Sudan's Vital Date Industry Struggles in War-decimated Economy

Prices have collapsed in Sudan's date industry, the latest economic sector to become a casualty of war in the northeast African country. ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP
Prices have collapsed in Sudan's date industry, the latest economic sector to become a casualty of war in the northeast African country. ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP
TT

Sudan's Vital Date Industry Struggles in War-decimated Economy

Prices have collapsed in Sudan's date industry, the latest economic sector to become a casualty of war in the northeast African country. ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP
Prices have collapsed in Sudan's date industry, the latest economic sector to become a casualty of war in the northeast African country. ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP

The lush palm groves of Karima are a long way from Sudan's battlefields, but the war's effects are all too present, leaving farmers struggling to find buyers for this year's harvest.

Prices have collapsed in the vital date industry, the latest economic sector to become a casualty of war in the northeast African country, said AFP.

Every autumn, until this September, date farmers in northern Sudan pulled their harvests down from palm trees, securing a living for months to come.

But five months into the war between Sudan's rival generals, the country's economic infrastructure has been destroyed and "buyers are scared", farmer Al-Fatih al-Badawi, 54, told AFP.
Sudan is the world's seventh-largest producer of dates, growing more than 460,000 tonnes per year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
How much of that figure will be available this year remains to be seen, but farmers in northern Sudan are lucky they could manage a harvest at all.

In Karima -- a town on the Nile River about 340 kilometers (210 miles) north of the capital Khartoum -- the groves bustle with young men climbing date palms, dropping bunches of the brown fruit, beloved by Sudanese, onto white sheets below.

Farmers who depend on the date industry face colossal challenges moving their products across the country, as do those in other agricultural sectors.
Along with insecurity, wartime fuel shortages have severely hindered the ability to transport goods.

Before the war, nearly all trade in highly centralized Sudan went through Khartoum.

But constant air strikes, artillery blasts and street battles have left the capital largely off-limits to traders, who fear for their safety or are turned back by fighters at checkpoints.

"Our main market was Khartoum", Badawi said. Without it, trade is at a standstill and the price for his crop is in freefall.

Land left fallow
In Sudan, one of the world's most underdeveloped countries, dates and other agricultural products were a foundation of the pre-war economy.

The agriculture sector employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and accounted for 35 to 40 percent of gross domestic product, according to the United Nations.

But now, in much of the country including southeastern Gedaref state, known as Sudan's breadbasket, the land has been left fallow.
Processing factories have been razed or looted.

Smallholder farmers have no access to financing, traders have no guarantees of viable markets and industry heavyweights have given up.

In May, Haggar Group -- one of the agriculture sector's largest employers -- suspended operations and laid off thousands of laborers.

Even before the war began, one in three people were in need of humanitarian aid and the country's farmers -- unable to meet domestic food security needs -- struggled to break even.

The date sector in Karima had been in urgent need of "guidance and agricultural policy", as well as resources to reduce high rates of waste, said Al-Jarah Ahmed Ali, 45, another farmer.

Now the challenges have only worsened.

Since April 15, fighting between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, has torn Sudan apart.

Fighting has killed nearly 7,500 people, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

More than 4.2 million people -- most of them from the Khartoum area -- have been displaced within Sudan, and another 1.1 million have fled the country, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Agricultural workers are among those joining the exodus, and while they may find relative safety in northern Sudan, whether they can earn enough to survive in a collapsing date market is questionable.

Among them is Hozaifa Youssef, a 26-year-old radiologist who left Khartoum to rejoin his family in Karima, where he is helping with the date harvest.

"I was going to India to get my master's degree," but that goal is now on hold, Youssef said.

The veteran farmer, Badawi, has not lost hope.

"We're trying to find new markets, even though it's going to be more expensive. Hopefully, the price will adjust and it will all work out."



Killer Whales Spotted Grooming Each Other with Seaweed

This handout frame grab taken from video footage provided by whale rescue group Organization for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) on June 9, 2025 shows a distressed humpback whale tangled in a rope swimming south of Sydney Harbour. (Photo by Handout and Clay Sweetman / ORRCA / AFP)
This handout frame grab taken from video footage provided by whale rescue group Organization for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) on June 9, 2025 shows a distressed humpback whale tangled in a rope swimming south of Sydney Harbour. (Photo by Handout and Clay Sweetman / ORRCA / AFP)
TT

Killer Whales Spotted Grooming Each Other with Seaweed

This handout frame grab taken from video footage provided by whale rescue group Organization for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) on June 9, 2025 shows a distressed humpback whale tangled in a rope swimming south of Sydney Harbour. (Photo by Handout and Clay Sweetman / ORRCA / AFP)
This handout frame grab taken from video footage provided by whale rescue group Organization for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA) on June 9, 2025 shows a distressed humpback whale tangled in a rope swimming south of Sydney Harbour. (Photo by Handout and Clay Sweetman / ORRCA / AFP)

Killer whales have been caught on video breaking off pieces of seaweed to rub and groom each other, scientists announced Monday, in what they said is the first evidence of marine mammals making their own tools.

Humans are far from being the only member of the animal kingdom that has mastered using tools. Chimpanzees fashion sticks to fish for termites, crows create hooked twigs to catch grubs and elephants swat flies with branches.

Tool-use in the world's difficult-to-study oceans is rarer, however sea otters are known to smash open shellfish with rocks, while octopuses can make mobile homes out of coconut shells.

A study published in the journal Current Biology describes a new example of tool use by a critically endangered population of orcas., AFP reported.

Scientists have been monitoring the southern resident killer whales in the Salish Sea, between Canada's British Columbia and the US state of Washington, for more than 50 years.

Rachel John, a Masters student at Exeter University in the UK, told a press conference that she first noticed "something kind of weird" going on while watching drone camera footage last year.

The researchers went back over old footage and were surprised to find this behavior is quite common, documenting 30 examples over eight days.

One whale would use its teeth to break off a piece of bull kelp, which is strong but flexible like a garden hose.

It would then put the kelp between its body and the body of another whale, and they would rub it between them for several minutes.

The pair forms an "S" shape to keep the seaweed positioned between their bodies as they roll around.

Whales are already known to frolic through seaweed in a practice called "kelping".

They are thought to do this partly for fun, partly to use the seaweed to scrub their bodies to remove dead skin.

The international team of researchers called the new behavior "allokelping," which means kelping with another whale.

They found that killer whales with more dead skin were more likely to engage in the activity, cautioning that it was a small sample size.

Whales also tended to pair up with family members or others of a similar age, suggesting the activity has a social element.

The scientists said it was the first known example of a marine mammal manufacturing a tool.

Janet Mann, a biologist at Georgetown University not involved in the study, praised the research but said it "went a bit too far" in some of its claims.

Bottlenose dolphins that use marine sponges to trawl for prey could also be considered to be manufacturing tools, she told AFP.

And it could be argued that other whales known to use nets of bubbles or plumes of mud to hunt represent tool-use benefitting multiple individuals, another first claimed in the paper, Mann said.

Michael Weiss, research director at the Center for Whale Research and the study's lead author, said it appeared to be just the latest example of socially learned behavior among animals that could be considered "culture".

But the number of southern resident killer whales has dwindled to just 73, meaning we could soon lose this unique cultural tradition, he warned.

"If they disappear, we're never getting any of that back," he said.

The whales mainly eat Chinook salmon, whose numbers have plummeted due to overfishing, climate change, habitat destruction and other forms of human interference.

The orcas and salmon are not alone -- undersea kelp forests have also been devastated as ocean temperatures rise.

Unless something changes, the outlook for southern resident killer whales is "very bleak," Weiss warned.