Hemedti's Militia and Burhan's Army Are Starving Sudan's Breadbasket

Gezira State was supposed to feed a nation. For generations its fields of cotton, sorghum, wheat, and groundnuts sustained millions of Sudanese, and its irrigation network was among the largest of its kind on the continent. Today, that breadbasket is a battlefield, its canals are broken, its markets are dead, and its farmers are either missing, displaced, or waiting for permission to return to land they once worked with their own hands. Ask yourself a simple question. How does a country lose its food system without a famine that everyone can see coming? The answer is that powerful men chose it.

Let us name them plainly. The Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, have turned a country into a war zone. Both men helped overthrow Sudan's civilian transition in the October 2021 coup. Both men then turned their guns on each other in April 2023. Both have answered for the suffering of Sudanese civilians with bombs, sieges, and looting. And the civilians who paid the price were the ones with the least power: smallholder farmers, women running households alone, young people with no jobs, and families who fled one village after another.

Now the World Bank, through the World Food Programme, is preparing KHAIRAT, a proposed three-year, US$90 million project to restore agricultural production in Gezira. It is scheduled to run from April 2027 to March 2030, and it will operate in five localities: Madani, South Al Jazirah, Um Al Qura, Al Hasahisa, and Al Managil. The project aims to repair irrigation infrastructure, rebuild crop and livestock value chains, add value to local produce, and connect producers to markets. It targets smallholder households, women, youth, returnees, internally displaced people, and food-insecure host communities. On paper, this is exactly what Sudan needs.

But paper is not a field. Money is not a harvest. And a stakeholder engagement plan, however well-written, is only as good as the people who enforce it.

The governing document for KHAIRAT is built on the World Bank's Environmental and Social Framework, specifically Environmental and Social Standard 10 on stakeholder engagement and information disclosure. That standard requires that information be timely, understandable, and accessible. It requires consultation that is culturally appropriate and free of manipulation, interference, coercion, discrimination, or intimidation. Read those words again. Free of coercion. Free of intimidation. In a region where armed groups have taken over towns, where commanders decide who eats and who is shot, and where aid has been diverted through checkpoints and local power brokers, these are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the difference between aid that reaches a widow in Um Al Qura and aid that ends up in the warehouse of a militia commander.

Consider what the standard demands in practice. Who decides which households are selected for seeds, tools, and irrigation repairs? If selection runs through the same local committees that were captured by armed actors, then the project will reward the men with guns and punish the men without them. Who verifies that returnees can actually reclaim their land, given that land disputes have multiplied during the war? Who ensures that women, who now head many farming households across Gezira, are not excluded from the meetings where decisions get made? These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions every Sudanese farmer is asking tonight.

We have seen this pattern across Africa before. International funding arrives with noble language, and then local elites, security forces, and well-connected contractors quietly capture the benefits. The donors leave their reports, the officials collect their allowances, and the farmers are left with broken pumps and empty granaries. Africa has paid for this lesson many times over. Sudan cannot afford to learn it again.

Let us be clear about the stakes beyond Gezira. Sudan's food crisis has already been declared a famine in parts of the country, and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has repeatedly warned that millions of people are facing acute hunger. A country that cannot feed itself becomes a country that cannot govern itself. Hungry populations are recruited into militias, pushed across borders as refugees, and ground down into the kind of despair that makes strongmen look like saviors. Every failed harvest is a recruitment poster for the next warlord.

So what must happen? First, the World Bank and WFP must publish the full stakeholder engagement plan in languages and formats that Gezira's farmers can actually read, and they must hold open consultations in the five target localities, not only in Port Sudan or Khartoum. Second, there must be an independent grievance mechanism that farmers can use without fear of retaliation, with results published publicly. Third, selection criteria for beneficiaries must be written down, tested against corruption and capture risks, and audited by independent Sudanese civil society organizations with real access. Fourth, land tenure records must be clarified and protected before irrigation investments are made, because a pump on land that will be seized next season is a gift to the seizer.

Africa already knows what works. Botswana built one of the continent's most prosperous economies on a foundation of secure property rights, transparent public institutions, and a relatively independent judiciary. Mauritius followed a similar path, showing that clean governance and open markets lift people out of poverty faster than any aid program can. Senegal, after years of tension, demonstrated that peaceful transitions and accountable institutions can hold even in difficult political climates. The lesson is not that foreign money is bad. The lesson is that foreign money works only when strong institutions guard it. Sudan needs its own version of those institutions, and it needs them now. A civilian-led transitional authority, with the power to protect farmers' rights and audit public spending, is not a luxury. It is the precondition for every dollar of this project doing any good.

Regional bodies have a role too. The African Union and IGAD cannot keep issuing communiqués while the generals keep fighting. They must press for a credible ceasefire, guarantee humanitarian corridors into Gezira, and make clear that any leader who obstructs food aid will face sanctions. The United Nations Security Council must stop treating Sudan as a file to be managed and start treating it as a case of crimes against civilians that demand accountability. And the private sector, Sudanese and foreign alike, must refuse to buy goods produced under militia control or sourced through looted supply chains. Markets punish criminals faster than courts do, if we have the courage to let them.

As for ordinary Sudanese and their friends across Africa, the demands are simple, and they are yours to make. Demand that the World Bank and WFP publish every consultation record and every beneficiary selection rule. Demand that the African Union appoint a standing envoy for Gezira's farmers with a mandate to monitor aid delivery. Demand that both the RSF and the SAF open humanitarian access and stop using hunger as a weapon. Demand a civilian government that answers to voters, not to gunmen. Share this story, because silence is what the generals are counting on. Contact your representatives, your journalists, and your diaspora associations and insist that Gezira's farmers be heard before the money is spent.

The fields of Gezira are waiting. The water is still in the canals, and the soil still remembers how to feed a nation. What is missing is a government that is accountable, an army that is answerable, and a citizenry that refuses to accept starvation as the price of stability. We have the knowledge. We have the example of countries that got it right. The only question left is whether we will act before another season is lost.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB