Community-supported agriculture is a great way to get a variety of local fruits and veggies, but it can be overwhelming to stare down all those leafy greens.
My refrigerator’s vegetable drawer is stuffed with kale, peas, and turnips. I suspect my neighbors are in the same boat; up here in the Northeast, that’s what’s currently coming in community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes. The contents of your vegetable drawer may vary, but if you’re a CSA member, you know exactly what I mean. More importantly, you know the feeling of CSA Panic: The new share comes tomorrow, and we’re only half done with this one! What am I supposed to do with all these potatoes, or carrots, or mustard greens, or … celeriac?
I grew up in a rural area, where being a “work-share” CSA member meant you actually went to the farm and helped out. (Dirty, but extremely fun, especially when you’re a kid.) Now, living in New York City, I have what is probably a more typical experience. Every spring, I send a chunk of change to my local, volunteer-led CSA, which in turn works with a handful of farms to put together several offerings. The base option is a box or a bag of vegetables, delivered every week to an empty nearby school that lets us use their space every Saturday morning. Volunteers arrive to bag up the goods and distribute them to other members as they pick them up (everyone takes a weekend as a volunteer in my CSA). In addition to vegetables, members can pay extra to receive eggs, or a fruit share, or other items like honey, coffee, or meat. A CSA can extend way beyond produce: During the first pandemic summer, my husband and I used a little of our stimulus check on a share in an oyster CSA. (Yes, it was awesome.)
CSAs have a fascinating history, beginning with Black farmers in Alabama in the 1960s and ’70s and slowly growing to number around 13,000 in the US the last time census data was collected. The appeal is obvious: Weekly shares generally cost the same or less than what you’d pay in the grocery store (mine works out to $30/week), often with higher-quality produce and subsidized shares or SNAP for lower-income members. The up-front investment helps family farms (which struggle in the face of Big Agriculture to stay alive) have a guaranteed income.
The constant flow of vegetables is the backbone of most CSAs, and whether you’re a newbie or veteran, once the season starts you are soon confronted with your own wasteful food habits and unimaginative cooking skills. I’ve developed an arsenal of tools of my own to confront the problem, and so have a bunch of expert cookbook authors and chefs.
So if you, like me, are trying to make the best of a farm share, fear not: Help is on the way.
Establish an order of operations
The cycle starts when you bring home the goods, a variety of toothsome, wholesome, and usually pretty dirty produce. Where to begin?
Most of the experts I spoke with said the first thing to do is sort them in order of priority, which has to do with what will last a few days and what will still be edible if you find it in the back of the fridge in a month. “Arugula and other delicate head lettuces along with snap and snow peas tend to tire more quickly, so use those in the first days of bringing home your farm share,” says Alexandra Stafford, a blogger and cookbook author who writes a Substack newsletter devoted to making the most of your CSA. “Kale, cabbage, and other heartier greens will hold up just fine for at least a week in the fridge.” The same goes for hard and tough-skinned vegetables, I find: Winter squashes, carrots, beets, potatoes, and other root veggies can hang out for a while without harm. (Don’t refrigerate your potatoes. Or your tomatoes, while we’re at it.)
Leafy greens can sometimes be the trickiest to deal with, since they take up a lot of space and can wilt quickly, but also will almost certainly not get eaten if you don’t store them clean. I immediately wash my lettuce and other leafy greens and run them through a salad spinner, then dry as well as I can between layers of towels. Then I wrap them in paper towels and store them in bags in the refrigerator, and this keeps them fresh for at least a few days. Maya Kaimal, owner of an eponymous line of Indian food products and the author of Indian Flavor Every Day, is a big proponent of CSAs, and she has a more eco-friendly, plastic-free solution: “I wrap my greens in moistened cloth market bags — the unbleached cotton type I seem to have a zillion of — and then I put them in my vegetable drawer,” she says.
Linda Ly, who writes the award-winning homesteading and gardening blog Garden Betty as well as The No-Waste Vegetable Cookbook, then tackles her root vegetables. First she removes the greens, wraps them in a damp towel, and seals them in a bag. Then she stores the roots separately, often in their own plastic bags. “With radishes in particular, I like to wash them first and then store them in the fridge, in a jar filled with water, which keeps them crisp and ready for snacking,” she says. (Radishes are good with every kind of dip, but I confess a weakness for eating them with butter and a little salt.) Other root veggies can also be stored in water in the fridge, in a food storage container, she notes.
