Sudan’s troubled east is a microcosm of a wider crisis

In the centralUN marketplace of Gedaref, eastern , Mohammed Siddig counts the cost of the past year’s turmoil. The price of fuel, which he needs to run his farm near the border with Ethiopia, is up by about 300%. School fees, which he pays for four of his children, have increased by 400%. Yet just as unrest at nearby Port Sudan hurt farmers’ exports, the state-owned agricultural bank cut their subsidies. “It’s totally unprofitable,” Mr Siddig laments. His sesame and sorghum harvest recently fetched about half what it had the previous year. Now he is in debt, which he underscores by slapping onto the counter a bag of chickpeas that he is buying on credit., already in a tailspin, tipped into recession last year. Although this may have brought inflation down a bit, it remains in triple digits, among the highest rates in the world. Roughly one-third of Sudanese (some 15m of a population of 44m) need emergency aid such as clean water, shelter or food, according to the . Almost 12m people are going hungry. Eastern Sudan, in theory the country’s breadbasket, should be faring relatively better. But the long-standing neglect of the region by successive rulers in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, left deep wounds. The latest crisis threatens to reopen them.