Darfur Disgrace

NYT — Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat. African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation. But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export. “Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”

Darfur Ambush

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Dozens of men on horseback armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed Nigerian peacekeepers serving with the joint U.N.-African Union force in Darfur, though no casualties were reported, the U.N. said. About 50 to 60 armed men dressed in military camouflage on Wednesday afternoon ambushed the peacekeepers along the new airport road near El Geneina in West Darfur state, the U.N.-AU mission known as UNAMID said in a statement Thursday. They stole rifles, ammunition, telephones and cash. The United Nations peacekeeping chief warned last week of an alarming increase in violence in Darfur that has spread to the Sudanese capital Khartoum and could escalate further. The conflict that began in 2003 has already killed as many as 300,000 people, the U.N. says. The U.N.-AU force took over peacekeeping duties in the western Sudanese region of Darfur in January from a beleaguered AU force. It only has about 7,500 troops and fewer than 2,000 police on the ground, although a total of 26,000 have been authorized.