How the RSF destroyed El-Fasher’s economy and starved its people

El-Fasher, once Darfur’s breadbasket, has been starved and destroyed by the RSF’s siege, collapsing from a trading hub into famine.

Once a bustling agricultural hub and regional trading centre, El-Fasher has been reduced to ruins. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which seized the North Darfur capital after an 18-month siege, have not only killed thousands but also dismantled the city’s economy, starving it of food, income, and life itself.

A city that once fed Darfur

Before the war, El-Fasher was known for its markets, flour mills, and caravans carrying millet, sorghum, peanuts, and fruit across Darfur and into neighbouring Libya and Egypt.

Surrounded by fertile plains and sustained by seasonal irrigation and small wells, the city served as a distribution hub for grain, livestock, and produce from Jebel Marra, Kutum, and Tawila.

The Encyclopedia Britannica calls El-Fasher a “historic caravan centre” and “a market for grain and fruit,” connected by trade routes to Geneina and Umm Keddada. Its economy revolved around trade, small workshops, and the constant rhythm of buying and selling that sustained thousands of families.

That has all now stopped.

The siege that strangled a city

The RSF’s siege of El-Fasher cut off roads, halted trade, and blocked humanitarian convoys. What began as a military encirclement became an act of economic warfare.

The International Crisis Group described the situation in mid-2024 as “catastrophic,” noting that the blockade had “ignited economic collapse” and sent food prices soaring.

The UN’s humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) reported in September 2025 that the city remained under siege, with “severely disrupted flows of essential goods despite high-level negotiations.”

Access to the central market became life-threatening. The cost of a bag of flour or a litre of fuel changed daily as supplies vanished and road risks grew.

World Food Programme (WFP) data for August 2025 showed record inflation in El-Fasher and Kaduqli.

The price of wheat flour rose 38 percent in one month, reaching 6,524 Sudanese pounds per kilogram. Sorghum increased by 42 percent in the same period.

 The price of the local food basket doubled in a year.

Fuel costs also spiked, with diesel up 12 percent. Meanwhile, daily wages barely changed, and the Sudanese pound lost most of its value on the black market—around 3,700 pounds to the dollar.

This meant that even those still earning could no longer afford the bare minimum, leaving families skipping meals and relying on food aid that rarely arrived.

A hunger crisis turns to famine

Because El-Fasher’s economy depended on daily income and rapid cash turnover, the blockade’s effects were immediate. Farmers stopped planting, traders fled or lost their warehouses, and food stocks ran out.

By late 2024, famine had already reached nearby camps. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network confirmed “phase five” famine conditions in parts of El-Fasher, including Zamzam camp, and warned that they would spread unless roads reopened.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) estimated in mid-2025 that at least nine million people across Sudan needed emergency food aid, requiring 150,000 tonnes of food each month — a target impossible to meet under siege.

After the RSF captured the city in October 2025, local medical and rights groups reported massacres of civilians, looting of markets, and the destruction of hospitals, including the Saudi Maternity Hospital, where hundreds of people were killed. The city’s economy, already suffocating, collapsed entirely.

A war on livelihoods

Residents say El-Fasher has been “killed twice — once by weapons, once by hunger.”

The militias looted livestock, burned warehouses, and attacked aid convoys. Firewood became more expensive than a day’s wage, and food prices reached levels beyond the reach of most households.

The RSF’s control over Darfur’s main trade routes and smuggling corridors has turned food, fuel, and even relief goods into instruments of coercion. What was once a functioning urban economy is now an economy of survival, ruled by scarcity and fear.  

El-Fasher’s story is not just about one city’s fall, but about how economic life itself was weaponised.

A city that once fed Darfur’s markets with grains, fruit, and meat is now surviving on humanitarian handouts—when they can get through. Markets are burned, roads are blocked, and the hum of daily commerce has been replaced by silence.

Once described as a “centre of trade and caravans,” El-Fasher today stands as a symbol of Sudan’s wider collapse — a city where the war on civilians is also a war on bread.