Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how food aid has become part of Sudan’s political economy over a period of fifty years. It traces the evolution of food aid from geopolitics and Sudan’s unequal development to the changing ways in which emergency food aid has been manipulated for political and economic ends.

Paper long abstract:

Inequality is a major determinant of access to food in Sudan, with power, wealth and services concentrated within central Sudan, leaving much of the country marginalised, impoverished and suffering repeated emergencies. The country has been at war with itself for most of its independent history. This paper discusses the evolution of three food aid regimes of practices in Sudan and how food aid both contributed to the state's exclusionary development process and tried but failed to assist crisis-affected population in its peripheries. Food aid first explicitly supported the state. From the late 1980s, emergency food aid bypassed the state but its manipulation led to economic and political benefits for the Sudan government and its closely aligned private sector. By the 2000s, the Sudan government controlled international food aid and established its own food aid apparatus, which it could use to further its political and military goals. New food technologies developed in the aftermath of the 2008 food crisis, and applied in Darfur, have enabled the withdrawal of aid, make politics and conflict invisible and create profits for private food corporations. The paper argues for the careful analysis of the social and political determinants of access to food in protracted emergencies.