Tamar Adler, author of several books about using up food — including most recently The Everlasting Meal Cookbook — says the first thing to do is simply make sure you’ve cooked everything that can be cooked, so that they’re already ingredients, rather than just raw materials. “Once you have roasted squash or boiled little turnips or sautéed greens, it is much easier to just add them to rice or a sandwich or a soup,” she says.
What’s important is to not lose track of what you’ve got on hand. For sisters Irene and Margaret Li, chefs and authors of the zero-waste cookbook Perfectly Good Food, it’s all about strategy. “If you have leafy lettuce greens that need to be eaten sooner rather than later, don’t shove them to the back of your crisper drawer,” they say. Stick a running list on the fridge so you know which ingredients you’ve got, or keep a note on your phone.
Use easy-to-replicate recipe formats
Using everything you get requires some strategic planning. “If you have root vegetables that will last longer, think ahead about fun ways to eat them and get those ingredients,” the Lis say.
You’ll need to have some reliable tools and ingredients on hand. Kaimal suggests a salad spinner, sheet pans, and reusable zippered bags; Stafford says a good chef’s knife, extra-large bowl, and food processor are essential. I’d also recommend an air fryer (for making quick roasted vegetables), a blender, and one of these chopper things, which I spotted all over TikTok last summer. It’s brilliant for making a fast salad or provoking minimal onion-chopping tears.
A Dutch oven is one of Ly’s favorite tools for turning everything into soup at the end of the week. Soup is in fact the great food-saver: The Lis recommend a hand blender (also called a stick or immersion blender) — “because you can toss so many different items from a CSA box into a soup!” Just heat up some broth, add languishing roasted vegetables, and blend, then add other ingredients till it tastes right (which could include cream, full-fat coconut milk, peanut butter, cooked garlic and onion, miso, and other refrigerator stalwarts).
Everyone I spoke with recommended having olive oil, salt, and some kind of acid on hand, like lemon juice or wine vinegar. “Aleppo pepper or silk chili (from Burlap and Barrel) is great for sprinkling on all sorts of vegetables, especially sautéed greens and roasted vegetables,” recommends Stafford. I’m a New Yorker, which means I put “everything” seasoning on, well, everything. But I also recently subscribed to a spice company that sends some new, fun spice every month to try, which keeps me from always defaulting to my beloved Herbes de Provence.
Ly recommends having oil (such as avocado and olive) in both pour and spray bottles. I recently started using olive oil in spray bottles and it changed my life — coating vegetables and pans evenly is so much easier now. Ly also recommends a “good condiment that can go on anything,” like chili crisp or chimichurri. “If I’m feeling stuck or too lazy to cook, I throw veggies into a pan and top them with chili crisp,” she says. Having miso, rice vinegar, and soy sauce around, as well as a selection of spice blends from various regional cuisines, is always a smart move.
Roasting vegetables is one of the easiest ways to turn your produce into ingredients. Preheat your oven to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, then chop everything into roughly the same size, and then drizzle (or spray) olive oil onto them and add spices, salt, and pepper. “You can cook a whole bunch of different veggies at once — just keep an eye on them, since smaller pieces will cook faster than larger pieces,” the Lis say. “Once cooked, they’re super easy to use up in lots of different recipes, from pasta to salad to just eating straight, and they’ll last a few extra days in the fridge.”
When I am drowning in leafy greens and need to make space, I handle the situation by turning them into a pesto (or something that I call pesto, anyhow). The traditional pesto most Americans think of is basil-based, with pine nuts and Parmesan involved. But I just take whatever huge pile of greens I have lingering from last week and, after washing, shove them in the blender. I add as much peeled, raw garlic as I have sitting around (which might be three cloves or a lot more), then glug some olive oil into the blender. I turn it on and continue adding olive oil through the lid until it forms a bright green sauce. Then I add salt till it tastes good enough to complement everything from rice to pasta to eggs veggie dip. (Beware: The garlic gets stronger over time.)
