GENEVA – The UN human rights office warned Tuesday that Sudan’s two-year civil war has produced a self-sustaining economy of resource exploitation, giving both the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces strong financial incentives to keep fighting regardless of the human toll.
The assessment, released by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, documented systematic looting, extortion, and trade-route control across Sudan’s resource-rich regions. Both the army and the RSF have built parallel revenue streams from commodities including gold, livestock, and gum arabic, creating what the UN described as a self-perpetuating conflict.
“Sudan’s vast wealth of natural resources should benefit its people,” said UN rights chief Volker Turk. “Distressingly, what we are seeing today is anything but that.”
The conflict erupted in April 2023 when fighting broke out in the capital Khartoum between the army and the RSF, which had previously served as a government-aligned paramilitary force. The war has since killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced more than 11 million, producing what the UN describes as the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. Both sides control significant portions of territory and use their positions to extract revenue from the populations living under them.
The OHCHR report placed particular emphasis on gum arabic, a commodity that Sudan once supplied in quantities representing 70 to 80 percent of global crude exports. Gum arabic, derived from the sap of acacia trees native to Sudan’s Sahel belt, is used as an emulsifier in soft drinks, confectionery, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical production. Its technical properties have made it difficult to substitute, and Sudan’s dominant market position accumulated over decades of specialized cultivation.
In May 2025, RSF forces reportedly seized and looted the Gum Arabic Exchange in El-Nuhud, the primary trading hub for the commodity in West Kordofan state. The raid devastated local traders and disrupted supply chains that had partially survived the earlier phases of the war. Throughout the conflict zone, the 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, the OHCHR found that traders and farmers were being forced to surrender portions of their income as informal levies. In army-controlled territory, similar extraction was documented at road checkpoints, where trucks carrying agricultural goods faced tolls enforced by armed personnel. Neither party’s revenue from these activities appears in any official accounting.
Turk called on the international community to act. “This war economy must be disrupted and the international community must pay much closer attention to the commodities and trade routes,” he said, urging that “companies cannot continue business as usual when sourcing from conflict-affected value chains.”
The warning carries direct relevance for global food and beverage companies that have historically relied on Sudanese gum arabic for supply chain stability. The commodity’s unique emulsifying properties have made substitution technically difficult, and buyers in Europe and North America have faced limited alternatives as the conflict has drawn on.
The conflict has also resisted diplomatic resolution. Talks mediated by Saudi Arabia and the United States collapsed in 2024, and subsequent efforts to reach a ceasefire have not produced a sustained result. The war economy dynamic the OHCHR identified helps explain the persistence: both parties have developed financial architectures that make continued fighting more economically viable than the uncertain terms of a peace settlement.
A court in Port Sudan sentenced RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, to death in absentia this week for genocide and war crimes in West Darfur. The verdict underscored the legal exposure RSF leadership faces but has had no discernible effect on the paramilitary’s operational capacity or its control of revenue-generating territory.
The OHCHR 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 Euronews noted, stopped short of naming specific international companies sourcing from conflict-affected supply chains. Whether accountability will follow remains, like peace in Sudan itself, an unresolved question.
