ABSTRACT
The history of Sudan is a history of crushed developmental dreams and agricultural revolutions aborted. ‘Sudan Poised’ goes back to the early 19th century, when Napoleon’s France invaded Egypt and brought Western science and Enlightenment ideas about rationality, centralisation and universalism to North Africa. A complex, multi-dimensional international political economy has been developing between the People’s Republic of China, the Arabian Peninsula and Sudan, with flows of resources and billions of dollars between the different points of this triangle. The Agricultural Revival seeks to partner the country’s extensive land, labour and water resources with Gulf Arab capital and technology to push up productivity and output, helping the North transition away from an oil-based economy to an agricultural powerhouse after the secession of South Sudan in July 2011. Ja’afar Nimeiri’s vision of Sudan as a regional ‘breadbasket’ quickly gained traction in the 1970s.
