The ongoing civil war in Sudan has entered its fourth year this month. It is widely seen as one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced. And yet, the conflict gets less media attention than the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.
What role does gold have in the Sudan conflict? As US humanitarian aid dwindles around the world, have other countries stepped in to help? And how has the war affected the economy of Sudan?
Those are just some of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics reporter Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Those and Tooze. Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, search Those and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And look at Adam Small storage journal.
Cameron Abadi: Can you give us some sense of the dimensions of the Sudanese war?
Adam Tooze: Sudan is big. It is a nation of 53 million people, and this is after the secession of South Sudan. So that compares to about 40 million people in Ukraine. The population of Sudan is the same as the population of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine combined. And the results of this war have been very bad. Military casualties are not where the drama is found here. Official numbers are rarely reported. One-time conflict casualties, we estimate, are in the order of 100,000 to 150,000.
But the real question is the additional death due to the chaos and destruction that has been brought to Sudan by the war. So we are talking about maybe 12 million people who fled their homes in various places, 4.5 million people crossing to Egypt, South Sudan, and Chad, none of the rich places that can take immigrants, in the same way that refugees from Ukraine are going to the rich countries of Western Europe. Refugees from Syria go to Turkey, which is also a middle-income country. Not Egypt, South Sudan, or Chad. Therefore, this is a major disaster that occurs in a poor part of the world and affects millions of people. The worst figure is that 34 million people in Sudan have been reduced to a state of needing aid, and in some pockets we are talking about outright starvation, catastrophic events. So the conditions of people dying of hunger, weakened children and their ribs are out, a complete disaster.
And it is more important because it is happening in the East African region which itself has serious problems. The whole of East Africa, of which Sudan is an important part, since the late 2010s has become one of the major disaster areas. And what is here is politics. It’s not just about the selfishness of the commanders of the Sudan Armed Forces or Hemeti (Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo), the commander of the rapid response forces, RSF (Rapid Support Forces). It’s about the question of what will succeed the long-term dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, which collapsed in 2019. And there was a democratic transition going on where both wings of the military launched revolutions. And then the supporters, the revolutionary parties, collapsed in 2023 and caused this disaster, which has now drawn regional players from the wider field of geopolitics and certainly also Western interests as well.
CA: Gold has replaced oil as Sudan’s main exporter. Is this current civil war a war based on resources, with gold playing the role of a conflict diamond that can be learned from other African countries?
AT: The fact that gold has become the most important commodity that it has is a symptom of the crisis, if you will. And it is a kind of golden economy. There is a golden belt running along the Sahel. And if you think about the Islamic uprisings that are also happening in the western Sahel, they are also fueled by artisanal gold mining. Art in the sense that it is small scale, not large scale, not like Anglo-American in South Africa or something like that. So it involves millions and millions of people digging. It produces a large import of basic materials necessary for it.
And that is then organized by powerful groups as a source of funding. So the UAE (United Arab Emirates) is not involved in Sudan because of the gold, but the gold in Sudan in the areas controlled by the RSF helps finance the advanced weapons that the UAE has been willing to supply to the RSF. Most of the official gold sales go to Egypt. Unofficial shipping goes to Dubai. The advantage of gold, of course, is it can be melted down. So it becomes fungible. It is difficult to track, unlike diamonds. And because the price of gold has soared since post-COVID-19 inflation, this has become a major source of income.
The stakes for the UAE, I think, are wider. They are about establishing spheres of influence, and the UAE is the main player in Libya, it is the main player in the conflict in Somalia, it is the main player of course in Yemen. If you look at the investment in Sudan, it is very big from the UAE side. They run into 20-plus-billion dollars at a time. And this has enabled the war to cross. So if we think of the classic wars in Africa, basically the Sahel, since the late 1990s that will be conducted by high-speed units with guns and heavy 20 mm cannons mounted on the back of Toyota trucks, the UAE in Sudan has moved forward. So they are supplying the RSF—and the Sudanese Armed Forces themselves are also importing—cheap heavy weapons from China, including heavy weapons.
And the Sudan war has become a drone war, like the Ukraine war, like the Iran war. All that technology comes through the UAE, paid for by gold and other exports, ultimately from Chinese sources. So these wars have not only expanded in scale and integrated into the entire regional economy and the entire logistical infrastructure, they have also changed technologically from the kind of typical African wars of the 1990s and 2000s to something more complex, faster, more sophisticated.
CA: There is a great humanitarian need now in Sudan, at a time when the American aid infrastructure has collapsed. Has anything replaced US aid in Sudan?
AT: The Americans have yet to allocate a budget for aid to Sudan, but people reporting from the ground say they see aid being given by the full list of people you expect, the European Union, Italy, the United Kingdom, Qatar, and UNICEF, in the absence of official US support. One effort to consolidate support for Sudan has come through Germany, which led a large meeting of donors that actually excluded both sides in the Sudanese war, which at the time was itself the source of a major scandal. But I don’t think there is any reason to mince words about this. Of course, (US President Donald) Trump would like to be the main peacemaker, but in practice, there are no US resources, or very little.
CA: Sudan has been known as the breadbasket of Africa. What are the alternative ways of development that Sudan has been cut off from? And from that, what does it tell us about the Sudanese elite that they are pursuing this priceless military conflict, instead of development?
AT: I mean, it’s really scary, yes. Because just look at where Sudan is on the map, right? It’s on the Nile, basically. It therefore has some of the most fertile agricultural regions in Africa. Even for 2022, if you look at the figures of cultivated land in Sudan, it is small. It is the largest agricultural stakeholder in Africa, in its part of Africa. It is 10th in the world in total agricultural land, about 110 million hectares, which puts it in the same ballpark as the American Midwest or twice the size of Ukraine. Therefore there is a possibility of a large agricultural area and prosperity and great potential for animal husbandry and for land development. I recently came across a story that Sudan is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s gum arabic, which is used as an additive in paints and cosmetics and, I think, Coca-Cola. So it is the nature of the potential power of agriculture.
It’s not just agriculture, however. Often people would criticize people like me who talked about Gaza for the fact that we weren’t talking about Sudan at the same time. The double standards, the anti-Semitic suggestion that we were prioritizing Israeli violence in Gaza over those being committed elsewhere. So I thought I would go into the question of the destruction of the Sudanese university system, you know, to compare it to what the Israelis were doing in Gaza. And the result is that the violence presented in Gaza was more severe. But the damage in Sudan to the university system is amazing and also devastating. So Sudan had a university system that, starting in the early 1990s, grew to provide higher education to 700,000 students. This was a major center of graduate education for East Africa, and primarily, above all, in medicine. So it was one of the biggest training centers for doctors, nurses, and it was enrolling a very large number of female students as well.
So this is a society that, given the opportunity, has the full potential to develop a diverse economy, people’s development, human capital formation, everything. It has everything going for it. No wonder, it’s a big and complicated community. And it is a kind of common failure, therefore, to include powerful and potentially disruptive elites in institutions that would incentivize them to divert their primary motivations toward projects that might benefit society as a whole. And that, I think, is a reconstruction project that should be part of any peace process eventually—not just to end the fighting, but to use the strength of the combatants in ways that are constructive for the development of Sudan and all its potential and not just a form of resource extraction to pay for the war.
