Sudan's Fields of War: How the UAE's Farmland Ambitions Fuelled the RSF Offensive
When the Rapid Support Forces swept across Sudan's Darfur region in 2023, displacing hundreds of thousands and leaving a trail of documented atrocities in their wake, analysts were clear on the immediate driver: a power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces. What has received less attention, until recently, is the role of a Gulf patron with its own appetite for Sudan's most fertile land.
Reporting from Middle East Eye, citing regional sources and conflict analysts, identifies Abu Dhabi's long-standing interest in Sudanese agricultural assets as a structural driver of its support for the RSF. The UAE has poured weapons, financing, and diplomatic cover into the paramilitary force led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemedti — while simultaneously cultivating relationships with officials who could deliver land deals. The result, critics argue, is a war that serves multiple masters simultaneously, none of them Sudanese civilians.
The Land That Drives the War
Sudan's agricultural potential has long attracted external interest. The country possesses arable land sufficient, in theory, to feed much of the Middle East — a proposition that has drawn Gulf investment interest for more than a decade. Prior to the 2019 revolution that ousted Omar al-Bashir, Emirati and Saudi firms had already negotiated substantial farming concessions in Sudanese territory, agreements that unravelled with Bashir's fall but never disappeared from Gulf planning rooms.
The RSF emerged from Bashir's counterinsurgency apparatus, formally integrating into the security state but retaining a parallel command structure. When war erupted between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces in April 2023, analysts noted that Hemedti's forces were better equipped and better financed than their rivals — an asymmetry that tracks directly to UAE patronage. According to reporting by Middle East Eye, the extent of that financing has been conditioned on the RSF's continued usefulness as a security partner and commercial enabler for Abu Dhabi.
The pattern is not unique to Sudan. UAE state-linked entities have pursued agricultural investment across Africa — in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya — using a combination of sovereign wealth mechanisms and hybrid commercial-security relationships. Sudan, with its vast unexploited arable land and weakened central state, represented the most significant remaining prize.
Who Benefits When the Shooting Stops
The conflict's trajectory matters because the actors shaping it have economic interests that align with particular outcomes. The Sudanese Armed Forces, under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, have received support from Iran and, more ambivalently, from Egypt — countries with their own interests in a Sudan that does not become a Gulf client state. The RSF's external backers, led by the UAE, are positioning for influence over whoever emerges victorious.
This creates what analysts of proxy warfare describe as a perverse incentive structure: outside powers arming their preferred faction while civilians pay the butcher's bill. UN investigators have documented RSF atrocities that may meet the threshold for genocide. The Sudanese government has referred the RSF to the International Criminal Court. Yet the financing continues, suggesting that whatever calculus Abu Dhabi applies to its Sudanese engagement weighs agricultural access more heavily than the human cost.
Middle East Eye's reporting suggests that RSF commanders have facilitated UAE-linked agricultural projects in areas under their control, creating a direct commercial logic to the paramilitary's territorial expansion. Whether these projects have proceeded as planned is unclear — the chaos of war disrupts commercial calendars — but the intent appears established in the sourcing.
Structural Drivers Beyond the Wire Frame
Western coverage of the Sudan conflict has centred on the humanitarian catastrophe: the famine risks, the displacement figures, the failure of peace negotiations in Jeddah. These framings are accurate. They also obscure the competitive great-power dynamic underneath.
For Gulf states, particularly the UAE, food security is existential policy. The Emirates has limited arable land and water, a large and wealthy population to feed, and a state apparatus accustomed to projecting commercial power through security relationships. Sudan represents a potential solution to that structural vulnerability. The investment is not charitable. It is infrastructure for Emirati food independence, purchased with influence over a partner that controls territory.
The Sudanese population, meanwhile, receives a war it did not choose, a famine that international institutions have issued stark warnings about, and a future in which its most productive land may be mortgaged to foreign interests with no accountability to Khartoum. The RSF and SAF are fighting over state power; the UAE and its Gulf rivals are fighting over productive assets. These are not the same fight, but the Sudanese people bear the consequences of both.
What Comes Next
The war shows no sign of resolution. The Jeddah process has produced repeated ceasefire declarations that neither side has honoured. Regional powers have deepened their engagement rather than pulling back. The Trump administration's pause of USAID funding to Sudan, reported in early 2025, removed a humanitarian pressure valve at a moment when famine conditions were accelerating.
For the UAE, the calculation remains intact as long as the RSF retains viability as a fighting force. The paramilitary has suffered battlefield reverses, and its control over Sudanese territory is incomplete, but Abu Dhabi has shown no indication of reconsidering its alignment. If anything, the Gulf strategy has been to deepen stakes rather than seek exits — a pattern visible across the region's interventions in Libya, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa.
The farmland thesis does not explain every dimension of the Sudan war. Ethnic mobilisation, pre-existing grievances in Darfur, and the personal ambitions of military leaders all operate as independent causal factors. But it adds a layer of structural clarity to a conflict that Western audiences have often received in purely humanitarian terms. Behind the suffering is a resource scramble. The actors pursuing it have names, track records, and strategic rationales that deserve examination.
That examination is long overdue.
This publication has covered the Sudan conflict primarily through the lens of civilian harm and humanitarian access. The agricultural investment dimension — and its connection to external state patronage of the RSF — has received less attention from Western wire services, which tend to frame the conflict through a ceasefire/negotiation prism. We consider the resource dimension essential context for any serious analysis.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/1920115483848638478