land & WateR 53abandoned in 1984 after the SPLA attacked the construction camp.
While hydraulic projects have been at the centre of state ideas of
development in Sudan, there has been an alternative model of agricul-
tural development, which took the focus away from the Nile. After some
experiments in the 1940s, the government decided in the 1950s to system-
atically promote mechanized rainland farming in the belt of land that
forms what has been called the transitional zone, between the Tenth
Parallel north and the fourteenth. In the 1970s, the radical government
of Jaafar Nimeiri threw new energy into this, and considerable areas of
land in what were then Blue Nile and southern Kordofan provinces were
assigned to mechanized farming schemes, in the hope that they would
produce grain which could be exported to Saudi Arabia and the gulf
countries in exchange for hard currency. While some of the investors who
put money into these farms evidently prospered, mechanized farming
has been seen as problematic by development specialists. By taking up
land which, from the state’s point of view, no one ‘owned’ but which
was used on an occasional basis by small-scale cultivators, or as seasonal
grazing resources, or migration routes, these giant farms compromised
the livelihoods of people who relied on flexibility; and the land itself was
in some cases quickly exhausted.
In the last few decades, as a result of state intervention, civil war,
famine, and, in some areas of the north, increasingly unreliable rainfall- and the consequent disruption of traditional systems of food produc-
tion – Sudan has seen dramatically accelerated population displacement.
Millions of people have been forced to move. Rural-urban migration has
resulted in dramatic changes in the population landscape, notably the
mushrooming growth of cities in central Sudan, especially the capital
region of Khartoum. Sudan’s porous international borders with Chad,
Eritrea and Ethiopia mean that it has also played host to many hundreds
of thousands of refugees from wars in these countries. These shifts in
population have far-reaching implications for the natural environment,
producing deforestation around urban centres and necessitating food aid
where self-sufficiency has been lost.
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors
(www.riftvalley.net).