River Nile Blues: Famished Sudanese Turn to the Humble Sweet Potato
- The Xylom
- Apr 9
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 11
The shadows lengthen in the late afternoon sun in the city of Ad-Damazin, the capital of Sudan’s southern Blue Nile region, as photographer Median Hassouna’s mother prepares her family’s evening meal.
But instead of heating up the douka (traditional clay or metal griddle) to bake kisra, a doughy flatbread ubiquitous across the northeastern African nation, she instead peels and cuts up bambei (white sweet potatoes) to cook down into porridge.
While bread has traditionally been Sudan’s primary carbohydrate source, sweet potatoes have become an unwanted replacement due to the Sudanese civil war that threatens the breadbasket of the nation.
Since Apr. 15, 2023, Sudan has been the site of the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, engulfed in a devastating war as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and Sudanese Armed Forces grapple for power. Widespread displacement has bled into states far beyond the reaches of Khartoum, where the fighting began. The state of Al Jazirah, which lies 230 kilometers southeast of the capital city along the Blue Nile River and is considered the breadbasket of Sudan, initially served as a refuge for 500,000 people fleeing the violence. Before the conflict, Al Jazirah’s agricultural projects supplied half of Sudan’s wheat.
But after attacks from the Rapid Support Forces escalated last October, residents and displaced persons who settled in Al Jazirah were forced to continue fleeing. Large numbers of civilians were killed, detained, and displaced; there was also rampant sexual violence against women and girls. At least 135,000 people were displaced from Al Jazirah over just 10 days between 20th and 30th Oct., 2023. Homes were looted, and farms burned, halting agricultural operations, isolating eastern states from food supplies, and disrupting vital supply chains. An estimated 60% of the state’s 11 million livestock were reported to be stolen, and Al Jazirah was reported to face an overall 72% decline in agricultural output as of last year. As a result, Sudan has fallen victim to a widespread famine.
Most families in the Blue Nile have been subsisting on sweet potatoes over the past eight months, rather than on wheat, which is not only the preferred mainstay but has deep cultural connections for the families.
Wheat is ground into flour, which is then baked into bread — the mainstay of Sudanese diets. They are served at nearly every meal, from aish baladi (round, oven-baked flatbreads) to gurassa (thick, spongy pancake-like bread good for soaking up stews).
Sudan imports 85% of its wheat, but severe disruptions to supply chains, limited access to markets, and disrupted transport routes have stalled exports and forced regions not directly in the line of fire to shift diets. This is especially true for the Blue Nile state, which is traditionally known for cultivating and exporting sweet potatoes and now struggles to meet its own dietary needs, because of its warmer, more tropical climate that makes it less conducive for growing wheat than Al Jazirah.
This means, for the Blue Nile state’s 1.4 million residents, the impacts of this sudden dietary shift to sweet potatoes as a primary food source are still undocumented.
A normal day at the offices of Hassan Jaafer at the Wad al Mahi Locality looks something like this: a steady stream of farmers and produce sellers coming in for livelihood assistance, buying seeds, acquiring farm tools and fuel, and filing paperwork for micro loans. An agricultural engineer by trade, Jaafer coordinates farming activities within Wad al Mahi.
Mohammed Yousif, a local produce seller, is a tall middle-aged man with a clean-cut beard who was dressed in a cream-coloured jalabiya with a “sidery” (the Sudanese national menswear, where a vest is worn over the long tunic). One morning in February, he strolls into Jaafer’s office to discuss the upcoming farming season’s outlook.
Through his work in the produce business, Yousif harbors a close, symbiotic relationship with the farmers he works with. When they have a bad season — or are affected by fluctuations due to the civil war — he also suffers.
Among the several challenges that Yousif and his fellow agriculturalists have suffered has been the difficulty of buying essential goods that they need to continue feeding the nation. Many farmers have been forced to borrow money from the merchants they supply to buy tagawi (seeds) and pesticides.
“When Sinja and Dindir were attacked by the [Rapid Support Forces] in July 2024, the roads were completely blocked and unsafe,” he says. It became difficult to buy pesticides or fuel to run tractors and irrigation pumps. “Farmers I work with were unable to continue with their harvests,” he continues.
State security forces also barred the movement of gasoline between states shortly after the war began due to high incidents of smuggling; local committees were forced to use fuel reserves or resort to the black market. But since last August, thankfully, fuel started to flow once again via the black market from across the Ethiopian border. Some farming activities have resumed with this fuel resurgence.
“I am very happy that we had a productive season regardless of the challenges,” Yousif says. Considering the dire circumstances, Yousif commends how the Ministry of Agriculture was able to scrounge up enough seeds for small-scale farmers to continue feeding themselves and the greater Wad al Mahi community, circumventing starvation.
According to Yousif, “the crop that was hardest hit was zura (sorghum)” because people simply stopped farming it. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, sorghum and corn production plummeted in 2024. The resulting artificially high prices of cereals further restricted food access, exacerbated by sharp drops in employment from war.
“The major lack of cash and the change of the currency” was also a huge factor that hurt agriculture in the country. Last November, the Central Bank of Sudan decided to issue new bank notes for 500 Sudanese pounds (equivalent to USD 0.20) and 1,000 Sudanese pounds (equivalent to USD 0.41), urging everyone to deposit their money into the banks as a way to control inflation and combat the looting of banks in Khartoum by Rapid Support Forces and others.
