The numbers from Khartoum tell a story of economic free fall layered on top of armed conflict. A tea seller earning a few dollars a day cannot keep pace with food prices that jump 17% in a single month. A butcher supporting 12 people watches his irregular $9-14 earnings dissolve against $10/day in basic expenses. A day laborer skips meals to pay school fees. These are not poverty stories — they are stories of an economy being actively dismantled by war. Sudan's Central Bureau of Statistics reports national prices 28% higher in September than a year earlier, but the Khartoum figure is nearly 60%. Food and beverages nationally cost 37% more year-on-year, with a 17% jump in September alone — more than double August's increase. The parallel-market exchange rate moved from 9,500 to 10,050 pounds per dollar in a single day. Al Jazeera's survey of four Khartoum markets found sugar up 11%, cooking oil up 25%, bread up 67%, lentils up 25%, rice up 30%, and powdered milk up 17% — all within days. The destruction is structural. The World Bank estimates Sudan's economy shrank 29% in 2023 and a further 14% in 2024. Nearly 8.9 million people remain internally displaced as of April, according to the International Organization for Migration. The military's recapture of Khartoum State from the RSF brought residents back, but the return increased demand against shattered supply chains. Fuel shortages hit the capital in September as consumption outpaced supply. Urban areas bear the worst of it. Food prices in towns and cities are 55% higher year-on-year, compared with 21% in rural areas. The gap reflects destroyed infrastructure, higher transport costs, and the concentration of displaced populations in urban centers competing for scarce goods. Agricultural production in 2024 was strong, but limited rainfall in 2025 raises the prospect of food shortages after November's harvest. Economic analyst Khalid Teks traces the rot to well before the war: falling oil production after South Sudan's secession in 2011, pound depreciation, cash shortages, international isolation, corruption under al-Bashir, and failed reforms during the political transition. The 2023 war simply accelerated a collapse already in motion. Families are depleting savings, selling possessions, and borrowing against a future that offers no recovery timeline. The prescribed solutions — humanitarian access, ceasefire, direct household support, low-interest small business loans, microfinance expansion through the Zakat Chamber — are reasonable but depend entirely on ending the war. Without that, every intervention is a temporary dam against a rising flood. Remittance channels, a lifeline for many Sudanese households, remain disrupted. The informal economy absorbs the shock but cannot generate the capital formation needed for recovery. What Khartoum illustrates is the compound mathematics of wartime inflation: destroyed supply meets returning demand, currency collapse multiplies price shocks, and household reserves drain faster than any income can replenish. Every month this continues, the recovery timeline extends by more than a month. The extraction is not by a single actor but by the war itself — converting human capital, savings, infrastructure, and institutional capacity into rubble and debt.
