The Sustainable Development Dilemma in Sudan and the Reality of Financing: Agriculture as a Model

Prof. Dr Hussein Suleiman Mohamed Ahmed

The Sudanese economy suffers from a structural problem at the grassroots level—whether in neighbourhoods, villages, and small rural settlements, or in workplaces in the formal sector. Organising the population into grassroots organisations makes communities easier to administer, facilitates their access to finance, enables the development of value chains, and opens supply chains to and from these communities.
The prevailing legislation in Sudan governing relations among producers is the Agricultural and Livestock Production Professions Owners Act. The term “owners” is important to understand. In English, it means those who possess ownership. This implies that every member joining such an organisation should own property, whether land, livestock, fixed assets or movable assets.
As Brother Abdel Hamid Adam Mukhtar, a former member of the Farmers’ Union for several terms and an active participant in the agricultural sector in the Blue Nile Region alongside his colleagues in the Al-Qalaa and Al-Muharib organisations, explained to me, this law was established following the abolition of two previous laws: the Pastoralists’ Union Act, representing the livestock component of agriculture, and the Farmers’ Union Act, representing the crop-production component.
The reason for this change was that the pastoral sector, in the traditional nomadic sense that prevailed until the 1970s, had declined to less than one per cent of the farming population. Traditionally, nomadic pastoralists moved continuously across grazing areas in search of water and pasture.
As Dr Abdel Ghaffar Al-Sharif described in his book Sudanese Rural Society: The Dynamics and Trends of Its Movement, a nomad is “a person who has no residence in a village or town, does not engage in crop production, and obtains food grains by purchasing them from the market”.
As the proportion of nomadic pastoralists, according to this definition, declined due to changes in their mobility patterns, many began to settle and engage in crop production alongside livestock rearing.
At the same time, settled crop farmers increasingly began raising livestock, particularly owners of large agricultural projects, whose animals could feed on crop residues.
Both groups consequently discovered that combining crop production with livestock rearing was more profitable than engaging in either activity separately.
For this reason, the laws governing the Pastoralists’ Union and the Farmers’ Union were merged into the Agricultural and Livestock Production Professions Owners Act. In addition, the legislation incorporated elements of Sudan’s Voluntary Work Act and Cooperatives Act.
However, about cooperative legislation, lawmakers overlooked its most important feature. This omission represents a major weakness in the Agricultural and Livestock Production Professions Owners Act: the creation and accumulation of capital within cooperative societies.
Cooperative societies traditionally generated their own financial resources from several revenue sources. New members paid an initial membership share subscription, which was renewed annually. Members also purchased shares, while accumulated funds were lent to some members through mechanisms similar to bank lending, with the objective of developing, increasing, and preserving the cooperative’s capital.
To address this deficiency in the Agricultural and Livestock Production Professions Owners Act under the present circumstances, the general assembly of each organisation should recommend establishing an internal financial fund and determine its revenue sources until lawmakers introduce the necessary amendments to the legislation.
It is also important to note that some states require farmers to establish cooperative societies before becoming eligible for financing. The responsible authorities should therefore clarify the status of producer organisations, whether the cooperative movement remains operational and, if so, the geographical and institutional scope within which it currently operates.
What prompted me to write this article is the substantial financing allocated to this year’s summer agricultural season.
Decision-makers were right to prioritise the agricultural sector at a time when the Sudanese economy is suffering from inadequate financing.
However, to prevent some of these funds from being wasted, allocated to individuals who are not genuine producers, or distributed in amounts insufficient to enable genuine producers to carry out their essential activities, agricultural financing should be channelled through producer organisations.
Applicants should submit project feasibility studies or financing applications through the grassroots organisations to which they belong.
Such organisations are familiar with their members’ creditworthiness and can assess whether applicants have the capacity to implement the proposed projects.
More importantly, the organisation can monitor members during project implementation to ensure that projects are executed in accordance with the feasibility studies submitted for financing and that the funds are used exclusively for the purposes for which they were approved.
The central argument is that grassroots organisations constitute the missing foundation of Sudan’s economic structure in some parts of the country. Where such organisations exist, they often lack mechanisms for accumulating capital internally.
A distinction must therefore be made between increasing the incomes and capital of individual members and establishing a collective financial fund within the organisation.
At the individual level, substantial increases in capital have already been achieved. Where members earn sufficient income, they should be able to establish funds within their organisations.
These funds should then facilitate the transition from primary agricultural production to industrial activity.
For cotton producers, this could mean establishing collectively owned cotton ginneries.
For livestock producers, it could involve building collective slaughterhouses.
For oilseed producers, it could mean establishing large jointly owned oil-processing plants.
For gum arabic producers, this could involve establishing factories to produce mechanically processed and spray-dried gum arabic powder.
For wheat producers, it could mean establishing flour mills.
Through this approach, crop production, livestock production and agro-processing industries would be integrated within a single economic development framework.
The same processing facilities could also implement contract farming models, making them the institutions closest and most responsive to producers in rural Sudan.
In this way, reforming the structural foundations of the Sudanese economy at the grassroots level would become more achievable. Financing would be directed towards the purposes for which it was approved, while sustainable development could be realised in both the agricultural and industrial sectors—the two sectors that drive Sudan’s economic development.

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