My best recommendation, when it comes to cooking what you’ve got, is to store recipes in an easily searchable place, so you’re not flailing all over the internet when looking for something to do with those turnips. I’m a passionate fan of the Paprika Recipe Manager app, which has desktop and mobile iterations that sync across platforms. You can drop a web link into the app and it will pull out the recipe with astonishing accuracy, saving ingredients and instructions and then making it easily searchable in your own private database. I also use this for printed cookbooks, scanning the text using my iPhone’s Live Text function, then cleaning it up slightly. Paprika also has some great list-making functions for creating a grocery list as well as keeping track of your “inventory,” which is especially helpful for tracking what’s in the produce drawer already.
What to do when your produce has seen better days
My share is delivered on Saturdays, which means by Thursday I’m usually getting a little panicked and the fridge is looking a little … limp. Soggy. Not quite in shape anymore. So what should you do? When I asked around, the answers tended to provoke exclamation points.
“Trim off anything soggy or rotting and cook it!” declares Adler. (Her book is devoted to ways to do this.) “Use a good deal of olive oil and salt so it’s delicious and you want to eat it!”
Stafford favors “freezing!” Anything wilted can quickly be turned into a green sauce, and big batches of pesto and schug can be frozen in ice cube trays, then popped out and stored in bags, for use throughout the season and into the winter months. Stafford transforms leafy greens into fritters and fried green meatless balls, which can also be frozen. She also prefers to cook greens before freezing them: “For instance, if I have a head of kale or chard that is looking tired, I’ll quickly sauté it, and either stash it in the fridge (to be used as a pizza topping or omelet filling) or freeze for a future use.”
Traditional canning, I’ve always found, is a bit beyond my reach, both in terms of labor and space (I do live in Brooklyn, after all). My freezer is tiny too. But a quick pickle is a great way to rescue and change the taste of most vegetables. Ly turns extra cabbage into kimchi or sauerkraut, and tomatoes that are overripe become homemade tomato sauce. Extra herbs can be frozen, too.
I get eggs in my CSA share, which means I’m sometimes drowning in those if we haven’t been eating them as regularly. But that’s a great opportunity to make an easy frittata, which uses up a dozen eggs and whatever random veggies are sitting around, especially the ones I don’t love. Slice it up and you can eat it throughout the week, and it makes a great office lunch, too.
For me, the key to using everything up has been in seeking out great vegan and vegetarian cookbooks. I eat some meat and dairy, but find that plant-based chefs have the most creative ideas for what to make. Similarly, the best uses for odds and ends and unexpected vegetables often lie in global cuisine; Indian food, for instance, (as in Kaimal’s cookbook) often lends itself to vegetarian cooking.
And Kaimal has the kind of suggestion that might be worth hanging on to for next year: “I choose the alternate week CSA box so that I can still enjoy what looks good at the farmer’s market on the off weeks,” she says. “Otherwise, I get overwhelmed!”
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past few years of CSA membership, it’s that if you find yourself getting overwhelmed, just imagine you’re in an elaborate cooking competition show, tasked with figuring out what to do with all this wonderful food that you’ve already paid for. That mindset gamifies the experience, encourages experimentation, and makes any kitchen flops feel a little less floppy. Yes, CSAs support local agriculture and biodiversity; they’re good to join no matter what. But your CSA box is only as good as your imagination — and everything tastes better when you’re having fun.
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What Oakland’s teachers union reveals about labor strikes in 2023.
The school year ended in dramatic fashion in Oakland, California.
Teachers went on strike on May 4, 2023, just three weeks before the last day of the academic calendar. The strike lasted seven school days. In negotiations, teachers not only fought for higher salaries and a better schedule, but for a set of what they called “common good” demands — like ensuring that all unhoused families in the district are expedited for Section 8 housing vouchers and implementing a task force on reparations. The strike had what appeared to be fairly widespread support based on turnout at school sites, though many caregivers and community members expressed confusion about the broader demands on climate and housing. Wasn’t this a salary renegotiation? Why were the teachers talking about transportation?
These demands are part of a broader movement among unions to bargain for the common good by including provisions in teachers’ contract demands that don’t just affect them directly, but also the quality of life for their students and the city. The movement for “common good bargaining” in the educational context — other industries are increasingly making common good demands too — was born during the Chicago teacher strike of 2012 and has been gaining steam ever since. In a country where increased privatization is too often the response to its most pressing problems, common good bargaining is a provocative counterforce. It’s a promising strategy for birthing new coalitions within communities that — in the best-case scenario — might get people talking about more than just third rail topics like charters, enrollment policy, and the “reading wars.”
