We eat what we plant

This piece was published in Atar English 28.

The United Nation’s (UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released this month the report of its Crop and Food Supply Assessment Mission (CFSAM) to the Sudan , a 64 pages report documenting what its team had learned from a review of cereal production in the country in the 2024/2025 agricultural season. The review was conducted in the period 14 December 2024 to 5 January 2025 by eight teams composed of representatives of the FAO, Sudan’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Animal Resources and Fishery, and the state ministries of agriculture which toured the eight states safely under the control of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF): Al Jazeera, Gedaref, Blue Nile, Kassala, Red Sea, Northern, River Nile, Sennar and the White Nile. Another team worked remotely to collect the available information on Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan. In addition, the report made use of input from the Government of Sudan (GoS) Meteorological Authority, Central Bureau of Statistics, Agricultural Bank of Sudan, state ministries of agriculture and agricultural schemes management authorities. 

In brief, the report states an estimated cereal (sorghum, millet and wheat) production across the country in the season 2024/2025 of 6.7 million tonnes, 62% above the output of the previous season and 7% below the average of the past 5 years. Sorghum production, said the report, is estimated at 5.4 million tonnes, 77% higher than the output of the previous season and 30% above the average of the previous 5 years. Millet production is estimated at 792 943 tonnes, 16% above the output of the previous season and 45% below the average of the previous five years. The production of wheat, harvested in March 2025, is forecast at 490 320 tonnes, 30% above the previous season and 22% below the average of the past 5 years. According to the Central Bank of Sudan, cereal consumption for 2025 is projected to stand at 7.7 million tonnes, leaving a cereal import requirement of 2.7 million tonnes, essentially wheat, while sorghum is likely to generate a surplus of 979 330 million tonnes. 

These numbers can arguably be politically debated, and they surely were at their point of generation hence the delay in the release of the report, given the GoS interest in debunking the recurring argument of food deficit equals sovereignty deficit equals humanitarian license for imperial takeover. The report however kindly reminded the reader that Sudan is critically an agricultural social formation bound to land not an online one bound to Facebook, since 65% of its peoples are engaged in agriculture. And cereal production, primarily sorghum and millet, is in the custody of its peasantry, the proverbial tarbal, working mostly family units of 5 to 100 feddans. This proportion is likely to increase under the current conditions given the effective abolition by gunfire of the service economy that bubbled for a while in Khartoum. The confusion of these two Sudans, the Sudan of the land-bound peasantry and the Sudan of the online-bound commentariat is a major cause of misreading and harm. 

“Peasant” however or the rather neutral “farmer” is a poor equivalent for tarbal which does not carry the derogatory tone of the peasant as bumpkin, Marx’s “sack of potatoes”. Interestingly, to add to the confusion of the Arab/African dichotomists, the joke glossary of the Sudan preserves the racialised “Arab” attached to Al Jazeera and often in the diminutive as a term of derogation for the country bumpkin. The tarbal is another category, it derives from a verb that translates into “cultivate” crossing into “raise” and in romance the Hamar poet says: يا رايقة التربلوكي لي، شديرة المنقة الشتلوكي لي; the lovely one raised for me, the mango succulent planted for me. The reverence of the tarbal in the Sufi tradition is another order altogether. In fact, the material and ideological resources of the maseed, Sudan’s precolonial schools, are largely dedicated to the raising of this figure, but that is probably beyond the scope of this note. 

The CFSAM report makes little of the tarbal; it attributes the relative recovery of cereal production in the safe zones of the country to adequate and temporally well distributed rainfall and limited damage by pests and disease. Almost everything else about the season went wrong. The authorities were in no position to restore functionality to the irrigation infrastructure of the major schemes, Al Jazeera, Al Rahad and New Halfa, irrigation canals remained blocked and pumps out of order. Credit availability from the Agricultural Bank of Sudan and others was severely constrained, reaching only around 7 million beneficiaries compared to 22 million in 2022. Agricultural inputs, seeds, herbicides and fertilizers, were unsurprisingly in shortage; federal and state ministries were unable to distribute any amount of certified seeds and farmers relied on what they had saved from the previous seasons. Fuel availability was limited. Wage labour was generally marked as available, a direct effect of war and displacement pushing wages down in Kassala, North and Central Darfur. 

