In the editorial for the current issue of ROAPE, Elisa Greco writes on the surge in the price of food and role of speculation on food markets, and how this is impacting the lives of the poor across Africa and the world. These trends in global political economy have had a direct and dramatic impact on the course of events in Sudan since 2019. Greco unpicks the consequences of global shocks on Sudanese politics, the recent war and resistance.
By Elisa Greco
Cheap borrowing is over and austerity is back. The 2023 International Monetary Fund (IMF) regional report on Africa argues that the continent is at a turning point: a phase of a constant increase in African borrowing on global capital markets, lasting from 2007 to 2022, has come to an end. This saw an increase in the stock of African Eurobonds, which in December 2021 were estimated at US$140 billion (Smith 2021), but rampant global inflation and the increase of borrowing costs put an end to this phase. The issuing of new Eurobonds in Africa declined from US$14 billion in the second quarter of 2021 to US$6 billion in the first quarter of 2022, while the US dollar effective exchange rate reached a 20-year high (IMF 2023). This has once more reinforced the US dollar – under the rising challenge posed by the internationalisation of the Chinese yuan and its recent digitisation (Deng 2023) – as world money, sitting firmly at the top of the global money hierarchy. African countries, like many others in the global South, are once more entrenched low down in the hierarchy of the global monetary system.
This dynamic brings to light the ‘remarkable historical continuity of capitalist finance as a key vector of imperialism’ (Alami 2019, 2), while African governments are pushed towards the re-enactment of austerity policies. Since spring 2022, African governments have stopped issuing Eurobonds (IMF 2023) and now, more than halfway into 2023, eyes are on which African government is going to default next, following on the default of Zambia in 2020 and Ghana in 2022. A new phase of austerity politics highlights the persisting burden of imperialism, while African states grapple with all the features of centuries of historical layering of uneven and combined development (Ashman 2009).
Our editorial in issue 174 argued that the global economic slowdown has led to the return of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to the continent, because of the increased rates of indebtedness of most African countries promoted by low interest rates in the first decade of the 2000s. As referenced in that editorial, ROAPEdocumented the emergence of this dynamic the first time round, in the 1980s, and the role of international financial institutions in enforcing SAPs’ austerity policies, alongside the politics of negotiations, resistance or compliance that these generated at the national level in different countries.
As argued by Alami (2018), there is a set of features that can be identified in most emerging or industrialising economies that goes beyond the simple subordination of weaker currencies to stronger currencies on global monetary markets. These features are to be found in most African countries: a persistently strong scrutiny by international investors over national policy processes, high volatility of exchange rates and high interest rates, fragile financial reputations that are easily shaken and rapidly changing, coupled with equally rapid capital flight during moments of financial crisis, and a general dependence on the monetary policies of advanced capitalist countries. All these features lead to a ‘severity of the terrorism of money’ (Alami 2018, 28) that characterises poor, non-industrialised countries.
Capital’s hold on material reality has a strong – though not unshakeable – hold over people’s imagination and perception of reality. One of the mechanisms through which this hold is consolidated is that of ideology. Capital’s ideology revolves around representing capitalist reality as the ultimately natural reality: an order instituted by nature itself, and therefore intrinsically legitimate, solid, and deeply rooted within the human and nonhuman spheres: that is, in their ‘nature’. This conception has been so mainstreamed that many crises are explained away through an analysis of the specificities of a given historical conjuncture, resting on the idea that social and natural systems are normally functioning in a state of equilibrium, which can be disrupted by external shocks, then to evolve towards a new equilibrium.
This conception has become so engrained today that it is hard to encounter deeper explanations of the current global food crisis that go beyond the analysis of the multiple types of shock that have caused this spike of inflation and speculation on global food markets, leading to sustained high food prices. Thus, the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the global food market has been reduced to, and compared with, any other form of external ‘shock’ (Hall 2023), with the food crisis caused by the Russia–Ukraine war deemed comparable to a ‘bad rain year’ (Moseley 2022) leading to the polemic by Hall (2023) against that characterisation.