But, like all organizing strategies, it also risks becoming little more than a label. And it may generate backlash from the parents, like those in Oakland, who didn’t understand why those issues were on the table in the first place.
As an Oakland Unified School District parent and a journalist who writes about education, I wanted to better understand the growing movement of common good demands. Here’s what I learned.
Common good bargaining is a national phenomenon
Increasingly over the past decade, teachers unions are introducing what they call “common good demands” alongside salary and benefit requests during bargaining. These demands can include defunding campus police, offering more eco-friendly and free transportation options, shielding students from evictions, and more.
In 2012, more than 25,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) included common good demands when they walked picket lines in front of 580 schools during a strike that lasted seven days; it was the first school strike the city had seen in a quarter-century. The teachers won salary increases and more job security — typical bargaining fare — but they also got more collective wins, like pushing back against the testing obsession of the education reform movement and fighting for more support staff, such as counselors and nurses, to serve their most marginalized students.
Proponents say that common good bargaining is a wise strategy because it ensures legally enforceable gains. In theory, if districts agree to common good demands during the bargaining process, they can be sued if they don’t follow through. Many well-intentioned resolutions either die before they ever get voted on by school boards or they get approved and then end up being discussed to death in committees. Too often, little action is actually taken. When leadership shifts — at the school board or superintendent level — these resolutions are often lost in the mix. And we’ve all seen how dramatic and dysfunctional school board meetings can be because of increased political polarization. A binding contract requires a board to follow through.
Teachers involved in this more expansive type of bargaining also argue that including common good demands is reflective of the reality of a teacher’s workday. If a portable classroom without air conditioning is too hot for kids to focus or an unhoused kid is constantly absent, it makes sense to address these issues during teacher bargaining. In this way, “working conditions” for teachers organically overlap with the most pressing problems of our time — particularly climate change and racial and economic inequality.
“Our students have needs, and if those needs aren’t being met, that’s impinging on our ability to do our job,” said Kasondra Walsh, a kindergarten teacher in an Oakland school serving low-income students. Walsh was on the bargaining team during her union’s recent renegotiation. “So often these things are outside of the control of a classroom teacher. So when the board fails to take action, our next option is to try to get something embedded into our contract.”
Sarah Wheeler, an educational psychologist and public school parent in Oakland, said, “Imagine the daily experience of a teacher. You’re underpaid, under-resourced, under-supported, and contending with all of these huge societal forces every day in your classroom. I can imagine that demanding real action on some of these larger common good issues could give you a sense of agency. It might even help you have the stamina to stay in the job.”
This isn’t an insignificant point when one considers that teacher turnover is at an all-time high in many states. Even if some of the common good demands are challenging to win or ultimately difficult to implement in cash-strapped districts, the act of advocating for them may feel like a restorative practice for some teachers.
Common good bargaining is not a new phenomenon
This expansion of bargaining terms is building steam in part because of a national group called the Bargaining for the Common Good Network, which first met a couple of years after that catalytic moment in Chicago. Hallmarks of a successful common good bargaining effort, according to the network’s materials, include: getting grassroots community groups to collaborate and inform which demands end up on the bargaining table, centering racial justice, and keeping the campaign going with community allies long after the union settles its contract.
Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian and the executive director of Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, where the network is housed, is quick to point out that common good bargaining isn’t new. Rather, he says, its resurgence is “a rediscovery of an old labor tradition. In the early 20th century, when teachers unions first formed, the teachers’ first priority was trying to reform the tax system because the schools were so underfunded. Teachers have always had an interest in fixing a school system that’s broke on purpose.”
Alex Han, the executive director of the progressive magazine In These Times, and Emma Tai, the executive director of United Working Families, writing last year in Nonprofit Quarterly, also trace the way that broader bargaining is a modernization of an old approach, not an innovation. “Beyond equity issues,” they wrote, “the CTF” — the all-female predecessor to the Chicago Teachers Union — “took on fights that could be seen now as ‘bargaining for the common good’— against a University of Chicago-led and business-backed ‘factorization’ of Chicago’s public schools, and in favor of fair funding.”
