The ongoing civil war in Sudan entered its fourth year this month. It is broadly seen as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced. And yet, the conflict gets much less media attention than the wars in Gaza or Ukraine.
What role is gold playing in Sudan’s conflict? With U.S. humanitarian aid diminished around the world, have other countries stepped in with help? And how has the war affected the Sudanese economy?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Can you give us some sense of the dimensions of the Sudanese war?
Adam Tooze: Sudan is gigantic. It is a nation of 53 million people, and this is after the separation of South Sudan. So that compares to about 40 million people in Ukraine. Sudan’s population is similar to the population you’d get if you added up Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine all together. And the consequences of this war have been absolutely devastating. The military casualties are not where the drama is to be found here. The official numbers are hugely under-reported. The immediate conflict casualties, we think, are in the order of 100,000 to 150,000.
But the real question is excess death as a result of the chaos and the destruction that has been brought on Sudan by the war. So we’re talking about maybe 12 million people displaced at various points, 4.5 million people crossing into Egypt, South Sudan, and Chad, none of which are rich places that can accommodate migrants, in the same way refugees from Ukraine are going to rich Western European countries. Refugees from Syria go to Turkey, which is also a high middle-income country. Not Egypt, South Sudan, or Chad. So this is a huge disaster happening in a poor part of the world and affecting millions of people. The most devastating number is that 34 million people in Sudan have been reduced to the state of needing aid, and in some pockets we’re talking about outright hunger, catastrophic scenarios. So situations of people literally starving to death, emaciated children with their ribs protruding, a total disaster.
And it’s all the more important because it’s taking place in a region in East Africa which is itself hugely under strain. The entire section of East Africa, of which Sudan is a key part, has since the late 2010s become one of the great disaster zones. And what is at stake here is politics. It’s not just simply about the egos of the commanders of the Sudanese Armed Forces or Hemeti [Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo], the commander of the rapid response forces, the RSF [Rapid Support Forces]. It’s about the question of what will succeed the longtime dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir’s, which collapsed in 2019. And there was a democratic transition ongoing against which both wings of the military launched a coup. And then the putschists, the coup parties, fell out in 2023 and resulted in this disaster, which has now sucked in regional players from around the broader geopolitical field and indeed also Western interests as well.
CA: Gold has replaced oil as Sudan’s greatest export. Is this current civil war a resource-driven conflict, with gold playing the role of conflict diamonds that may be familiar from other African countries?
AT: The fact that gold has become the key export that it has is a symptom of crisis, if you like. And it’s a particular type of gold economics. There is a gold belt that runs along the Sahel. And if you think about the Islamic insurgencies that also are happening in the western Sahel, they are also fueled essentially by artisanal gold mining. Artisanal in the sense that it’s small scale, it’s not large scale, it’s not like Anglo-American in South Africa or something like that. So it involves millions and millions of people digging. It produces a huge import of the basic equipment necessary for it.
And that then is organized by power blocs 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 to fund the highly sophisticated weaponry the UAE has been willing to supply to the RSF. Most of the official exports of gold go to Egypt. The unofficial exports go to Dubai. The advantage of gold, of course, is it can be smelted down. It therefore becomes fungible. It’s almost impossible to trace, unlike diamonds. And because gold prices have surged so dramatically since the post-COVID inflation, this has become obviously a major source of revenue.
The stakes for the UAE, I think, are much broader. They’re about establishing spheres of influence, and the UAE is a major player in Libya, it’s a major player in the Somali conflict, it is a major player of course in Yemen. If you look at the investments in Sudan, they’re very considerable from the UAE side. They run into the 20-plus-billion dollars over time. And this has enabled the war to transition. So if we think of the classic wars of Africa, essentially the Sahel, since the late 1990s to be waged by fast-moving units with heavy 20-millimeter guns and cannon mounted on the back of Toyota pickup trucks, the UAE in Sudan has moved to the next level. So they are providing the RSF—and the Sudanese Armed Forces themselves are also importing—affordable heavy weaponry from China, including serious artillery.
And the Sudanese war has become a drone war, like the war in Ukraine, like the war in Iran. All of that technology is coming via the UAE, paid for by gold and other exports, ultimately from Chinese sources. So this war has not just expanded in scale and linked in an entire regional economy and an entire logistical infrastructure, it has also technologically mutated from the kind of African war model of the 1990s and the 2000s into something much more complex, much more fast-moving, very sophisticated.
CA: There’s enormous humanitarian need now in Sudan, at a time when America’s aid infrastructure has essentially collapsed. Is there anything that has taken the place of American assistance on the ground in Sudan?
AT: The Americans have still earmarked a budget for Sudanese aid, but people who reported from the ground say that they are seeing aid delivered by the full roster of people that you expect, the European Union, Italy, the U.K., Qatar, and UNICEF, with a striking absence of official American assistance. One effort to pull together support for Sudan has come through Germany, which presided over a large donor conference from which both sides in the Sudanese war were in fact excluded, which was then itself a source of considerable scandal. But I don’t think there’s any reason to mince words about this. Rhetorically, of course, [U.S. President Donald] Trump would like to be the great peacemaker, but in practice, there’s no American resource, or very little.
CA: Sudan has been referred to potentially as the breadbasket of Africa. What alternative development pathways has Sudan been cut off from? And given that, what does it tell us about Sudan’s elites that they are pursuing this zero-sum militarized conflict, instead of development?
AT: I mean, it’s truly tragic, yes. Because just look at where Sudan is on the map, right? It’s at the headwaters of the Nile, essentially. So it actually has some of the most fertile agricultural regions of Africa. Even for 2022, if you looked at the statistics for land under cultivation in Sudan, it is ginormous. It’s the largest agricultural player in Africa, in its part of Africa. It is the 10th in the world for total agricultural land, 110 million hectares roughly, which puts it in the same sort of ballpark as the American Midwest or twice the size of Ukraine. So it’s potentially a gigantic and prosperous agricultural region with huge potential both for animal cultivation 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’s naturally a potential powerhouse of agriculture.
Not only agriculture, though. People would often criticize folks like myself that spoke out about Gaza for the fact that we weren’t speaking out about Sudan at the same time. So double standards, suggestion of antisemitism that we were prioritizing Israel’s violence in Gaza over that being done in other places. So I thought I would actually go into the question of what is the destruction of the Sudanese university system, you know, to compare it to what was being done by the Israelis in Gaza. And the result is that the concentrated violence delivered to Gaza was much more intense. But the damage in Sudan to the university system is spectacular and devastating as well. So Sudan had a university system which, from the early 1990s, had grown to provide tertiary education to 700,000 students. This was a huge hub of graduate education for East Africa, and critically, above all, in medicine. So it was one of the great training centers for medics, for doctors, for nurses, and it was enrolling very large numbers of women students as well.
So this is a society which, given a chance, is absolutely capable of diversified economic growth, human development, human capital formation, everything. It has everything going for it. Unsurprisingly, it’s a great and complex society. And it’s a sort of classic failure, therefore, of the incorporation of powerful and potentially disruptive elites into institutions that would give them an incentive to turn their baser impulses toward projects that would actually benefit society as a whole. And that, I think, is really the reconstruction project that has to be part of any eventual peace process—not just to end the fighting, but to harness the energies of the warfighters in ways which are constructive for the development of Sudan with all its potential and not just a kind of rapacious resource extraction so as to pay for war.
