A2 · Elementary
11 min
food securitycivil conflicteconomicshumanitarian crisis
Breadbasket, Emptied
El granero que olvidó cómo sembrar
Sudan's pound has collapsed to a record low as civil war tears through farms, markets, and supply lines. Fletcher and Octavio go deep on how a country once called the breadbasket of Africa can no longer feed its own people.
La libra sudanesa ha caído a su valor más bajo en la historia, en medio de una guerra civil que ya destruye cosechas, mercados y vidas. Fletcher y Octavio exploran cómo un país llamado 'el granero de África' llegó a no poder alimentar a su propia gente.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| campo | field / countryside | Sudán tiene mucho campo bueno para plantar. |
| caro | expensive | La comida está muy cara en el mercado. |
| hambre | hunger | Los niños tienen mucha hambre. |
| agricultor | farmer | El agricultor no puede ir a su campo. |
| cosecha | harvest | No hay cosecha este año porque hay guerra. |
Forty years ago, I filed a piece from Khartoum about Sudan's agricultural potential.
The headline my editor put on it was 'Africa's Unplanted Garden.' I thought about that piece this week when I read that the Sudanese pound just hit a record low.
Because what a currency collapse means, in a country at war, is that people cannot afford to eat.
Sí.
Yes.
Sudán tiene mucha tierra buena.
Sudan has a lot of good land.
Mucha tierra.
A lot of land.
Right.
And that's the thing that makes this particular tragedy so hard to look at squarely.
We're not talking about a country without resources.
We're talking about a country that has been, for decades, in the process of destroying the resources it has.
El dinero de Sudán vale muy poco ahora.
Sudan's money is worth very little now.
Es un problema muy grande.
It's a very big problem.
A record low for the Sudanese pound.
And when a currency collapses in a country that imports a significant portion of its food, the math is brutal and immediate: prices in the market double, triple, and wages don't move.
The gap between what food costs and what people earn becomes unbridgeable.
La comida está muy cara.
Food is very expensive.
Las personas no tienen dinero.
People don't have money.
Octavio, let me give listeners the backstory, because what's happening now is almost the opposite of what Sudan was supposed to become.
In the 1970s and 80s, there was genuine international excitement about Sudan's agricultural potential.
The Nile, enormous stretches of arable land, a favorable climate in many regions.
Development economists were calling it the breadbasket of the Arab world.
Some went further than that.
El río Nilo pasa por Sudán.
The Nile river passes through Sudan.
El Nilo es muy largo.
The Nile is very long.
It's the longest river on earth, and in Sudan it splits into the Blue Nile and the White Nile, which join at Khartoum.
And the land along those rivers is extraordinarily fertile.
Farmers there have been growing wheat, sorghum, cotton, sesame for thousands of years.
This is not marginal farmland.
Los agricultores plantan muchas cosas cerca del río.
Farmers plant many things near the river.
Trigo, sésamo, muchas verduras.
Wheat, sesame, many vegetables.
And sesame is worth dwelling on for a second, because Sudan is actually one of the world's largest sesame exporters.
There's a real irony in a country that ships sesame to kitchens all over the world while its own people are going hungry.
That tension is at the heart of what I want to get into today.
Sudán vende mucho sésamo.
Sudan sells a lot of sesame.
Lo compran muchos países.
Many countries buy it.
So how do you get from 'breadbasket of Africa' to 'record-low currency and mass starvation'?
The short answer is: war.
Multiple wars, actually.
Decades of civil conflict that began before independence was even fully settled.
Hay guerra en Sudán.
There is war in Sudan.
La guerra destruye muchas cosas.
War destroys many things.
It destroys farms particularly.
And this current conflict, between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, has been unusually vicious about targeting food infrastructure.
Markets, grain stores, irrigation systems.
The RSF just struck El-Obeid with drone attacks this week, and El-Obeid is not just any city.
El-Obeid es una ciudad grande.
El-Obeid is a big city.
Vende comida a muchos lugares.
It sells food to many places.
It's a major regional trading hub for North Kordofan.
It sits on routes that move food across a huge swath of central Sudan.
When you strike the markets, the fuel stations, the roads in a place like that, you're not just killing people who happen to be nearby.
You're cutting supply lines that feed entire provinces.
Los soldados atacan los mercados.
Soldiers attack the markets.
Esto es muy peligroso para la gente.
This is very dangerous for people.
There's a phrase that humanitarian workers use quietly among themselves: food as a weapon.
It's not new.
Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach.
But the modern version of it is starving civilian populations into submission or displacement, and Sudan has become one of the worst contemporary examples.
Sí.
Yes.
Sin comida, la gente tiene que irse.
Without food, people have to leave.
Tiene que moverse.
They have to move.
And the World Food Programme has been sounding alarms about Sudan for more than a year now.
Famine conditions are confirmed in multiple areas.
The numbers are almost too large to absorb: somewhere between 24 and 26 million people facing acute food insecurity.
In a country of 48 million.
That's half the country.
Muchos niños tienen hambre.
Many children are hungry.
Muchos niños están muy enfermos.
Many children are very sick.
The malnutrition among children under five in some parts of Sudan is at levels that doctors describe as among the worst they've seen anywhere on earth.
And now layer onto that a currency that just hit a record low.
Everything imported, every medicine, every sack of flour that has to come in from outside, just got more expensive overnight.
Sudan no puede comprar comida de otros países fácilmente.