Today, Chicago stands out as a case study of what happens when teachers get real political power in a city. Last month, Brandon Johnson, a teachers union organizer, was sworn in as Chicago’s 57th mayor after an extremely tight race. Johnson started as a middle school teacher, leaving the classroom a decade ago in order to get involved in common good organizing. Under the mentorship of the late Karen Lewis, then Chicago Teachers Union president, Johnson was part of school closure protests in 2013 and an effort to elect the first teacher to the City Council in 2015. All the while, Johnson mentored other cities’ teachers unions on rabble-rousing for more than just higher pay, but also broader support for public school families.
Mayor Johnson wasted no time establishing his credentials. Some of his first executive orders were directed at getting money into programs for youth, and his first speech as mayor largely focused on his vision for a more collaborative and equitable public school system for all of Chicago’s kids.
Common good bargaining requires long-term organizing and awareness efforts
Johnson’s mayoral run didn’t come out of nowhere; it began when he quit teaching in 2012 to start knocking on doors. Likewise, successful common good bargaining campaigns need long runways, or else their demands can seem unintuitive at a tense moment in bargaining. According to Han and Tai, teachers unions must invest in “deep partnership” with community allies in the lead-up to the bargaining moment. They should also build relationships for the moments that require more civic stamina and engage in broader consciousness-raising efforts — door-knocking, listening tours, informational workshops, and any and all gatherings that make community members feel heard. Where that doesn’t happen, experience suggests, backlash is possible.
In a city like Oakland, for example, which has experienced three teacher strikes in the last five years, there is strike fatigue among some parents and educational advocates. After all, additional demands, especially those that require coordination across so many institutions, slow down negotiations, which means more days that kids are out of school during strikes (on the tail end of a deeply disruptive pandemic). As Jesse Antin, a public school parent, wrote in the Mercury News in response to the third strike, “The union is holding our kids hostage over common-good principles that we all agree on, but which have no place in a labor contract. Most of us are liberal people who choose to live in a liberal city, but activism has a time and place and this isn’t it.”
Many labor experts argue that too-narrow bargaining demands lost teachers unions much of their popular support. What became known as the Red for Ed movement — a wave of teacher strikes starting in West Virginia in 2018 that swept across states, including notoriously conservative ones — therefore felt like a profound departure. The resurgence of teachers unions, and community support for them, has coincided with a sense that educators are the canaries in the coal mine of democracy, demanding that our public institutions serve everybody better. Chris Jackson, a special education teacher who led the common good bargaining committee in Oakland last month, said, “Now we’re actually bargaining for the community. It’s not just about us; it’s about the students that we serve.”
Jackson said that the Oakland Education Association curated the common good demands from a mix of district data, information gathered from door-knocking, and their long-term organizational allies like the Black Organizing Project and Bay Area PLAN.
The strike in Oakland came to an end in mid-May with a tentative agreement that promised all union members a 10 percent raise, retroactive to November 1, 2022, and a 15.5 percent pay raise for most. It also promised all full-time union members an additional one-time payment of $5,000. (This was not significantly different from what the district offered before the strike started.) The union also won four common good demands, not technically in the contract language but as included memorandums of understanding.
Lakisha Young, the founder and CEO of Oakland REACH, says she is intrigued by a common good strategy in theory, but not to the point of prolonging a teacher strike. According to Young, common good bargaining should never be a justification for keeping kids out of school in a district where absenteeism is already such a problem. “The district isn’t the villain,” Young said. “The villain is the collective behavior of adults. When adults get distracted from reading and math, that’s the issue.”
For other organizers, though, common good bargaining can be part of a long-term strategy for labor. Stephen Lerner, a veteran organizer who got his start five decades ago in the farmworkers movement, is one such activist. “The way I’d look at it is, the labor movement needs to be more utopian,” Lerner said. “We need to have a bigger vision of what we want. Why do we exist if we are just taking the status quo?”
After experiencing last month’s strike in Oakland, public school parent Rebekah Otto told me, “My new question is: What else needs to change to make the common goods a reality? We need a district and union that have a good relationship, we need a city council more invested in pushing for change, we need new ideas about county and state advocacy.”