It is concerning to acknowledge that this focus on shocks and resilience recurs also in critical analyses of the global food system (Clapp 2023). A pervasively implicit assumption of mainstream accounts of the current food crisis and its impact on national economies and on their people is that the Russia–Ukraine war has been causing short- and long-term loss of market access for Ukrainian exports. This immediate loss of crops has caused the surge in food prices in the last year, acting as a physical ‘shock’ to a presumed equilibrium in international food markets (Breisinger et al. 2022). Explanations of supply–demand issues caused by the war as the main cause of the crisis have become pervasive, with an erasure of the role of financial speculation that is too systematic to go unnoticed. For example, in April 2022, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) staff and research fellows rapidly produced an economic estimation of the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on Sudan’s domestic wheat price (Breisinger et al. 2022). This and similar reports do not even mention financial speculation as an element that caused the price hikes in international food markets in 2022.
The role of international speculation on food markets in the wake of the Russia–Ukraine war has been underplayed. That supply disruption caused the price hikes is far from being an uncontested fact and it is rather an implicit assumption, hiding that the decrease in wheat and maize supply caused by the war has only indirectly caused the current crisis. Many have argued that the determining factor in the increase of the price of food has been the surge of speculation on food markets – that is, of financial speculators actively betting on prices going up as a consequence of the material supply/demand issues caused by the war. While this kind of speculative boom in prices is short-lived, it is long enough for the speculators to make money and induce higher volatility of prices.
Two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the agricultural economist Aaron Smith argued that the total volume of Ukrainian exports of maize and wheat were not a cause for concern in terms of global food supplies, and that food price hikes had largely been caused by financial speculation and the role of futures markets (Smith 2022). While he later went on to reconsider his calculations and recognised that the former argument was incorrect, the latter argument still holds true. Financial speculators betting on supply problems on the food commodity futures markets have largely fuelled the price hikes and increased price volatility in the last year (Pettifor 2022; Russell 2022). Financial speculators are not the only winners in the current global food crisis. A pre-/post-pandemic overview shows that the nine largest companies producing synthetic fertilisers have seen their profits increase from US$14 billion before the pandemic to US$28 billion in 2021 and US$49 billion in 2022, at the expense of many governments in the global South who are faced with exorbitant bills for the purchase of fertilisers distributed to peasants and farmers through state subsidies (GRAIN 2023).
While agribusiness companies have hugely profited from current food price hikes, food and oil inflation have contributed to increasing the pressure on the working poor. This pressure has been compounded by the return to austerity politics and policies, caused by the current reversal of borrowing trends. In countries where domestic inflation was already an issue before the current crisis, this has led to a cost-of-living crisis for the majority.
These general trends have contributed significantly to the current crisis in Sudan. Since 2018, booming domestic inflation has caused an increase in the price of bread (Breisinger et al. 2022). This, amid a general increase of the cost of living, played a role in the revolutionary moment of 2018/19 that led to the deposing of Omar al-Bashir. The cut in international donors’ funding in October 2021 – as a sanction against the military coup – compounded the onward trend of domestic inflation and contributed to the spike in the price of bread, as the government stopped subsidising wheat in January 2022 (Breisinger et al. 2022). The IFPRI blog post estimated that in Khartoum, between July 2021 and February 2022, the wholesale price of wheat increased by 112% in absolute terms, or about 60% in real terms. Throughout the last year, the Sudanese people – not only the working poor but also the middle classes – have been crushed under economic and political pressures: rampant inflation worsened living conditions have led to lower purchasing power, while an unstable military alliance gradually revealed its fragility and its inability to deliver on the promise of a transition to civilian rule.
The war in Sudan
In the weekend of 15 April 2023, open warfare started in Sudan. With striking rapidity, global media relegated the crisis to the back burner: a second-class war, far from the geopolitical centre of the West, the definition of which is being shaken and redefined by the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. The relegation of the war in Sudan to the subordinate category of ‘just one more African war’ re-proposes the neo-colonial trope of Africa as a place of ‘tribal conflict’ and permanent war. This has not gone unnoticed by a diverse range of activists in the diaspora, such as the social media site Keepeyesonsudan.net, ensuring the visibility of the ongoing conflict – as echoed in the title of this editorial, ‘Keeping eyes on Sudan’.
The most immediate cause of the conflict is to be found in the fragile alliance between the two leaders of the transition phase: General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and his deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – better known as Hemedti, leader of the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who became internationally infamous as previous leader of the paramilitary Janjaweed group that was responsible for war crimes and atrocities in the Darfur war. These two groups created an alliance, while contending for control over the military–security complex that has itself long controlled the Sudanese economy. The tensions emerged over how to share resources and power and how to handle the transition to a civilian government.
