Gulf agribusiness and the Sudan war: how farmland ambition fuels conflict

The war that erupted in Sudan in April 2023 has settled into a grinding catastrophe. What began as a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has metastasized into a conflict that the UN estimates has displaced more than 12 million people. But alongside the headline figures on casualties and displacement, another dimension of the war has attracted growing scrutiny from researchers and conflict monitors: the role of foreign actors with interests that extend well beyond the immediate military contest.

Reporting from Middle East Eye has documented how the desire to acquire agricultural land factors prominently into the calculus of Gulf state involvement in Sudan. Abu Dhabi, specifically, has emerged as a central actor — its backing for the RSF paramilitary under the command of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has been widely noted by regional analysts and international observers. The financial and logistical support flowing from the UAE to the RSF has given the paramilitary force capabilities it might otherwise lack, while simultaneously positioning Emirati agribusiness interests to benefit from whatever postwar settlement eventually takes shape.

The land question is not incidental to the conflict. Sudan possesses some of the most arable territory in Africa — farmland that Gulf states, facing acute water scarcity and growing food import dependencies, have long sought to secure. Over the past two decades, a pattern of large-scale land acquisitions, often referred to in development literature as "land grabbing," has seen Gulf-backed entities acquire or seek rights to Sudanese agricultural zones. The logic is straightforward: when your domestic water table is falling and your food supply chains run through contested shipping lanes, owning production capacity abroad is a form of insurance.

What makes the current conflict different is the mechanism. Previous rounds of land acquisition were structured through state-to-state agreements and commercial lease arrangements. The war has opened a different pathway. RSF-controlled territories, particularly in Darfur and regions along the borders with Chad and Libya, are now effectively outside Sudan's central governance. For a Gulf actor with the capacity to negotiate directly with the paramilitary — bypassing the formal state apparatus — the opportunity is qualitatively different. There is no bureaucratic Sudanese ministry to navigate, no parliament to satisfy, no public tender process to observe.

This is not to suggest the UAE's interest in Sudan is purely agricultural. The broader strategic picture includes access to Red Sea port infrastructure, positioning vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia in a regional competition for influence, and the cultivation of allied armed groups that can serve as proxies. But the farmland dimension has been consistently noted in reporting and has become a point of analysis for researchers examining the structural drivers of the conflict. It adds a material incentive — beyond ideology or alliance — that makes the war's continuation profitable for actors who benefit from its prolongation.

The RSF's own conduct has generated substantial documentation of atrocities, including mass killings in Darfur that the United States and other governments have characterized as potential genocide. UN panels have documented systematic sexual violence, the burning of villages, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. These documented violations coexist with the financial flows that sustain the RSF's military capacity. That dual reality — accountability gaps on the ground alongside continued foreign patronage — is a feature of how this war has been sustained rather than resolved.

For the Sudanese civilians caught between the forces, the farmland calculus is abstract and distant. The UN's World Food Programme has repeatedly warned of famine conditions spreading across the country. Agriculture in major producing regions has been disrupted by fighting, displacements have severed labour supply chains, and market infrastructure has been degraded. The land that outside actors seek to secure has been, in the interim, rendered unproductive by the conflict they are helping to fuel.

What comes next is difficult to parse. Diplomatic efforts, including those backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States, have attempted to broker ceasefire agreements without durable success. The RSF's military position has been contested but not broken. Meanwhile, the Gulf states' longer-term agricultural strategies continue to be pursued through multiple channels simultaneously — some visible, some not. Sudan is not the only arena: UAE and Saudi interests have been pursued across the Sahel, in Egypt, and in Central Asia.

The pattern raises structural questions about how food security frameworks for wealthy, water-poor states intersect with the sovereignty and welfare of producing nations. When a conflict creates a power vacuum that a foreign actor can fill with commercial and strategic arrangements, the incentive to see the conflict continue changes shape. The farmland is there. The paramilitary that controls it needs resources. The arrangement that emerges from that convergence does not require a formal peace to be profitable.

Reporting from Middle East Eye and other regional outlets has documented the specific contours of this overlap in Sudan. The sources do not establish that agricultural acquisition is the sole motivation for UAE involvement — the picture is more complex, involving regional positioning, competition with Riyadh, and old alliance networks. But the farmland dimension is real, and it sits alongside documented arms flows and financial transfers in sustaining a conflict that the international community has struggled to arrest.

The stakes, for now, remain concentrated in Sudan. But the model being tested here — patronage networks that blend commercial interest with military support to lock in resource access — has implications well beyond the Horn of Africa.

This article focuses on structural drivers of foreign involvement in Sudan's civil war. Monexus covered the humanitarian dimensions of the conflict in reporting earlier this year.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/19201234567890123456