Cover Image by Ammar Hreib from Pixabay. On this page, we would like to shed light on a very important piece written by Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist.
"One of Africa's most fertile lands is struggling to feed its own People"
Link : https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-sudan-nile-land-farming/?srnd=businessweek-v2
In 2019, environmental journalist Peter Schwartzstein published a Bloomberg feature examining how Gulf countries had leased vast stretches of Sudanese farmland — land many Sudanese communities depended on — while local families struggled with water shortages and hunger.The article exposes the mass amounts of land rented by gulf countries in Sudan, the products being cultivated and how these projects impact the local communities.
The author also includes a map of the different countries and the land they have acquired in Sudan.The agricultural projects in Sudan are a lifeline to Gulf countries who are struggling with a dire lack of water supply and lack of arable land in their region. Maintaining a stronghold on the ruling parties in Sudan allows them to continue to reap the benefits of the rich soil in Sudan while local Sudanese communities suffer from dehydration, famine, and lack of basic resources.
That piece, and the scholarship it drew on, painted a picture of a country whose richest natural resource was being exported abroad while its own people went without.Years later, and after a revolution, a transitional government, and a devastating civil war, the story of Sudan's farmland has only grown more complicated — and more consequential.
The article can be accessed here: http://www.pulitzercenter.org/reporting/land-grabbing-and-its-implications-sudanese-views-scholar
How the land deals began
The pattern Schwartzstein documented didn't start in 2019. According to research compiled by the Pulitzer Center, large-scale foreign agricultural investment in Sudan took off in the early 2000s, when President Omar al-Bashir's government began offering land and water to Gulf investors on favorable terms. The trend accelerated sharply after the 2008 global food price crisis, when several food-exporting countries restricted exports to protect their own populations — a wake-up call for Gulf states that, despite their oil wealth, had limited arable land and shrinking water reserves of their own.
Sudan offered exactly what those countries needed: the Nile, vast tracts of underused farmland, and a government willing to make deals. Some of those deals were striking in scale. Reporting from Dabanga Radio described a 2016 agreement leasing roughly one million feddans — over a million acres — to Saudi Arabia for 99 years. Around the same period, UAE-based Al Ghurair Foods secured a 100,000-hectare, 99-year lease to grow grain for export back to the Gulf. Multiple similar deals followed, often at costs reported to be less than a dollar per acre.
Who's involved, and why
The buyers weren't just private companies. Sovereign wealth funds became central players, with the UAE's ADQ and Saudi Arabia's SALIC among the largest institutional investors in Sudanese agriculture. Their motivation was straightforward: Gulf states import the large majority of their food, and Sudan holds one of the largest reserves of arable land in Africa — by some estimates over 200 million acres, with only a small fraction actively cultivated. For countries with almost no fresh water or farmland of their own, that combination was hard to pass up.
From the investors' perspective, this is a mutually beneficial arrangement — capital and agricultural expertise flowing into an underdeveloped sector, boosting Sudan's exports and, at least on paper, its economy. Sudanese officials under multiple governments have made similar arguments, framing these deals as necessary development given how little of the country's farmland was being used.
What critics say the deals cost local communities
Critics, including the scholars interviewed for the Pulitzer Center piece and multiple watchdog and advocacy organizations tracking global farmland acquisitions, describe a different picture on the ground. Long-term leases at extremely low prices have often been negotiated directly with the government, with limited input from the farmers and pastoralist communities who actually work and depend on that land. Water diverted toward large-scale commercial irrigation projects has, in multiple documented cases, come at the expense of smallholder farming nearby. Organizations tracking these deals have also raised concerns about the displacement of local communities and the erosion of traditional land rights that were never formally titled in the first place, leaving many families with little legal standing to contest the leases.
What's changed since the original reporting
The most significant shift since 2019 has nothing to do with agriculture directly: Sudan has been at war. Since fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in 2023, large parts of the country have been devastated, and food security has collapsed in several regions. Independent famine monitoring released in the 2025–2026 period confirmed famine conditions in areas including El Fasher and Kadugli, with warnings that catastrophic hunger continues to spread.
