Sudan’s crisis has moved beyond battlefield geometry into an attack on survival itself. In early August 2024 famine thresholds were confirmed in the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur and humanitarian agencies warned that millions more were at acute risk as access collapsed and markets disintegrated.

That human catastrophe did not arise from nature alone. In late June a panel of UN rights experts publicly declared that both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces were using starvation as a weapon of war, documenting blocked convoys, disrupted harvests, sieges and the looting of supplies. Their judgment reframed the hunger emergency as a deliberate tactic with legal and political consequences.

Western and multilateral responses have leaned heavily on targeted sanctions meant to raise the political and economic costs of violence while preserving space for humanitarian relief. Since January 2024 the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States have adopted successive packages of designations that freeze assets, restrict travel and penalize companies and individuals tied to the warring parties and their procurement networks. The EU added listings in January and expanded them in June; the UK announced business-related measures in April; and the US Treasury has repeatedly designated commanders and entities linked to the RSF and other networks. These measures signal consensus that private and state-enabled supply chains underpin the conflict.

But the central question for policy makers is not whether to sanction, but whether those sanctions change the calculus on the ground where hunger is being weaponized. Three structural limits are already apparent:

1) Enforcement gaps and third country toleration. The RSF and elements of the SAF have demonstrated resilient procurement channels and opaque financial flows. Designations matter, but unless enforcement reaches intermediaries in neighboring jurisdictions and trade hubs, sanctions become signals rather than chokepoints. International press and aid groups have flagged the movement of arms, vehicles and logistics via regional intermediaries that are difficult to interdict quickly through conventional sanctions alone.

2) Humanitarian access frictions and exemptions that do not operate in practice. Most targeted measures include humanitarian carve outs. In Sudan the problem has not been lack of legal exemptions but the absence of secure routes, predictable permissions and impartial monitors to certify deliveries. When convoys are looted or permissions withdrawn, an exemption on paper does not translate to food on plates. The weaponization of bureaucratic approvals and local checkpoints has been one of the more pernicious tactics.

3) Political signaling without durable pressure. Sanctions that blacklist commanders or firms can delegitimize actors internationally, but they rarely compel short-run battlefield restraint. The warring parties have domestic political logics and patronage structures that can absorb the reputational hit. For sanctions to alter behavior they must be paired with credible enforcement, avenues for inducements to defectors, and multilateral isolation of external facilitators.

Taken together these limits imply the following strategic assessment: sanctions are necessary but insufficient. They reduce the margin of maneuver for profiteers and send important legal signals that the weaponization of hunger is internationally unacceptable. However they will not, on their own, reopen lanes to a besieged camp or dislodge an actor willing to pay a premium for control of territory and resources. The policy objective therefore must be to integrate sanctions into a combined package that privileges three operational priorities.

First, enforcement and follow-the-money must become operational. Designations should be paired with prioritized financial investigations that target the logistics nodes enabling sieges: fuel suppliers, spare-parts dealers, aviation service providers, freight companies and intermediary banks. Where appropriate, sanctions should pivot from symbolic listings to measures that choke transport and maintenance pipelines that sustain siege operations. Public naming of enablers helps build political cover for secondary jurisdictions to cooperate.

Second, humanitarian delivery must be securitized and depoliticized through independent authorization mechanisms. The lessons of successful cross-border deliveries in other conflicts show that legal exemptions require operational guarantees: internationally supervised humanitarian corridors, impartial verification teams that certify deliveries, and agreements that tie deconfliction commitments to rapid, measurable relief. If the Security Council or a credible multilateral forum can authorize limited physical guarantees for convoys and prepositioning, the humanitarian carveouts in sanction regimes can function in practice rather than in theory.

Third, diplomatic and regional levers must be synchronized. Sanctions work best when regional states apply parallel pressure and when there is a credible pathway for insiders who defect from abusive chains to gain protection or legal incentives. That implies closer coordination with African Union partners, Egypt, Chad, the Gulf states and others that sit on ports, air services and financial flows relevant to Sudan. It also requires public, verifiable steps from external states to close loopholes that permit arms and materiel transfers.

There are risks. Overbroad financial restrictions or poorly designed export controls can inadvertently reduce the capacity of local humanitarian groups to operate. Sanctions that drive economic activity further underground increase opacity and can accelerate the very illicit markets they are meant to disrupt. That means policy design must pair targeted measures with clear, practical humanitarian exemptions and active support for local implementers who sustain relief chains inside Sudan.

Finally, accountability must remain front and center. The UN experts’ statement that starvation is being used intentionally raises the prospect of international criminal and civil investigations. Sanctions are a short and medium term tool. To deter future weaponization of hunger the international community must make clear that economic penalties will be accompanied by investigative, accountability and, where warranted, judicial mechanisms. Those long horizon measures are also strategic: they reduce the future political viability of commanders who profit from sieges and create a stronger deterrent against the instrumentalization of civilian suffering.

Conclusion: On their own sanctions cannot feed a camp. But used as part of an integrated strategy that combines enforcement of financial chokepoints, operational guarantees for humanitarian access, coordinated regional diplomacy and credible accountability measures, they can shrink the operating space for actors who weaponize hunger and protect the relief flows that keep people alive. The immediate imperative is operationalization. If the international community treats new listings as the end of a process rather than the opening of one, the famine in Sudan will remain a political problem masquerading as a humanitarian emergency.