congo. Ask your national media why hunger stories disappear after a single news cycle. Support the local civil society groups, farmers' cooperatives and human rights monitors who document these crimes when the cameras leave. Refuse to accept that a child's hunger is the price of someone else's ambition.

We are not powerless. We are the only ones who can end this. The generals, the warlords and the foreign opportunists are counting on our exhaustion. Let them count on our anger instead.

Based on reporting by ACSS