Two and a half million Sudanese people have been driven by war into refugee camps in the province of Darfur. In some of these camps, officials estimate that between 12 and 100 people starve to death every day.

Some officials, such as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, insist that this catastrophic situation is being driven by food shortages caused by climate change. The fact of the matter, however, is that Sudan produces enough food to easily feed its entire population. The problem is the Sudanese government is not using that food to feed its people; it is exporting that food to other nations in order to capitalize on high global food prices.

The International Herald Tribune reported the following in an article posted on August 10:

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-stricken region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize: beans, wheat, sorghum, melons, peanuts, pumpkins, eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million people driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?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.Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the U.S. government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston. Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to UN officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in the United States and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly “one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime’s domestic policies.” It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government’s strategy to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”

The root cause behind starvation in Darfur has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with human greed and corruption. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have died because of men who are more interested in power and wealth than they are about alleviating human suffering.

This same greed and corruption, at one level or another, is the root cause of all of humanity’s problems. Human nature is to live the way of “get.” To eliminate this nature so that people will live the way of give will require divine intervention.

Jesus Christ is prophesied to return to stop wars and famines in all nations. Once all mankind learns God’s way of give, then all will have access to food in abundance. As Amos 9:13 says, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.”

For more information on how human nature will soon be eradicated, request our booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.