Garrett Bucks, founder of community organizing group The Barnraisers Project, argues that teachers unions, using tools like common good bargaining, have the potential to be the catalysts for radical collectivity in America’s cities, but too often default to smaller questions around power and status.
“Is the question here about the transformation of a city or is it a question of turf?” Bucks said. “In the last 15 years, there are a larger number of big-city teachers unions who are asking turf-based questions in more inspiring ways, and I like that, but it also bums me out. We don’t need adults on every side of education debates jockeying for power. We need organizing that is accompanied with soul searching about our relationship to our kids.”
Courtney E. Martin is the author of Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter’s School and a public school parent in Oakland, California.
The violence is further destabilizing the region.
The discovery of a mass grave containing 87 people n Sudan’s Darfur region is yet another atrocity in a brutal, three-month-long conflict in the country and an echo of infamous horrors of Sudan’s recent past.
Just two years ago, Sudan seemed a tentative success story after years of conflict, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and a decades-long dictatorship. But since April, conflict between the nation’s military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group has essentially halted Sudan’s hopes for a democratic future, created a humanitarian crisis, and threatened fragile regional stability. A series of ceasefires have failed to contain the violence, which began with rival military leaders battling for control after ousting the civilian transitional prime minister — offering little hope for an end to the brutality.
United Nations investigators announced the existence of the mass grave on Thursday, on the eve of a mediation effort hosted by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi and other regional leaders have convened in Cairo in an effort to keep the conflict in Sudan from spreading and further destabilizing the neighboring countries.
The bodies in the grave include members of a non-Arab-speaking ethnic group called the Masalit, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as others allegedly killed by the RSF forces and allied militia in the region over eight days in June. The dead include seven women and seven children, as well as people who died because they were unable to seek medical treatment for injuries sustained in the violence.
“I condemn in the strongest terms the killing of civilians and hors de combat individuals, and I am further appalled by the callous and disrespectful way the dead, along with their families and communities, were treated,” High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement Thursday.
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Elmurod Usubaliev/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The mass grave in West Darfur is a reminder of recent history. In 2003, the Sudanese government employed militias known as janjaweed — out of which the RSF eventually developed —to brutally suppress an uprising by the non-Arab population in the Darfur region. The janjaweed also brutalized the civilian population, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and displacing more than 2 million people.
The conflict in Darfur officially ended in August 2020 with a peace agreement between rebel groups in Darfur and the transitional government, but the violence continued, with militias targeting ethnic minority groups and many thousands of people still displaced.
Surrounding nations like Egypt and Ethiopia have a vested interest in keeping the conflict from spiraling even further and affecting their own countries — whether that’s via a spillover of the violence, or due to external displacement. But if past efforts are any indication, any end to the violence will be impermanent and unsatisfactory.
The African Union and a coalition of countries including the US and Saudi Arabia have attempted to broker peace between the two warring parties in the past three months, to no avail. Representatives from the RSF and the SAF headed to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Saturday to resume talks after a series of deadly clashes in Bahri and Omdurman, Reuters reported.
But given the repeated ceasefire violations and both the RSF’s and SAF’s efforts to derail Sudan’s transition to democracy, lasting peace is difficult to envision. The current conflict began out of the RSF’s desire to remain independent from the regular military, and the two sides have thus far proven unwilling to have substantive talks about a lasting ceasefire.
Furthermore, neither side appears invested in putting the country back on the path to democratic civilian rule, which the Sudanese people have been demanding for years.
The humanitarian crisis in Sudan shows no signs of stopping
After widespread civilian protest and a military coup overthrew dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, former Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok al-Kinani was fairly capably leading the country in its transition to democratic civilian rule.
But the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abd-al-Rahman interfered with that process, ousting Hamdok in October 2021. Though Hamdok was briefly reinstated a month later, he formally resigned in January 2022, and al-Burhan has been the de facto head of state since.
The conflict between al-Burhan and the RSF’s Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti, spilled over into widespread chaos and violence in the capital Khartoum in the early morning of April 15. Since then, several ceasefire attempts to allow for humanitarian aid and access have failed, around 2.8 million have been displaced according to the UN International Organization for Migration. Accurate information about the number of deaths in the conflict have been difficult to obtain, but may be as high as 3,000.
