The Iran war is now making Sudan's famine worse

Mohamed Adam farmed in West Kordofan until the Rapid Support Forces took his region. He is now displaced in southern Omdurman, working a smaller plot under the Jamuia agricultural scheme, and he is preparing to plant less than he did last year. The reason is not the war he fled. The reason is the war farther east, in the Gulf, which the Iranian crisis has turned into a chokepoint on the inputs his farm requires.

Fertiliser prices, in his scheme, have risen by sixty-seven percent over the past twelve months. Diesel for the irrigation pumps has more than doubled. The price he receives for his harvested crops has stayed the same. The arithmetic does not work, and the response is to plant less. This response, multiplied across the Sudanese farms that have not been physically taken over by combat, is being added to a Sudanese hunger crisis that already produced, by United Nations estimate, the largest displacement of any current conflict.

Where the inputs come from

Sudan's agricultural economy is structurally exposed to Gulf supply. The country relies on Gulf-sourced fertiliser for more than half of its national consumption, according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development data. The war that began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces destroyed most of Sudan's domestic refining capacity, leaving the country entirely dependent on imported fuel — most of which arrives, like the fertiliser, via Red Sea routes that depend on the safe passage of vessels through the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint and, upstream, through Hormuz.

The Iran war's effect on those routes has been the cost-side disruption that farmers like Mohamed Adam are now absorbing. Maritime insurance premiums on Red Sea passages have risen sharply since the Bandar Abbas incidents of the past months. Diesel shipments routed through Djibouti and Port Sudan are arriving with cost adjustments that propagate immediately to the inland markets. Fertiliser, much of which originates in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, has seen production-cost increases and Red Sea shipping increases compound each other.

The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that Sudanese cereal production was already a quarter below the pre-war average. The further reduction that the input-cost shock will produce has not been quantified in published estimates. The directional finding is clear. The food crisis the RSF war has produced is being made worse by a war Sudan has no part in.

The Gulf paradox

For a Qatar Standard reader, the structural fact this story exposes is that the Gulf states are simultaneously the cause and the cure of the Sudanese agricultural crisis. The fertiliser Sudan cannot afford originates in Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati production. The fuel Sudan depends on transits Gulf logistics. The arms that have destroyed Sudanese refining capacity and displaced farmers like Mohamed Adam have, according to the United Nations Panel of Experts and a sequence of independent investigations including Human Rights Watch's May 2026 report on Colombian mercenaries trained on Emirati military soil, been supplied by one of those same Gulf states.

The pattern is the proxy theatre rendered into agricultural economics. The UAE arms the RSF, which displaces farmers and destroys refining capacity. The Iran war disrupts the Gulf fertiliser and fuel exports that those displaced farmers would have needed to plant their next crop. The Gulf state principally responsible for the second-order shock is not the same Gulf state principally responsible for the first-order one. But the displaced Sudanese farmer is absorbing both.

Qatar's exposure to this pattern is different. Doha has not supplied the RSF. The fertiliser sector that Qatar Fertiliser Company operates is a major regional producer; it is, in principle, capable of being directed toward emergency Sudanese supply at concessional terms. The Qatar Fund for Development's standing programmes include agricultural assistance lines. The instruments exist. Whether they are mobilised at the scale the FAO production decline justifies is a different question — and one that the diplomatic preoccupations of the spring of 2026, from Gaza mediation to the Iran nuclear file, have not surfaced.

Kordofan and Darfur: where the war is the input shock

For the farmers still inside the combat zones, the input-cost story is a secondary one. The primary one is the war itself. The France 24 reporting and the corresponding accounts in TimesLIVE and Siasat document a pattern in Kordofan and Darfur where the war's logistics have become the agricultural sector's binding constraint. Machinery is being stolen at checkpoints. Crops are seized. Agricultural labour is being absorbed into RSF and SAF formations as combatants. Entire farming communities have been displaced to camps where they cannot plant at all.

This is the inverse of the Mohamed Adam case. He has access to land and inputs but cannot afford the inputs. The Kordofan farmer who has not been displaced cannot access land or inputs because the war is on top of both. The aggregate effect is two distinct contractions of Sudanese agricultural output stacked on top of each other.

The Sudanese hunger figures are the result. United Nations estimates place more than thirty million Sudanese in some form of food insecurity, with roughly twenty-five million in acute insecurity and several million in conditions the FAO IPC system classifies as Phase 5 famine. The numbers reflect a country in which the production base has collapsed by combat, the import base has been disrupted by a second war, and the institutional capacity to coordinate emergency response — at the federal level — barely exists.

What the linkage names

The Iran war and the Sudan war have been treated, in most diplomatic and analytical commentary, as separate files. They are, formally, separate files. The actors are different. The theatres are different. The political logics are different. The structural connection is in the supply chains the wars share.

For Sudan, the connection is most operationally exposed at the input level: fertiliser, diesel, the agricultural-industrial chain on which the country's residual food security depends. For the Gulf states, the connection is at the policy-coherence level: it is difficult to claim a humanitarian posture toward Sudan while remaining indifferent to the cost-transmission effects of the wider regional conflict on Sudanese agriculture. The OIC declarations against Israeli recognition of Somaliland do not address the pattern. They are not designed to.

For Qatar specifically, the linkage produces a policy opportunity that the diplomatic record has not engaged. The fertiliser-export side of the Qatari economy is a producer of an input Sudan structurally cannot afford. The Qatar Fund for Development has the apparatus to direct discounted or subsidised supply to Sudanese federal agricultural programmes. The Sudanese federal authorities, whatever their constraints in territorial control, retain the agricultural ministry and the import licensing capacity to receive such supply. The combination is a humanitarian instrument that does not require resolution of the larger Sudan war to be useful.

The Iran war will continue. The Sudan war will continue. The Hormuz cost-transmission effects on East African and Sahelian food systems will, on current trajectories, deepen. The question Doha has not publicly answered is whether its fertiliser and humanitarian-finance apparatus will be directed at the second-order shock that the first two have produced.

Mohamed Adam, in Omdurman, will plant less in 2026 than he did in 2025. The 2027 plant — the harvest that would, in normal years, replenish a population that is already starving — depends on what arrives at the input markets between now and then. The component arriving at those markets from Doha is currently unchanged. It would not require a war to change.

---

Sources: Reuters reporting carried by France 24, TimesLIVE, Siasat and Anewz, May 2026. UN Conference on Trade and Development data on Sudanese fertiliser imports. Food and Agriculture Organization Sudan cereal production estimates. Council on Foreign Relations, 'The Iran War's Hidden Front: Food, Water, and Fertilizer.' Center for American Progress, 'Food, Fuel, and Fertilizer.' UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, S/2024/65 and S/2025/239. Human Rights Watch, May 2026 report on Colombian mercenaries.