We’re upgrading our airstrip at Equatoria Teak Company, South Sudan, to accommodate evacuation flights from Sudan where the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is deepening by the day.

by Charlie Tyron, Maris CEO

How bad do things have to get in Sudan for the international community to get serious about peace talks?

150,000 people have been killed, 1 million people are starving, 2 million people have fled the country, 8 million people have been internally displaced, 25 million people face acute hunger.

Both sides have committed “an appalling range of harrowing human rights violations and international crimes” – torture, murder, rape – as documented by a UN Human Rights Council report published last week. The two intransigent war lords fighting for power will stop at nothing because for them it is an existential battle and they have long histories of brutality. The SAF and RSF are holding up aid convoys while children starve. They have overturned a peaceful revolution and replaced democracy with death.

But the devastation doesn’t stop there. Sudan’s geography, and rich gold resources, make it arguably the most geo-politically significant country in Africa. Its desirable Red Sea port is spitting distance from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Its borders with Egypt and Libya make it a gateway to North Africa, to the east and south it affords access to the Sahel and the Sahara. The Economist captured the ramifications of this perfectly last week:

“Sudan is a chaos machine. The war sucks in malign forces from the surrounding region, then spews out instability—which unless the conflict is halted will only get worse. As the country disintegrates, it could upend regimes in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. It could become a haven for terrorists. It could send an exodus of refugees to Europe. And it could exacerbate the crisis in the Red Sea, where attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis have already contorted global shipping.”

The first place to get hit by the spew of chaos is South Sudan, where humanitarian conditions are already dire. In 2023, 7 million South Sudanese (two-thirds of the population) faced severe food insecurity. Inter communal violence is ongoing and a fragile peace deal may unravel at any moment.

Many of the refugees arriving in South Sudan to escape the violence in Sudan are returning nationals who had already been living as refugees. Violent clashes, disease and hunger afflict overcrowded camps and there simply isn’t the resource to deal with them. I worry about the strain this will put on a peace deal that is already hanging by a thread.

At Equatoria Teak Company, our teak plantation in South Sudan, the team has been working around the clock, extending the airstrip to accommodate evacuation flights from Sudan. ETC, which we have owned and operated for more than ten years is one of the few places in South Sudan that remains peaceful and hunger-free. In this corner of South Sudan’s lush greenbelt we are growing teak and coffee for export (mostly along roads which we have built ourselves) giving the world a glimpse of what could be achieved across this region if young people were given jobs instead of guns – the opportunity to train and work, not fight and kill.

“Equatoria Teak Company in South Sudan is a glimpse of what could be achieved across this region if young people were given jobs instead of guns – the opportunity to train and work, not fight and kill.”

After flooding its neighbours, the spew of chaos from Sudan spreads across the region. Armed groups and terrorists, flows of desperate refugees, and the disruption of trade and oil will destabilise an already fragile region, ill-equipped to handle even more people and problems. The crisis in the Red Sea which the Economist refers to is already affecting exports of high-value agricultural products from East Africa, including Kenya where exporters like Agris (our agricultural division) are having to use slower, more expensive shipping routes via South Africa to Europe.

Even if I wasn’t CEO of a company with operations across the region I would be worried about this conflict. The international community needs to realise that this conflict has implications far beyond African shores and the longer it’s allowed to go on, the harder it will become to manage the fallout, especially an exodus of refugees to Europe. The recent success of far-right parties in East Germany, forcing the government to tighten border controls this week, plus the anti-immigration demonstrations and riots that took place in 27 towns and cities across the UK this summer are a reminder of what’s at stake.

It shouldn’t be difficult to agree that state collapse is in nobody’s interests.

So what needs to happen? There are myriad conflicting interests at play here, as Andres Shipani explains in this powerful report for The Financial Times. RSF and SAF are receiving support from a varied cast of backers who are exploiting the conflict to their own ends. But it shouldn’t be difficult to agree that state collapse is in nobody’s interests and the world’s main powers must put real pressure on their respective allies to urge SAF and RSF to cease fire. Peace talks have thus far failed because political engagement hasn’t been high-level enough to be taken seriously by those allies. Nothing must be off the table. This conflict can be ignored no longer.

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