Paper short abstract:

On one side, large scale land acquisitions in Sudan by investors from the Gulf countries reflect the government vision of future-making and, on the other side, they product new rural spaces, without any consideration for the interests of local communities.

Paper long abstract:

We address the issue of the new spatial outcomes generated by the facilitation policies of foreign investments in the Sudanese drylands. These vast, remote and poorly populated lands, far from the Nile, constitute the privileged topic of political narratives aimed at interpreting Sudan as a "sleeping giant", but with the intention of "waking up" him. The "rediscovery" of agriculture in Sudan is on one hand the response to the concerns of Gulf countries intent on saving the groundwater used for their large farms, and then in need of new land abroad. Foreign agricultural investments in the country on the other hand express the will of the Sudanese government to promote a hydro-agricultural mission that wants to push the national economy and to reinforce the fragile consent of government. In the past, the state strategy expressed itself in the implementation of agricultural mega-projects under the control of a public bureaucracy. At the time of the establishment of the projects, the drylands —characterised by nomadic cattle breeding and rain-fed agriculture— lost their socio-environmental complexity (their 'thickness'), becoming simplified spaces as dictated by planned agriculture: 'thin spaces' in the words of Scott (1988). Recently, however, a new agricultural development strategy has emerged that takes shape in what we have called "ultra-thin spaces". State willingness to "make room" for private interests, to offer the local places to foreign investors and to include them in the global economic dynamics translates into the creation of a new type of agricultural investment, very "light" and mobile.