Now under these dire conditions, Sudan’s tarbal worked an estimated 11.3 million hectares of land with sorghum, 15% higher plantation area than the previous year and 13% percent higher than the average of the past 5 years, most of the expansion being in the semi-mechanised sector which registered an 18% increase compared to the previous year and a 32% increase above the average of the past 5 years. In other words, the land-bound small peasantry held its ground and expanded slightly, 2% and 15% over the previous year and the average of the past 5 years respectively, and some capital, it might be interpreted, likely moved from the rubble of Khartoum to cereal production. The increase in plantation area was most notable in Kassala state, a gross recipient of displaced people and capital, where the planted area expanded by 189% over the past season and 261% above the past 5 years average. In effect, Kassala compensated for the decline of production in Sennar ransacked by the marauding Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 

The CFSAM report does not address the resourcefulness of the tarbal in overcoming these deficits and threats and maintaining cereal production in a time of war, devastation and displacement. The exact magnitude of the recovery of cereal production can be challenged obviously given the circumstances of data collection and the political stakes involved. What the report however documents but does not spell out is the feat of Sudan’s tarbal, the trendy term being “resilience”. If one objective of the RSF campaign was to liquidate this particular life-form or subdue it to the requirements of a neoliberal siphoning of wealth via the gateways of Dubai, it has failed. The RSF campaign of terror destroyed homes, electricity and water installations, health care facilities, schools, irrigation infrastructure, you name it, but not the ancient knot that ties the tarbal to the land. The tarbalstands tall with a whiff of baraka, says the CFSAM report without saying so; this shrewd figure managed to acquire credit, scrap together agricultural inputs, scavenge for fuel, organise and carry out agricultural processes and succeeded in maintaining cereal production to a considerable degree with the baraka of good rains and few pests, the debate is around the degree. 

Does this feat have a political meaning? Abd Al Khaliq Mahjoub, Sudan’s outstanding revolutionary and communist leader, addressed in August 1970 a fidgety extraordinary conference of the Communist Party’s cadre. Almost half of the Party’s leadership had switched lanes, from Abd Al Khaliq’s leadership to the putschist camp that unconditionally supported Jaafar Nimayri who had assumed power in the 25th May 1969 coup and declared the ‘national democratic revolution’ from above. Nimayri ended the brief and reluctant alliance with the Communist Party by kicking the three Party-loyal officers out his Revolutionary Command Council in November 1970 setting the stage for the communist coup attempt in July 1971. Abd Al Khaliq Mahjoub was tempted but not swayed by the dangling fruits of power. 

He told his fidgety comrades split over the role of the officers and the armed forces in general in the ‘national democratic revolution’: “The democratic revolution is a revolution of agricultural reform, and it cannot reach its logical conclusion without awakening the mass of peasant toilers on a large scale and their engagement in the fields of political, economic and intellectual struggle. And the socialist revolution is a revolution of the majority of the toiling masses, and it can only take place with their will and satisfaction and through their effective participation at the highest levels of revolutionary activity” (Abd Al Khaliq Mahjoub, Report to the Communist Party of Sudan cadre deliberation conference August 1970, in the Communist Party of Sudan, “Strategy of the Sudanese National Democratic Revolution”, Khartoum, nd, p. 157). 

Now, Abd Al Khaliq was writing hastily at a time of acute political crisis in his own ranks, but the point is valid. The peasant toilers are alive and well and constitute the social class with a manifest interest in salvaging Sudan as a sovereign country from the long fangs of regional predators. Politically, it would be a long shot to assume that online politicians in the mould of Hamdok et al. have a claim to make about the democratic interests of the tarbal or that self-styled revolutionary activists are in a position to dictate to the tarbal priorities, fuel for sorghum or sexual emancipation. In any case, the tarbal will have to do sorghum in the morning and “national democratic revolution” in the afternoon, the commentariat could at least offer good wishes.