Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

According to Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College and an outspoken activist and writer on the Darfur crisis, there is an anomaly in the balance of international food-aid and Sudanese food-export. He calls it

“one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime’s domestic policies.”

What happened?

While the United States were shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of coarse grain, namely sorghum at high cost to the Sudan, Sudanese companies with close ties to the government in Khartoum, are exporting twice as much. In the meantime the United Nations have to cut food rations to Darfur.

Read the full article by Jeffrey Gettleman and Ed Damer (NYT)

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