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By the time Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters pushed into El Fasher and claimed the Sudanese army’s headquarters in late October 2025, the city had already been starved for more than a year. The siege involved a throttling of markets, the bombing of food convoys, turning every road into an extortion corridor whereby civilians were forced to pay ransoms for a right to flee. As soup kitchens and hospitals were struck, thousands were trapped, surviving on animal feed and weeds. When the RSF finally entered, it was not liberation but the logical end point of a starvation campaign — a city reduced to exhaustion, then overrun.
Mohamed Ismail Ireg is an independent Sudanese agronomist, writer, and researcher focusing on agriculture, food systems, and political economy in the Global South.
The tragedy of El Fasher is not an isolated atrocity but a method: the weaponization of hunger as a strategy of conquest and control. Two UN convoys were bombed. Those who escaped told of checkpoints where armed men demanded millions of Sudanese pounds for safe passage, and of children dying on the roadside when their families could not pay. The siege starved civilians into submission before a single tank entered the city.
But starvation in Sudan is never purely domestic. The RSF’s new foothold in El Fasher consolidates supply lines westward toward Libya — corridors long used for gold, arms, and fuel smuggling. Behind every sack of looted grain lies a chain of global interests — from Khartoum’s debt markets to Dubai’s gold exchanges.
In El Fasher today, the politics of hunger is laid bare. Women line up at communal kitchens (Takāya)< [1] run by volunteers, sharing the little sorghum that remains. Aid workers speak of babies fed only sugar water because mothers are too malnourished to nurse. The city has become the face of a wider regional order where food itself is governed by force and by finance — a war fought through prices, checkpoints, and hunger.
Tactics of Starvation: How Hunger Became a Weapon of War
Starvation in Sudan is not the by-product of chaos; it is a deliberate method of rule. The siege of El-Fasher was not a brief encirclement but an engineered famine, built trench by trench. By closing the routes from Mellit and Tawila, the RSF severed the arteries that once fed the markets and hospitals.
Convoys that tried to break through became moving targets. Humanitarian trucks were bombed on approach roads and looted after impact. The message was unmistakable: survival itself must be negotiated. Inside the city, every checkpoint was turned into a customs post of hunger, where passage was sold for money, gold, or fuel. Traders who once moved grain by the ton now bribed gunmen to move a single sack. The siege turned food into ransom.
The war starving Sudan is not sustained by Sudan alone.
Looting deepened the crisis. Warehouses of the World Food Programme and local charities were stripped bare, their contents re-appearing on black markets at prices families could never afford.
The hunger is gendered. Women queue for hours at communal kitchens, face harassment at checkpoints, made to barter jewellery or labour for food. UN investigators warn that, alongside starvation, sexual violence has become a weapon, targeting women whose only crime is fetching bread.
Even the blackout is weaponized. When RSF forces cut power and telecommunications, they did not just silence the city — they disconnected people from mobile cash, remittances, and information that could save lives. In a country where families rely on diaspora transfers to buy food, shutting down the network became another form of siege.
In El-Fasher and across Sudan, hunger is not a natural disaster but a system. The siege produces famine; famine produces submission; and submission feeds a war economy that thrives on the misery it creates.
Imperial Entanglements: How External Powers Feed the War Economy
The war starving Sudan is not sustained by Sudan alone. Behind the checkpoints and looted warehouses lies an international machinery of extraction — a network of financiers, arms suppliers, and political patrons who have turned the country’s collapse into a profitable frontier.
At its core stands the United Arab Emirates, the war’s principal external sponsor. From airstrips in Chad and Libya, Emirati cargo planes delivered arms and fuel disguised as humanitarian supplies, feeding the RSF’s battlefield endurance. The same network exported Sudan’s gold through Dubai — an open secret financing the RSF’s payroll and purchased loyalty on the ground. The UAE’s relationship with RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, is not a diplomatic accident but a continuation of its regional policy of controlling resources.
Israel’s role, although quieter, is equally strategic. The normalization process between Khartoum and Tel Aviv reframed Sudan’s generals as security partners rather than war criminals. Normalization, in this sense, laundered a coup regime into the Western camp, giving the generals the confidence that starvation would draw concern but not intervention.
Western powers, meanwhile, maintain the illusion of neutrality. They condemn “both sides”, suspend aid, and issue statements on humanitarian access while preserving the deeper architecture of dependency: IMF conditionalities that push austerity, sanctions that restrict state imports but leave private traders untouched, and arms-embargo loopholes that funnel weapons through neighbouring states. In this theatre, humanitarian language becomes a moral cover for imperial continuity.
If hunger has been weaponized from above, survival has been organized from below.
What binds these actors together is not ideology but the economics of control. Sudan’s starvation functions as market regulation — clearing out subsistence producers, collapsing local markets, and reopening the country for privatized agribusiness once the guns fall silent. The same investors who finance arms today will finance land leases tomorrow. Hunger becomes a technology of transition, preparing the soil for capital.
The RSF’s seizure of El-Fasher therefore marks more than a military milestone. It signals the consolidation of an externally fed war economy, where every corridor of food and fuel is linked to a port, a bank, or a foreign policy agenda far beyond Sudan’s borders. To understand this war is to trace its logistics: from a looted warehouse in Darfur to a gold refinery in Dubai, from a siege checkpoint to an IMF meeting room in Washington. Starvation, in this sense, is global governance by other means.
