Nile Water Shortage Leaves Sudan Farms Barren Amid El Niño

Along the parched riverbanks of the Nile in Sudan, farmers are struggling to draw water for their crops, with some turning to prayer as cracked earth stretches across once-fertile fields. Farmland capable of easing the world’s largest hunger crisis now sits fallow, caught in the crossfire of overlapping disasters far beyond Sudan’s borders.

The country’s troubles began with civil war between Sudan’s army and rival paramilitary forces, which has killed more than 200,000 people since April 2023 and pushed nearly 20 million people into crisis-level hunger. Then a separate conflict between Iran and the United States disrupted fuel and fertilizer supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, driving costs sharply higher. Now, a powerful El Nino pattern strengthening in the Pacific has delayed vital rains and caused water levels in the Nile to drop dramatically.

Just south of Khartoum, farmer Al-Tigani Fadlallah points to a sandbank that shouldn’t be visible this time of year. “The water usually covers it by July, but you can see it even now,” he told AFP, reading the exposed island as a troubling sign for his crops. Farmers across Sudan, from the northern fields near Egypt to the Ethiopian border, describe the same problem — water that isn’t rising from the riverbanks and rain that isn’t falling from the sky. The UN’s food and agriculture organization says this season is unfolding under heightened climate risk driven by El Nino, marked by delayed and below-average rainfall alongside longer, more frequent dry spells.

Elfatih Eltahir, a climate and hydrology scientist at MIT who has studied the link between El Nino and the Nile for three decades, says El Nino events beginning in late spring — as this one did — carry a high probability of drought in southeastern Sudan and northwestern Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile originates. Water levels behind Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which supplies most of the Nile’s flow, were six meters lower this July compared to the same month last year, according to Germany’s University of Tubingen. Eltahir said greater transparency and cooperation between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan over the dam’s management is increasingly necessary as climate change brings more extreme floods and droughts.

The Blue Nile basin has already received as little as half its usual rainfall this summer, according to UC Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center, with forecasts predicting continued below-average rainfall through the rest of the rainy season. In Gedaref state near the Ethiopian border, where much of Sudan’s staple sorghum and sesame crops are grown, farmers gathered for rain-invoking prayers in August as their fields remained dry and brown. “We need these rains for our crops and our livestock, and they’re late,” farmer Abdelmajid Hussein said. Agriculture Minister Ismat Qurashi said farmers are being advised to plant drought-resistant crops and delay planting where possible. Moussa Yaacoub, 75, who has grown sesame for decades through multiple difficult wartime seasons, said planting now costs him four times as much as before.

Downstream in Al-Jazira state, Hassan Ahmed surveys farmland that has belonged to his family for a century. When he returned last year after the army recaptured the region from rival paramilitaries, he found it ransacked and his trees wilting. He and his sons have worked to restore it, but this year has brought fresh setbacks. “I’m 63 and I have never seen the Nile this low in August,” he said, noting that by now his water pump should already have been removed due to flooding.

With water levels low, costs soaring, and markets crippled, many farmers have abandoned their land entirely — at a time when 65 percent of Sudan’s arable land is already out of use. Near Khartoum, young farmer Mohamed Al-Tijani said some farmers planted crops early in the season with hope, only to let them die later because the harvest wasn’t worth the cost. Sudan imports all of its fuel and most of its fertilizer, and prices for both have risen as much as fivefold this year due to the conflict in the Gulf. Veteran farmer Ahmed Othman, bent from decades of fieldwork, doesn’t expect to break even given the state of the market — but says he’s grateful simply to still be working.

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