Sudan cannot easily buy food from other countries.
El dinero no vale.
The money is worth nothing.
That's the currency trap in a wartime context.
And it's worth pausing on the colonial history here too, because it shaped this situation.
British administrators in the early twentieth century built Sudan's agricultural system around export crops for British markets: cotton above everything else.
They didn't invest in food security for Sudanese people.
They invested in cash crops for British textile mills.
Antes, Sudán plantaba algodón para Europa.
Before, Sudan planted cotton for Europe.
No comida para los sudaneses.
Not food for Sudanese people.
Exactly.
And that legacy, of an agricultural system oriented toward export rather than domestic consumption, is something that independent Sudan never fully corrected.
So when the wars came, the system had no real resilience built into it.
It was always precarious in a way that wasn't visible until the shocks arrived.
El campo de Sudán es grande.
Sudan's farmland is large.
Pero la comida va a otros países, no queda en Sudán.
But the food goes to other countries, it doesn't stay in Sudan.
And the neighbors are watching this very closely, because Sudan's food crisis doesn't stay inside Sudan's borders.
Chad, Ethiopia, Egypt, all of them have large populations living near the Sudanese frontier.
When food systems collapse and millions of people move, the shock radiates outward.
We saw this with Syria.
We're seeing it here.
Muchas personas salen de Sudán.
Many people leave Sudan.
Van a los países vecinos.
They go to neighboring countries.
Over ten million people displaced, which makes this one of the largest displacement crises on the planet right now.
Larger than Ukraine.
And it gets a fraction of the international attention.
I've been covering conflicts for thirty years and I'll tell you plainly: geography and proximity to Western interests shapes coverage in ways that are very hard to defend.
Es verdad.
It's true.
El mundo no habla mucho de Sudán.
The world doesn't talk much about Sudan.
Es un problema.
It's a problem.
So what would actually need to happen for food to reach people inside Sudan right now?
A ceasefire is the obvious answer, but it's also completely insufficient on its own.
Even if the guns stopped tomorrow, you'd need months of sustained logistics to rebuild supply chains that have been deliberately destroyed.
Bridges, roads, storage facilities, market infrastructure.
Sin paz, no hay comida.
Without peace, there is no food.
Con paz, hay esperanza.
With peace, there is hope.
Pero la paz no está aquí todavía.
But peace is not here yet.
That's the heart of it.
And the currency collapse makes all of that reconstruction harder, because the Sudanese state has almost no purchasing power to participate in its own recovery.
It can't finance imports of seeds, fertilizer, equipment.
The hole just gets deeper.
El país no tiene dinero para comprar semillas.
The country has no money to buy seeds.
No puede plantar nada.
It cannot plant anything.
I want to give people a sense of what food actually looks like on the ground right now in affected areas, because statistics are one thing and I've been in enough of these situations to know that the numbers don't carry the weight of what it actually means to not have food for your children.
Families in North Kordofan are reportedly down to one meal a day, and sometimes that meal is leaves.
Una comida al día.
One meal a day.
Solo una.
Just one.
Los niños tienen mucha hambre.
Children are very hungry.
One meal.
And the season matters enormously here, because the agricultural calendar doesn't pause for war.
If fields don't get planted during the right window, there's no harvest.
Farmers who've been displaced can't plant.
Farmers who are near active fighting won't risk going into their fields.
You lose an entire growing season, and that ripples forward for a year.
Los agricultores no pueden ir a sus campos.
Farmers cannot go to their fields.
Es muy peligroso.
It is very dangerous.
No hay cosecha.
There is no harvest.
Right.
So even if you solve the immediate supply problem, you've got a structural deficit building for next year.
That's what makes the breadbasket language so darkly ironic.
The potential is still there in the soil.
The water is still there in the Nile.
But the human system required to turn that potential into food has been shattered.
La tierra es buena.
The land is good.
El río está bien.
The river is fine.
Pero la gente no puede trabajar.
But people cannot work.
Esta es la tragedia.
This is the tragedy.
That's a sentence worth sitting with.
Octavio, earlier you said 'los niños tienen hambre,' and it caught my ear in the way that Spanish sometimes does when it diverges from English instinct.
Because in English we'd say 'the children are hungry.' You said 'they have hunger.' That's not quite the same thing, is it.
Claro.
Of course.
En español decimos 'tener hambre'.
In Spanish we say 'tener hambre'.
Tener es 'to have'.
Tener means 'to have'.
Yo tengo hambre.
I have hunger.
Tú tienes hambre.
You have hunger.
So hunger is something you possess in Spanish, not something you are.
'I am hungry' in English becomes 'I have hunger' in Spanish.
And this isn't just hunger, right?
There's a whole family of these.
Sí.
Yes.
Tengo frío.
I'm cold.
Tengo calor.
I'm hot.
Tengo miedo.
I'm afraid.
Tengo sed.
I'm thirsty.
Siempre usamos 'tener'.
We always use 'tener'.
So English says 'I am cold, I am hot, I am afraid,' and Spanish says 'I have cold, I have heat, I have fear.' Which means if you're an English speaker learning Spanish and you instinctively reach for 'estar' for all of these, you're going to sound strange.
Or, as I know from personal experience, very pregnant.
Sí, Fletcher.
Yes, Fletcher.
Recuerdo bien ese día.
I remember that day well.
Mi madre también lo recuerda.
My mother remembers it too.