Sudan
Country Overview
Most Sudanese families depend on women’s farming for their food and income. Women are also responsible for collecting fresh water and fuel wood for their families. In recent years, climate change and environmental destruction have degraded the quality of Sudanese soil, placing a tremendous burden on rural women. Overgrazing of livestock has turned much of Sudan’s fertile land into desert, while slash-and-burn agriculture has destroyed two-thirds of the country’s forests. Near major rivers, soil erosion has increased flooding, contaminating drinking water and spreading water-borne illnesses, such as cholera, that can be fatal to people already weakened by malnutrition.
Environmental destruction exacerbates long-standing political conflicts in Sudan. For more than 50 years, a civil war raged between Sudan’s Northern and Southern regions. Although a peace treaty was signed in 2005, war broke out in the western Darfur region in 2003. These conflicts have displaced millions of Sudanese families, including four million southern Sudanese who remain reluctant to return home in the face of food shortages and a suffering economy. As a result of mass migration within Sudan, larger groups of people are coming to depend on smaller tracts of land, further tightening tensions over scarce natural resources.
Much of the mainstream media point to “ethnic tensions” as the chief cause of political strife in Sudan. But many Sudanese families describe the uneven distribution of resources between pastoralists and farmers as the root of the problem. Inequality and the resulting conflicts are perpetuated by a repressive and corrupt national government that pits communities against one another in a bid to maintain power.
End Notes- “Environmental Degradation Triggering Tensions and Conflict in Sudan.” UNEP, June 2007. http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=512&ArticleID=5621&l=en
