GENEVA – The United Nations human rights office warned Tuesday that Sudan’s two-year-old civil war has produced a self-sustaining economy based on resource exploitation, giving the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces strong financial incentives to continue fighting regardless of human casualties.
The assessment, issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, documented looting, extortion and control of trade routes throughout Sudan’s resource-rich regions. Both the army and the Rapid Support Forces have built parallel revenue streams from commodities including gold, livestock and gum arabic, leading to what the United Nations has described as a self-perpetuating conflict.
“Sudan’s enormous wealth of natural resources must benefit its people,” said High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. “It is unfortunate that what we see today is anything but that.”
The conflict erupted in April 2023 when fighting broke out in the capital, Khartoum, between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, which previously served as a paramilitary force allied with the government. The war has since killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced more than 11 million, leading to what the United Nations calls the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. Both sides control large portions of territory and use their positions to extract revenue from populations living under their control.
The OHCHR report focused specifically on gum arabic, a commodity that Sudan once supplied in quantities representing 70 to 80 percent of global crude oil exports. Gum arabic, derived from the sap of acacia trees indigenous to Sudan’s Sahel belt, is used as an emulsifier in soft drinks, sweets, cosmetics and pharmaceutical production. Its technical characteristics have made it difficult to replace, and Sudan’s dominant market position has been built up over decades of specialized cultivation.
In May 2025, the RSF reportedly seized and looted the gum arabic exchange in the city of Nahud, the main trading center for the commodity in West Kordofan state. The raid devastated local merchants and disrupted supply chains that had partially survived the previous stages of the war. Throughout the conflict zone, OHCHR documented patterns of looting, extortion, arbitrary detention and threats directed at people working in the gum arabic trade.
Throughout RSF-controlled territory in Darfur and West Kordofan, OHCHR found that traders and farmers were forced to give up portions of their income as informal fees. In military-controlled territory, similar extractions have been documented at road checkpoints, where trucks loaded with agricultural goods have faced tolls imposed by armed personnel. Neither party’s revenues from these activities appear in any official accounts.
Turk called on the international community to take action. “This war economy must be disrupted and the international community must pay greater attention to goods and trade routes,” he said, urging that “businesses cannot continue business as usual when relying on value chains affected by conflict.”
This warning is of direct relevance to global food and beverage companies that have historically relied on Sudanese gum arabic to stabilize their supply chain. The unique emulsifying properties of this commodity made substitution technically difficult, and buyers in Europe and North America faced limited substitutes as the conflict continued.
The conflict also resisted a diplomatic solution. Talks brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States collapsed in 2024, and subsequent efforts to reach a ceasefire have not produced a sustainable outcome. The war economy dynamic identified by OHCHR helps explain the persistence of the conflict: both sides have developed financial structures that make continued fighting more economically viable than the uncertain terms of a peace settlement.
A court in Port Sudan issued a death sentence in absentia to the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, this week, on charges of genocide and war crimes in West Darfur. The ruling highlights the legal exposure faced by the RSF leadership, but has had no noticeable impact on the paramilitary forces’ operational capacity or control over revenue-generating land.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights said it would present the findings to the UN Human Rights Council, and called on Sudan’s warring parties to end attacks on civilian economic infrastructure. The report, as well euronews As he noted, he stopped short of naming specific international companies that rely on supply chains affected by the conflict. Whether accountability will follow, like peace in Sudan itself, remains unresolved.