The two military leaders took power in October 2021 through a coup d’état that deposed the civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. Since 2019, Hamdok’s government had ruled over the country, following the deposing of al-Bashir after several months of popular protest and uprisings, national strikes and demonstrations. The Sudanese people organised themselves in spontaneous resistance committees to call for the end of military rule, for demilitarisation of the economy and society in Sudan and for the establishment of a government of civilians. During the uprising, these resistance committees emerged as social formations practising self-help, direct democracy and self-organisation and coalescing around a categorical refusal to compromise with the military forces. They called for demilitarisation of the economy and society, accountability for war crimes and a political transition that included trials of war criminals.
The resistance committees promoted a much more radical change than that envisaged by the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), a broad political alliance of pro-democracy activists, who also included professional politicians, that coordinated the protests leading to the demise of al-Bashir. As Campbell and Serekberhan noted (2023), the hesitancy of the FFC in ‘declaring their complete opposition to militarism’ led the resistance committees to push the agenda well beyond a call for elections. The resistance committees challenged the military in an overt, uncompromising way, triggering the evolution of the uprisings into a fully-fledged ‘revolutionary situation’. As Hamdok’s government started seriously threatening to dismantle the hold of the military over the national economy and the consequent entrenchment of violence and corruption, the military staged the coup of October 2021.
Sudan has all the features of an extractive economy, with a colonially inherited and marked reliance on exports of agricultural commodities and livestock, besides an important mining sector (Al Nour 2022). The 30-year rule of al-Bashir consolidated this extractive structure, ensuring their effectiveness through a security complex built around the Islamist movement and delivered through the development of a capillary rural militia (Thomas and El Gizouli 2021). As elsewhere, land grabbing has accelerated after the 2007/08 financial crisis, as national and foreign investors – especially from China and the Gulf – expropriated the land from rural populations, causing an increase of landless people. In 2011, with the secession of South Sudan, Sudan lost the oil enclave territories. In order to recoup the lost oil income, the government encouraged the expansion of gold mining, which has become an important source of rural employment, as artisanal small-scale mining is prevalent. Today Sudan is Africa’s third-biggest gold-producing country, with most gold coming from small-scale mining.
Extractivism in Sudan has been marked by a militarisation of the economy (Thomas and El Gizouli 2021). Military and security leaders are involved in the hundreds of state companies that control a large part of the economy across most sectors (Suliman 2022), ranging from gold mining to large-scale agriculture, banking, telecommunications, transportation and real estate (Campbell and Serekberhan 2023), with striking similarities to the process of militarisation of the economy in Egypt and connections among the military and security systems of the neighbouring countries, as observed in another ROAPE editorial in issue 162. Gold mining and trading has played a big role in funding Hemedti’s RSF, with support from Russia, China, Israel and Saudi Arabia, alongside the European Community’s Khartoum Process – a Fortress Europe funding programme that relied on the RSF to deploy paramilitary forces against illegal migration towards Europe (Campbell and Serekberhan 2023).
As I write, the ongoing conflict has caused a serious humanitarian crisis, marked by considerable loss of life, widespread destruction of houses and infrastructure and an escalation of shortages of food, medicine and electricity. On May 22, after five weeks of conflict, a first ceasefire was negotiated in Jeddah (with arbitration by the US and Saudi Arabia) to allow for humanitarian relief to the population; this was repeatedly breached by both parties. To date, the conflict has led to massive displacement: about 1.4 million people have left Khartoum. Of these, two-thirds of internally displaced people took refuge in the countryside and about a third in neighbouring countries. These numbers stand in staggering contrast to the ridiculously low volume of Sudanese refugees evacuated to (or trying to reach) European countries: seen in this context, the management of Ukrainian refugees can only strike us as a further example of how racialised double standards go beyond migration policies and extend to humanitarian emergencies too.
Elisa Greco is an editor on the Review of African Political Economy. To read Elisa’s full editorial for Volume 50, Issue 175 (2023) click here and to access the articles in the issue, click here.
Featured Photograph: Protestors setting up barricades and burning tires during the Sudanese revolution against President Bashir (15 May 2019).
References
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