Paper details

Paper authors	Tamer Abd Elkreem
In panel on	Famine and Food Insecurity: New Trends and Systems or Politics as usual?
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person & Online

Abstract

The question of why a country like Sudan bestowed with enormous agricultural resources cannot feed itself becomes more relevant during times of crisis. Such a question, I argue, needs a political economy rather than a technical approach to food security. This paper builds on 6-months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork on the Al-Gezira Agricultural scheme in central Sudan. Al Gezira scheme is the biggest irrigation scheme in the country comprising 42% of Sudan’s irrigated area, and has provided a livelihood for almost 2 million tenants and seasonal laborer’s including people who fled from Sudan’s droughts and wars. The paper will first analyse how the 2005 Al Gezira Scheme Act introduced “rehabilitation” policies that debilitated 60% of the scheme’s potentiality intensifying food insecurity (nationally and for those who work on the scheme). The paper then covers how the influx of huge numbers of displaced people from Khartoum and other war affected areas in 2023 has impacted the scheme’s ability to meet the food needs at local and national levels. The analysis presented in this paper shows how state-led neoliberal agrarian development interventions have both drastically reduced the scheme’s potential and provoked tensions between the State and its associated elite businesses, farmers, and laborer’s (including previous and newly displaced). The main argument of this paper is that responding to the current crisis in Sudan, needs an understanding of Sudan’s political economy, including neoliberal agricultural development interventions and the power relations involved, how these have been affected by the recent violence and displacement, and how they impact on the food security of its most vulnerable populations.

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