How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan

SUMMARY

Given the current turmoil in the Sahel and Sudan, this debate piece addresses an important absence in the commentary. While self-serving explanations relating to climate change, avaricious generals and entrenched ethnic tensions abound, there is little on the deepening crisis within the agro-pastoral economy that directly affects millions of toiling people across the entire region. With reference to the spectacular, but largely ignored, growth in livestock exports from the ostensibly impoverished Horn to the urbanising Gulf states, we argue that over several decades, neoliberalism has transformed the erstwhile reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Favouring armed actors, the historic affinity between merchant capital and raw violence as an economic relation has produced a violent and expansive extractive economy. This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Livestock trade
• war
• agro-pastoralism
• neoliberalism
• urbanisation
• primitive accumulation
• de-development
• clearances
• dispossession

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 In 2017, the combined ruminant livestock exports of these countries was 5.6 million heads (source: FAOSTAT).

2 Mostly involving the period between1970 and 2021, our reworking of this data is contained in 24 graphs covering the Gulf and Horn livestock trade; selected Gulf development data; and Sudan and Somalia international aid data. These graphs can be found in the Supplementary Materials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Duffield

Mark Duffield is an Emeritus Professor and former director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol. In the 1980s, he was Oxfam’s Country Representative, Sudan.

Nicholas Stockton

Nicholas Stockton is a former Senior Humanitarian Advisor with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), former Director of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, former Emergencies Director of Oxfam GB and former Oxfam GB representative in Southern Sudan and Uganda. Both have spent decades variously critiquing capitalism and questioning the international aid industry.