Sudan's Generals and the RSF Have Turned Bread Into a Weapon

Think about what it means when a loaf of bread doubles in price in seven days. Five hundred Sudanese pounds for something that cost 250. For a family that already spends its combined salaries on flatbread, that is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between eating and not eating. Sawsan Mahmoud, a 44-year-old mother of three in Khartoum, now needs 900,000 pounds a month just to keep bread on the table, which is roughly what she and her husband earn together. Her family eats bread once a day. Her children are learning what hunger tastes like.

Sudan's war is now nearly three and a half years old. This is not a story about a distant famine on a television screen. It is happening in the capital, in the bakeries, in the queues outside petrol stations and public kitchens, in homes where mothers are doing arithmetic every night to decide which child goes hungry first.

Let us be precise about the scale. Around 20 million Sudanese face severe food insecurity. Famine has already been declared in parts of the country. Poverty has climbed to 80 percent, according to the country's own central statistics bureau, and inflation reached 99 percent last year. More than 200,000 people in South Kordofan and North Darfur are living in famine conditions, and UN-backed assessments warn it could spread to eight cities by 2027. These are not abstractions. Every one of those numbers is a family that has stopped sleeping properly.

Now look at what has collapsed around them. The Sudanese pound has lost about a quarter of its value against the dollar in a single month. It hit a record low of more than 10,500 to the dollar before recovering slightly to around 10,200. In 2023, when the war began, the dollar was worth 500 pounds. Sudan imports most of its wheat, so every collapse in the currency becomes a collapse in the loaf. Fuel, which the country also imports, is now so scarce that civil servant Yasser Mohammed sat at a petrol station from six in the morning until four in the afternoon and went home with nothing, having lost a day's pay. A kilogram of meat now costs between 50,000 and 70,000 pounds. Shoppers who once bought two kilograms are now buying 125 grams. That is not a shopping list. That is a country being slowly starved.

Bakers are closing because they cannot get flour, cannot afford fuel for generators, and cannot raise prices without losing the customers they have left. Mutawakil Ahmed Babiker sells his bread below cost because he cannot bring himself to charge a hungry neighbour more. Power outages have spread across Khartoum and eastern Sudan after repeated drone attacks on power stations. Outside the capital, aid trucks carry most of the wheat, but road closures and the fighting prevent it from moving. Food exists in pockets. Hunger is everywhere.

So who is responsible? We will not allow this to become a story where everyone is equally guilty and no one is accountable. The Sudanese Armed Forces hold Khartoum, central Sudan and the east. They retook the capital in March 2025 and have since presided over an economy in freefall, with public kitchens shut for months before reopening under pressure. The Rapid Support Forces control vast Darfur and parts of the south, where famine is deepest. Both sides have treated civilians as collateral in a fight over power, territory and the spoils of gold and trade. Both have blocked, taxed, looted or ignored the humanitarian routes that could save lives. And both have learned that the most effective weapon in this war is not a tank. It is an empty pantry.

Here is the part that should make every African angry. Sudan's wars are not fought with local money alone. UN experts have repeatedly documented weapons and supplies reaching the RSF through third countries, and Emirati authorities have denied backing the group. Regional powers with their own commercial and strategic interests have jockeyed for influence in Port Sudan and across the Red Sea, and external actors have been more interested in access to ports, minerals and markets than in the arithmetic of a mother's grocery budget. The world speaks loudly about democracy when it suits its foreign policy. In Sudan, where a civilian uprising toppled a dictator in 2019 and was crushed by generals in 2021, that language has been muffled whenever someone's business interests were at stake.

We have seen this pattern before. Armed men seize the state, then loot it. Currencies are allowed to rot because a central bank that answers to no one is a useful tool for those who control the printing press and the fuel contracts. Food becomes a bargaining chip. Civil society is hollowed out, journalists are silenced, and the people who should be holding power to account are either dead, displaced or in exile. Sudan is the most vivid example on the continent right now of what happens when the rule of law is treated as optional and the market is rigged for whoever holds a rifle.

But Africa also has the answer, and it is not complicated. Botswana built one of the continent's most prosperous economies by protecting property rights, managing its resources transparently and keeping its institutions independent of its generals. Mauritius created stability and growth through open markets and accountable government. Senegal showed in 2024 that a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power is possible even in a region full of coups. Sudan does not need a miracle. It needs what these countries already practice: a unified and credible exchange rate, a central bank free from military control, a fuel and flour supply chain open to private importers instead of cartels with guns, and humanitarian corridors that cannot be blocked by whichever commander happens to be winning this week.

So here is what must happen. The African Union, which suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, must move beyond statements and back a binding ceasefire with independent monitors who can verify that food and fuel reach the people who need them. The UN Security Council must impose targeted sanctions on the commanders, their financiers and the foreign networks that keep supplying weapons and cash, and it must enforce an arms embargo that is actually enforced. Regional bodies must stop treating Sudan as someone else's problem. Governments that trade with Port Sudan or invest in its resources should be required to show that their money is not feeding famine. Sudanese civil society, including the bakers, kitchen volunteers and displaced families organising themselves, must be funded directly and protected from both armies.

And we must demand it from our own leaders. Ask your government what it has said about the famine in Sudan. Ask whether it has voted for sanctions, funded aid, or simply looked away. Support independent Sudanese journalists who are documenting this in conditions most of us will never face. Share their reporting. Name the generals. Name the foreign backers. Refuse the lazy line that this is too complicated to understand.

Sawsan Mahmoud did not start this war. Abir Mohammed did not choose to close her bakery's sister shops. Mutawakil Ahmed Babiker did not drop the flour price on purpose. Every one of them is paying for a fight they did not start, staged by men who will never queue for bread. How many more loaves must double before the African Union, the Security Council and our own governments decide that Sudanese hunger is a stain on all of us? How many more children must eat once a day before the men with guns are made to answer for it?

We are Africans. This is our continent, and Sudan is our neighbour, our family and our responsibility. Do not let anyone tell you this is far away. Bread that costs twice as much this week is a warning. Pressure the institutions that can act, and do it now, while there is still bread left to save.

Based on reporting by RFI