The Breadbasket Dismantled: The Fall of Gezira and the Collapse of Self-Sufficiency
To understand the hunger consuming Sudan today, one must begin in the Gezira plains — once the pride of African irrigation and the backbone of the country’s self-sufficiency. The Gezira Scheme, carved between the Blue and White Nile, was not just an agricultural project; it was the living infrastructure of Sudanese sovereignty. Its millions of feddans (a unit of land around one thousand acres) of cotton, sorghum, and wheat fed the country, and anchored a rural middle class that resisted both famine and dependency.
That infrastructural heart has now been hollowed out. Since the RSF offensive into Gezira in December 2023, RSF and allied militias have swept through the Gezira region, looting farm machinery, burning storage silos, and extorting farmers at gunpoint. What began as military advance soon became economic conquest: control the fields, and you control the people who eat from them. The dismantling of Gezira is thus not incidental to the war — it is its economic logic. Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF view food systems as leverage. Between them, they have destroyed the cooperative networks that once defined the Scheme.
But the roots of Gezira’s collapse stretch deeper than the current fighting. For decades, IMF-driven liberalization dismantled subsidies and privatized land, leaving smallholders indebted and equipment obsolete. When war erupted, there was nothing left to buffer the shock. The militias merely finished the work that neoliberalism began.
With the irrigation grid silent, hunger radiates outward. Cities that once drew their grain from Gezira now depend on smuggling routes or international aid that rarely arrives. Market surveys in mid-2025 recorded a 400-percent rise in flour prices and the reappearance of famine-era foods — sorghum husks, wild roots, animal feed — in urban diets. The collapse of Gezira thus turns every siege into national starvation, magnifying the weaponization of hunger from a local tactic to a countrywide system.
Community Resistance: Mutual Aid and the Politics of Survival
Yet amid the ruins, small acts of resistance persist. Displaced farmers have begun reclaiming micro-plots along riverbanks, using hand tools and saved seeds. Informal seed exchanges circulate heirloom sorghum and okra varieties that escaped the looting. These are fragile but radical acts – attempts to re-root food sovereignty in the soil of dispossession. If the war is about who controls the right to eat, then each seed kept alive is an act of political defiance.
If hunger has been weaponized from above, survival has been organized from below. Across Sudan, as formal institutions collapse and humanitarian convoys stall, ordinary citizens have built a parallel system of life support — Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), communal kitchens, and solidarity networks (Takāya) that sustain millions. What began in April 2023 as spontaneous neighbourhood coordination to rescue the wounded has evolved into the country’s most vital social infrastructure.
In Khartoum, Wad Madani, and El-Fasher, ERRs and the Takāya became the invisible government of daily life: coordinating evacuations, food distribution, shelter, and information. These activities are horizontal, volunteer-driven, and defiantly non-partisan. Unlike NGOs bound by donor red tape, ERRs operate through trust, local knowledge, and shared risk. They collect money through WhatsApp groups, source food from local traders, and run kitchens in mosques, schools, and abandoned offices. In a country starved by siege and bureaucracy alike, these networks embody what theorist Frantz Fanon once called “the people’s counter-institutions”.
The communal kitchens represent the moral centre of this resistance. In El-Fasher, before its fall, women ran makeshift soup kitchens in courtyards, using donated sorghum and firewood, feeding hundreds each day. Cooking together became both a survival strategy and a political statement: a declaration that hunger will not be monopolized. These kitchens are the opposite of charity; they are acts of equality in the midst of enforced scarcity.
In Sudan, the people keeping each other alive in kitchens and seedbanks are the only ones enforcing international law in practice.
ERRs and other local solidarity practices also function as information networks, countering the blackout warfare of the RSF. Through radio relays and community messengers, they share food prices, safe routes, and warnings of raids. In effect, they are rebuilding the informational commons that imperial and local powers deliberately destroyed.
Women sit at the heart of these networks. They organize food queues, manage remittances, and arbitrate disputes in communal spaces. Their leadership transforms survival into a feminist politics of care, contrasting sharply with the masculinized violence of the militias. To cook, to nurse, to share — these have become revolutionary acts in a war that seeks to privatize life itself.
The Emergency Rooms and communal kitchens are not relief mechanisms; they are the embryo of a future polity. They demonstrate that collective organization, not charity or foreign aid, is what keeps Sudan alive. In a country deliberately starved into submission, solidarity is the only nourishment that cannot be looted.
Starvation as a War Crime and the Silence of the World
International law is unambiguous: starvation of civilians is a war crime. Article 54 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 forbids using hunger as a weapon or destroying objects indispensable to survival. Sudan’s sieges meet every element of that crime — food routes cut, markets shelled, convoys looted, civilians forced to trade rations for life.
Yet the world remains mute. The United Nations Security Council issues statements without consequence, and the International Criminal Court moves at a glacial pace. Western and Gulf powers condemn atrocities while financing or arming those who commit them. The African Union hides behind “non-interference”. The result is a hierarchy of outrage: some famines are global tragedies, others bureaucratic footnotes.
Silence is not neutrality — it is complicity. In Sudan, the people keeping each other alive in kitchens and seedbanks are the only ones enforcing international law in practice. Their defiance is the world’s last measure of justice.
This article is taken from the upcoming Rosa Luxemburg Foundation edited volume Weaponizing Hunger.
[1] Takāya (also spelled Takaya or تكايا) is a Sudanese term referring to a community-run communal kitchen where volunteers prepare and distribute cooked food to displaced families, the poor, and people affected by conflict. These kitchens operate on local donations and collective effort, especially during sieges and humanitarian crises.