Gulf involvement in Sudan hasn't disappeared during the war — in some respects, it has deepened. Agricultural operations in more stable regions, including Gezira and White Nile states, have reportedly continued, and new infrastructure agreements, including a major Red Sea port and agricultural zone project involving UAE-linked developers, have been discussed even amid the conflict. At the same time, the UAE's alleged financial and military backing of the RSF has drawn sustained scrutiny from journalists, researchers, and UN-mandated investigators, though the UAE has repeatedly denied these allegations. That overlap — a Gulf state's economic footprint in Sudanese agriculture existing alongside allegations of its involvement in the conflict devastating the country — is at the center of ongoing criticism from researchers who study land and resource politics in the region.
It's worth being clear about what is and isn't established fact here: the scale of Gulf agricultural leases in Sudan is well documented in company statements, government agreements, and land-deal tracking databases. The allegations connecting specific Gulf states to the RSF's military campaign are widely reported and taken seriously by researchers and international bodies, but remain contested by the governments named, and readers following this story should look to dedicated conflict-reporting sources for the most current, carefully sourced coverage of that dimension.
Why this still matters
Whatever position one takes on the individual land deals, the underlying tension Schwartzstein's reporting captured hasn't gone away: a country with some of the richest agricultural potential in Africa continues to struggle to feed its own population, even as large shares of its most productive land remain under long-term foreign lease. The war has made that tension more urgent, not less — disrupted supply chains, damaged infrastructure, and mass displacement have hit Sudanese food security hard, even as agricultural exports from Gulf-backed operations in calmer regions have reportedly continued.
Understanding how Sudan's land came to be leased on this scale, and to whom, remains essential context for understanding the country's current crisis — not a separate story from the war and famine dominating headlines, but a thread running through it.
7 key takeaways
1. The land rush started long before the war. Large-scale foreign agricultural investment in Sudan dates back to the early 2000s under President Omar al-Bashir, well before the 2019 revolution or the 2023 civil war. The deals covered in this piece are the product of two decades of policy, not a wartime development.
2. The 2008 food crisis was the turning point. Gulf states had been buying land in Sudan before 2008, but the global food price spike that year, when several exporting nations restricted food sales abroad, made securing dedicated farmland overseas an urgent priority rather than an opportunistic one.
3. The scale of individual deals is enormous. Some leases have covered over a million acres at a time, running for terms as long as 99 years, often at costs reported to be less than a dollar per acre — terms that would be difficult to replicate almost anywhere else in the world.
4. Sudan's farmland is genuinely underused. With an estimated 200 million acres of arable land and only a small share currently cultivated, Sudan's potential as an agricultural producer is real, which is part of why both Gulf investors and successive Sudanese governments have defended these deals as development rather than extraction.
5. Local communities often have little say. Because leases are typically negotiated directly between the government and foreign investors, farmers and pastoralists who depend on the land, much of it never formally titled, have limited legal standing to contest the terms or negotiate compensation.
6. The war has not stopped the deals. Agricultural operations in more stable regions like Gezira and White Nile have reportedly continued through the conflict, and new large-scale agreements have still been discussed even as other parts of the country face famine.
7. The UAE's role is the most contested part of the story. Its agricultural investment in Sudan is well documented, but its alleged financial and military backing of the RSF is a separate, disputed claim, taken seriously by researchers and international bodies but denied by the UAE itself. The two threads are often discussed together, but they rest on very different levels of evidence.
Further reading
- Peter Schwartzstein, "One of Africa's Most Fertile Lands Is Struggling to Feed Its Own People," Bloomberg Businessweek (2019) — https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-sudan-nile-land-farming/
- "Land Grabbing and Its Implications for Sudanese – Views From a Scholar," Pulitzer Center — https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/land-grabbing-and-its-implications-sudanese-views-scholar
- farmlandgrab.org, Sudan country tracker — https://www.farmlandgrab.org/cat/26
- "Food, land, water: Africa and emerging Gulf sub-imperialisms," Review of African Political Economy, republished via MR Online (2026) — https://mronline.org/2026/02/23/food-land-water-africa-and-emerging-gulf-sub-imperialisms/
- "Sudan Starves as Gulf Agribusiness Seizes Its Farmland," Al-Akhbar English (2025) — https://en.al-akhbar.com/news/sudan-starves-as-gulf-agribusiness-seizes-its-farmland
- "Gulf States: A Paradoxical Economic Lifeline for Sudan," Ifri (2024) — https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/ifri_el_obeid_gulf_states_and_sudan_sept2024.pdf