But a year into the war, the Sudanese pound was rapidly devaluing, with banks losing 50% of their transaction capacity. These cash shortages have made it difficult for farmers to pay their laborers, since many do not have bank accounts to begin with, complicating the most simple of transactions. People had to queue in front of banks anywhere from four to eight hours just to withdraw money to buy food. Many ATMs even stopped functioning.
The military has also been reported to have blocked humanitarian trucks bearing critical food aid in Sudan’s western border with Chad. As a result, at least 24 million civilians, about half of the Sudanese population, were starving as of last year. It took about 15 months for the UN-backed Famine Review Committee to declare an official state of famine in the country; yet, the report has been categorically rejected by the Sudanese military government.
According to global aid organization Mercy Corps, the estimated number of Internally Displaced Refugees (IDPs) in the Blue Nile State exceeds 133,000. Trying to see the situation in a positive light, Yousif believes this influx of displaced people from Al Jazirah state was a plus. Many are farmers who have been able to incorporate themselves into the Blue Nile’s farming scene, growing sweet potatoes and tomatoes.
But he stresses that support from the state and non-governmental organizations has been minimal throughout these trying times. “Most people survived because of their own personal resilience,” he says.
Moses Owori, a nutrition researcher at Bioversity International based in Kampala, Uganda, says that food choice affects not only the physiology of a person but also their mental health.
“Interventions on dietary habits, whether forced or deliberate — oftentimes through developmental or governmental strategies — have huge repercussions on communities,” he says over an encrypted call. “In this case, population change to eating sweet potatoes is a coping mechanism. It’s a sign they are food insecure.”
Wheat is not only higher in protein than sweet potatoes, but also contains zinc, making it a superior food choice. “Switching from wheat to sweet potatoes is a downgrade, since they have less nutrients but are more calorie-dense, containing far more starch that the body quickly converts into glucose–sugar,” the researcher says. “There’s also a practical aspect to wheat,” Owori adds, “Since it can be ground into flour, it can be baked, fortified with other ingredients.”
On top of this, farmers in the Blue Nile are growing and consuming white sweet potatoes, considered nutritionally inferior to the orange variety due to lower amounts of the orange provitamin beta carotene, which the human body later converts to vitamin A.
“If it’s not possible to return to the original diet, people would ideally complement the sweet potatoes with vegetables, beans, and pulses to have a balanced diet,” Owori says. But due to the several roadblocks, Sudanese diets are also now lacking in vegetables. An average Sudanese family of 5 used to consume half a kilogram of onions a day, but since last July, that has also virtually disappeared from the dinner tables of Blue Nile families.
Jaafer believes this sudden paucity in diet has manifested into a number of health issues in the region. Cases of itchy rashes resembling the Nile fever sprang up around the same time the roadblocks were imposed. Many reported these cases to Sudan’s Ministry of Health, who were limited to administering basic treatments such as penicillin, anti-histamines, and painkillers, according to Mohammed Almaryoud Allazim Albasheer, a general doctor at Al Damazin Educational Hospital.
The difficulties in acquiring food sources had a direct link to the decline of residents’ health, Albasheer says, and the influx of refugees and resultant overpopulation of Al Damazin has further exacerbated this food insecurity. He said the hospital used to get 5-8 children with malnutrition every day. “The food wasn’t enough for everyone,” he says, and the sudden switch to sweet potatoes has also led to vitamin deficiencies in most patients.
“Losing onions meant a loss of a great source of vitamin C and antioxidants,” Owori says. Prolonged dietary micronutrient deficiencies, like vitamin C, can lead to nutritionally caused skin diseases. But researchers “would need to study [the population] to see long-term effects on the body” to understand the real consequences of the civil war, he says.
Chris Newton, a food security expert at the International Crisis Group, says, “If we're thinking about the risk of growing famine in Sudan, and massive, rapid loss of life due to starvation and disease, then stable access to sweet potatoes, even white, and little else is still comparatively good news.”
“After you lose staple foods from the market or local agriculture, you're likely forced to consume things you need to be self-sufficient like your livestock and seed grain, or to consume famine foods, like foraged food (e.g. leaves from trees) that may have little nutritional value or even be unhealthy and indigestible,” he says.
Yousif has not given much thought to the health implications of the high consumption of sweet potatoes — that’s how Wad Al Mahi and the greater Blue Nile State residents survived last autumn and winter when other crops were unavailable. But this, compounded with the severely stilted sorghum production (another staple crop in Sudan, commonly eaten as assida (porridge), kisra, and other flatbreads), which is just another item made inaccessible and unaffordable for most civilians since last September, takes away another one of the culinary cultural identities of the people along the Blue Nile.
“We always liked eating sweet potatoes, and they’ve always been produced and sold in markets.” Yousif says with a laugh, “But we didn’t think we would be eating sweet potatoes this much!... When the roads closed, there were no onions, and the produce of sweet potatoes couldn’t be sold to other states. The abundance of sweet potatoes made it the replacement for onions.”
The recent victories of the Sudanese Armed Forces in the Sinja and Wad Medani districts bring him hope. He hopes that once the fighting ceases and the roadblocks are cleared, businesses can resume.
Despite his positive outlook, Yousif worries about the future of agriculture if farmers are not braced for shortages. He believes that the farmers of the Blue Nile should grow more sorghum and millet the next chance they have, as well as expand their farms.
Yet, should the roads close again this summer and block the shipment of crops from neighboring states, the Blue Nile could starve. “We don’t have enough sweet potatoes to last that long,” Yousif says. Without new shipments of seeds, the farmers’ fields would remain barren.
CORRECTION April 11th, 2025: A previous version of the story incorrectly described the agency declaring famine in Sudan.