The fighting has spread from Khartoum, where it was initially concentrated, to the cities of North Khartoum, Omdurman, and Bahri, and to the Darfur region.
The humanitarian situation remains dire throughout the country; on Saturday, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths condemned the violence and highlighted the challenge of delivering humanitarian aid in conflict.
“We cannot work under the barrel of a gun,” Griffiths said in a statement. “We cannot replenish stores of food, water and medicine if brazen looting of these stocks continues. We cannot deliver if our staff are prevented from reaching people in need.” Griffiths also estimated that 13 million children, or around half of those remaining in Sudan, are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.
But without an enduring ceasefire, delivering such aid will be a persistent challenge, Griffiths wrote.“We need predictable commitments from the parties to the conflict that allow us to safely deliver humanitarian assistance to people in need, wherever they are.”
The SAF and RSF signed the Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan on May 11 of this year under which both sides promised to honor “our core obligations under International Humanitarian Law to facilitate humanitarian action to meet the needs of civilians” in the conflict.
International humanitarian law requires that “the dead are honorably interred,” preferably in individual graves and according to the religious rites of their society or group, and clearly marked with the dead identified should circumstances necessitate group burials.
The mass grave in Darfur seems to violate those standards, particularly given that evidence that civilians were prevented from collecting and identifying their dead — not to mention burying them in a manner accordant with both IHL and local custom.
The existence of the grave is also an indicator of targeted violence against non-Arab ethnic groups, in a brutal echo of the RSF’s beginnings as the janjaweed militias in 2003. The International Criminal Court, which charged the former dictator Bashir with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide for his part in the Darfur conflict, announced Thursday that it will again investigate killings in Darfur, as well as reports of mass rapes and gender-based crimes, looting, and crimes against children.
Multiple humanitarian groups also accused the RSF of holding more than 5,000 people — an estimated 3,500 of whom are civilians, including women and foreign nationals — in deplorable conditions in Khartoum, Reuters reported Friday. The RSF denied those allegations.
Airstrikes in urban areas like Khartoum and Omdurman have also been particularly destructive; a SAF strike on the RSF supply route through Omdurman on July 8 killed at least 22 and injured dozens more.
Sudan’s conflict threatens to further destabilize the whole region
Egypt’s attempt to mediate Sudan’s conflict has roots in its own concerns about its internal stability and economy, as Giorgio Cafiero of Gulf State Analytics wrote in Al Jazeera Wednesday. Egypt is poised to default on its debts, further downgrading its creditworthiness; inflation is at an all-time high; and wealthy Gulf nations that have lent the country billions over the years now seem uninterested in handing out any more money without guarantees that it will be put to good use.
Around 256,000 Sudanese refugees have fled north, but the Egyptian state and its social safety net lack the resources to properly support them. Furthermore, as Cafiero notes, Sudan was previously an important trading partner to Egypt, supplying agricultural products like beef and buying manufactured items in return. Without those agricultural imports, food prices will continue to rise — never a good sign for Egypt’s stability.
Thousands of Sudanese refugees have also come to Ethiopia, itself a site of ethnic strife and civil conflict. Though both Ethiopia and Sudan seemed to be on the on the path to more stable and democratic societies in 2019 under Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and Sudan’s transitional council, that stability was short-lived. Abiy and the Ethiopian armed forces came into conflict with the ethnic Tigray region and its Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, sparking a brutal civil war in 2021.
Conflict in both countries increases the possibilities of further disputes in the region, including over Al Fashaga, a lush agricultural area on Sudan’s eastern flank, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a massive hydroelectric dam which is located about 30 kilometers from Ethiopia’s border with Sudan. Instability in Sudan also has the potential to worsen violence and humanitarian crises in neighboring Chad, as a May Economist Intelligence Unit report outlined. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees entered Chad even before the conflict began in April, but large swathes of the country are already facing food shortages due to bad harvests and internal instability.
Neither party in the Sudan conflict has the impetus to back down, and appealing to the safety and security of the country and its people has thus far failed to produce any real stop to the bloodshed.
Though Egypt and other regional actors have a vested interest in keeping the violence from spilling over into their own territories, they may not be able to stop what may soon become a full-scale civil war.