Before the Sudanese army and paramilitary fighters turned their guns on each other last year, Ahmed sold one of Sudan's main exports: gum arabic, a vital ingredient for the global industry.
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Now he's out of business, his story encapsulates Sudan's overall economic collapse during the 10-month war.
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Since the battle between two rival generals began on April 15, Ahmed has been at the mercy of the militants.
“When the war started, I had a stock of gum arabic in a warehouse south of Khartoum that was intended for export,” Ahmed told AFP, asking only his first name to be used for fear of retaliation.
“To get it out, I had to pay huge sums to the Rapid Support Forces,” the paramilitaries under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo that are at war with Sudanese forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
“I had to pay several times in the areas they controlled before my cargo got to the government-controlled areas,” Ahmed said.
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But the army-loyal government “then demanded that I pay taxes” on the product, an emulsifier used in everything from soft drinks to chewing gum.
When the trucks finally reached Port Sudan for export on the Red Sea, “the authorities again demanded new taxes and I had to pay six times more storage fees than before the war,” Ahmed said.
His gum arabic – like many other Sudanese products – never made it onto a ship. According to Sudanese port authorities, international trade fell 23 percent last year.
The Ministry of Finance, which did not set a national budget for 2023 or 2024 and forewent quarterly reports, recently increased the exchange rate for imports and exports from 650 Sudanese pounds to 950.
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But that is still far below the real value of the currency.
With most banks out of operation, the only exchange rate that matters to ordinary Sudanese is on the black market, where the dollar currently trades for around 1,200 Sudanese pounds.
“It is a sign of the destruction of the Sudanese economy,” former head of the Sudanese Chamber of Commerce, al-Sadiq Jalal, told AFP.
Making matters worse, a communications blackout since early February has hampered online transactions – which the Sudanese relied on for survival.
The war caused the industry to stop producing. Others were destroyed. Shops and food supplies were looted.
The World Bank said in September that “the widespread destruction of Sudan's economic foundations has set back the country's development by several decades.”
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The International Monetary Fund predicted that the northeast African country would still face “years of reconstruction” even after the fighting ends.
Sudan suffered for decades from a struggling economy and was already one of the poorest countries in the world before the war.
Under the Islamist-backed regime of strongman Omar al-Bashir, international sanctions slowed development, corruption was widespread and South Sudan split in 2011 with much of the country's oil production.
Bashir's ouster by the military in 2019 after mass protests led to a fragile transition to civilian rule, accompanied by signs of economic renewal and international acceptance.
A coup by Burhan and Daglo in 2021 before they turned against each other triggered a new economic collapse as the World Bank and the United States cut off vital international aid.
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More than six million of Sudan's 48 million people have been internally displaced by the war, and more than half of the population needs humanitarian assistance to survive, according to the United Nations.
UN experts said thousands of people were killed, including between 10,000 and 15,000 in a single town in the western Darfur region.
Now the indirect death toll is also rising.
Aid agencies have long warned of impending famine, and the United Nations World Food Program is “already receiving reports of people starving,” the organization's Sudan director, Eddie Rowe, said in early February.
The Sudanese state “is completely absent in all areas,” economist Haitham Fathy told AFP.
This includes, above all, agriculture, which could have helped fight hunger.
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According to the World Bank, agriculture generated 35 to 40 percent of Sudan's gross domestic product before the war and employed 70 to 80 percent of the workforce in rural areas, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
But according to the Sudanese research organization Fikra for Studies and Development, the war has put more than 60 percent of the country's agricultural land out of use.
In the wheat-growing state of al-Jazira, where RSF fighters captured large swaths of farmland south of Khartoum, farmers were no longer able to tend to their crops. They saw their livelihoods dry up.
From the wheat fields to Ahmed's gum arabic warehouse, the story is the same.
With his savings spent, his supplies lost and his future bleak, Ahmed – like much of Sudan's business class – has closed up shop.
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