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Geography, agriculture
and the economy of the Republic of the Sudan

Geography

The Republic of the Sudan is the largest country in Africa, with a total land area of more than 2.4 million km2. Traversed from north to south by the great Blue and White Nile rivers, the country is one of Africa's most geographically diverse countries, and it has mountains, desert, swamps and rainforest. The southern part of the country is tropical, the north is an expanse of arid desert. Rainfall is erratic and drought occurs periodically in some regions. The population is about 38 million and the population’s annual growth rate was 2 per cent between 2000 and 2006. Sudan is characterized by a rich ethnic and tribal diversity that reflects wide population movements over the past centuries from West and East Africa and the Arab peninsula.

Economy

The Sudan is endowed with rich natural resources such as oil, and it has a good agricultural potential, but it remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Large parts of the country are dependent on humanitarian aid and a barter economy.

Decades of civil strife and poor agricultural policy and performance have held back the economy. Inadequate land and water policies and inefficient marketing arrangements also contribute to inequalities in economic and social development between north and south and between urban and rural areas.

Thanks to increasing oil production, good harvests and the rise of the service sector, annual growth of gross domestic product (GDP) rose to 8 per cent in the period from 2000 to 2007. But the problem of external debt remains an obstacle to future growth.

Agriculture provides 90 per cent of the country’s food requirements, and accounted for 42 per cent of GDP in 2007. Yet oil has taken agriculture’s place as the leading export sector. Agricultural products are now 8 per cent of exports, a sharp drop from 90 per cent in the 1990s, before oil resources were tapped. The main agricultural exports are livestock, sesame, cotton and gum arabic.
 
Agriculture

The Sudan has large areas of arable land, and agriculture is the main source of livelihood for rural people, particularly in the south, where 90 per cent of the population is engaged in the sector. Agriculture contributed about 42 per cent of GDP in 2007. Growth in the sector is highly variable in both the rainfed and irrigated subsectors. In the irrigated sector low effiiciency and low productivity are the result of deferred rehabilitation and modernization of irrigation systems. In the rainfed sector growth is slow as a result of climatic variablity and restrictions on livestock exports imposed by importing countries. The traditional rainfed sector accounted for 67 per cent of agricultural GDP in 2005. It is the most important sector for the agricultural economy and for the livelihoods of poor rural people, but it receives 3 to 12 per cent of agriculture expenditures.

Source: IFAD