By Our Special Correspondent
In many fragile and conflict-affected countries, the military plays a decisive role not only in security affairs but also in political and economic life. Across contexts from North Africa to South Asia, armed institutions often shape electoral processes, determine political competition, and exercise significant economic influence. Alongside state militaries, violent non-state actors—including paramilitary forces and criminal networks—have expanded their economic footprints over the past two decades.
To sustain operations and preserve political leverage, these actors frequently engage in both formal and informal commercial activities. While existing research has largely focused on their involvement in extractive industries such as gold, oil, and timber, far less attention has been paid to their role in agriculture and food systems. This gap is significant: many of the world’s most fragile economies remain heavily dependent on agriculture for growth, employment, and food security.
Our recent study addresses this blind spot by examining the commercial activities of Sudan’s principal armed actors within the agrifood sector prior to the outbreak of the April 2023 conflict. Specifically, we analysed the economic networks of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), both of which have developed extensive business empires spanning land ownership, food processing, and agricultural trade.
Mapping Military and Paramilitary Agribusiness
Drawing on interviews with more than 50 Sudanese experts—including agribusiness executives, livestock specialists, former government officials, and governance practitioners—our research mapped the companies affiliated with the army and RSF across key agricultural value chains.
We focused particularly on livestock, wheat, gum arabic, and horticulture. The findings reveal that both armed actors pursue profit through multiple strategies, shaped largely by two considerations:
By integrating insights from agricultural value-chain upgrading literature and studies of military commercialism, we argue that armed actors gravitate toward sectors where profits can be extracted quickly and with limited technical investment—consistent with their typically short time horizons and off-budget financing needs.
Four Commercial Strategies in Sudan’s Agrifood Economy
1. Exclusive Capture and Rent Extraction
The livestock trade—one of Sudan’s largest export earners after gold—illustrates the most extractive model. Despite recurring import bans by countries such as Saudi Arabia due to sanitary and phytosanitary shortcomings, both the army and RSF have captured substantial rents from this sector.
Rather than investing in traceability systems, quarantine infrastructure, or vaccination upgrades, the armed actors have prioritised rapid profit extraction. The army has leveraged demand linked to Egyptian military procurement, while the RSF has capitalised on Gulf market ties and its social embeddedness among pastoralist communities in Darfur and Kordofan.
This pattern reflects a classic rent-seeking approach: high control, low upgrading.
2. Biased Competition via Licensing and Subsidies
In wheat milling—central to Sudan’s bread supply—the military has relied on regulatory distortion rather than outright monopoly.
Following the liberalisation of wheat milling in the mid-1990s, private firms initially dominated flour processing. However, Sudan’s intelligence services later established Seen Milling Company, which was subsequently transferred to the army after the 2019 removal of Omar al-Bashir.
Seen Milling benefited from preferential exchange rates, import subsidies, and licensing advantages that tilted the playing field against private competitors. This strategy allowed the military to penetrate a moderately complex value chain without undertaking major technological upgrading.
3. Strategic Retreat in Highly Complex Value Chains
Sudan supplies roughly 70% of the world’s raw gum arabic, but the highest profits accrue at the spray-drying stage—a technologically demanding process used for pharmaceutical, textile, and food applications.
Historically, French firms dominated this segment. When Sudan’s private conglomerate DAL successfully established domestic spray-drying capacity in 2017, the army attempted to replicate the model through its Green Zone company. However, lacking the required technical expertise and equipment, the military ultimately withdrew.
This case demonstrates an important constraint: when value addition becomes highly complex and capable private firms are present, armed actors may concede rather than compete.
4. Innovation in Underdeveloped Sectors
The most nuanced finding emerges from the horticulture sector. Here, the army-linked Zadna corporation—currently under US and EU sanctions—pursued genuine upgrading.
Because horticulture in Sudan historically suffered from underinvestment and limited private participation, Zadna moved to fill the gap by:
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establishing a tissue culture laboratory
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building large-scale nurseries for high-quality seedlings
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conducting research on improved seed varieties
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investing in fruit and vegetable drying technologies
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exploring agricultural waste management
In this instance, military involvement was comparatively developmental rather than purely extractive—though still politically embedded.
Why These Findings Matter
For scholars and policymakers concerned with fragile economies, the study highlights the need for a more differentiated understanding of armed actors’ economic behaviour. Military and paramilitary involvement in food systems is not uniformly predatory; rather, strategies vary according to profit horizons, technical barriers, and market structure.
For private-sector firms operating in conflict-affected settings, one key implication is clear: moving into more technically sophisticated segments of agricultural value chains can sometimes reduce vulnerability to military encroachment. Evidence from Sudan’s dairy and gum arabic spray-drying sectors supports this conclusion.
More broadly, the research underscores that durable peace in Sudan cannot be achieved through ceasefire negotiations alone. Any meaningful political settlement must also confront the underlying political economy—specifically, who controls access to the country’s most valuable agricultural and natural resources, and under what institutional arrangements.
Understanding these dynamics is essential not only for conflict resolution but also for building resilient, inclusive food systems across the Muslim world and other fragile regions.
