India House, a former trading house converted into a business club, is at the corner of Hanover and Pearl Streets in the heart of Manhattan. Part of it is now an elegant restaurant, but away from the dimmed lights and conversation there is a reminder of the ancient trade in exotica: a cabinet of curiosities, in rare woods, with drawers crammed with raw materials essential to the US economy. In the eleventh drawer, dedicated to resins, is a heap of fine granules labelled “gum arabic”.
Customers of the nearby organic supermarket chain Whole Food don’t know that their shopping bags contain tiny quantities of this acacia resin, also known as E414. Without it, “the black colouring in Coca-Cola would rise to the surface of the bottle,” said Frederic Alland, head of the gum import and processing business Alland & Robert: “We wouldn’t have fizzy drinks.” No sweets or medicine, since gum fixes the coating; no yoghurt, thickened by gum; no wine, since gum makes the tannins less harsh; no newspapers – gum fixes the ink.
“Most people consume gum arabic every day,” said Sudanese professor Hasan Abdel Nour. Pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food, flavoured drinks, textiles, printing, hi-tech: all depend on it. According to the Bible and the Qur’an, it fed the Jews wandering in the desert, and the Egyptians used it 4,500 years ago as part of the mummification process. Its source is the gum belt, a band of acacia trees linking Senegal to Somalia, between the Sahara and the equatorial rain forest. Chad and Nigeria are now major producers but they cannot rival Sudan, which produces the best quality, “hashab”, and half of global supply. Sudan’s supply is so indispensable to the West that, without the knowledge of US consumers, trade has continued between the shores of the Red Sea and the eastern seaboard of the US despite the embargo imposed on Sudan in 1997.
“The more the US imposes trade sanctions on us, the more gum arabic we export to them,” said Isam Siddig, a Sudanese businessman. Resin is essential to fizzy drinks, the ultimate symbol of US capitalism. “We may have our ethics, but don’t take away our Coca-Cola,” said a US expert on Sudan. The Washington Post describes this US foreign policy as “soda pop diplomacy”. Conscious of its history under Anglo-Egyptian rule, Sudan wants to set up an OPEC-style gum monopoly with Chad and Nigeria. In 2007, the former Sudanese ambassador to the US, John Ukec Lueth Ukec, brandished a bottle of Coca-Cola before journalists and threatened to cut off the supply of gum in retaliation for US condemnation of the massacres in Darfur. This could have sparked a “soda war”.
’We can’t imagine Sudan without gum’
Khartoum, with a population of 3 million (6 million with its conurbations), spreads around the meanders of the Blue and White Niles, where black Africa and the Arab world meet. Spice and sesame seed merchants shelter in their stalls from the sandstorms and stifling heat of the dry season of March, which is also the time to harvest gum, the fourth biggest agricultural export and an object of national pride. “We can’t imagine Sudan without gum,” said a merchant. “It is Sudan’s gold,” said another, “we have much more of it than oil.”
About 800km west of Khartoum, on a straight road across the savannah, are the huge acacia plantations of Kordofan and Darfur. The earth is red. Baobab trees rise up in silhouette against the desert horizon. At the end of the road is the small town of En-Nahud, the Sudanese capital of gum arabic.
Farmers labour to extract the sap. Late afternoon is the ideal time to tap the acacia bark; two weeks later the resin seeps from the cut and forms small viscous balls. “Acacia means life,” said Ajab Aldoor, who for 40 years now has repeated actions with his machete passed down from father to son for centuries. Like most of the farmers, he doesn’t know how the product is used. After he sells it to a local merchant for a few Sudanese pounds, it is washed, dried and crushed, and sent in hessian bags to the city of El-Obeid to be sold at auction. It then travels 2,000km to Port Sudan on the coast of the Red Sea, where it is loaded onto container ships and transported to western factories for processing. The final product is a fine white powder, re-exported all around the world.
Traders believe the outlook is good: stimulated by the growth of emerging economies, global demand has doubled since 1985, and is going up by 3% a year. “The main growth areas are soda, vitamin drinks and food supplements,” said Paul Flowerman, head of an importing company, PL Thomas. “Everything favours a return to natural gum,” said Thomas Yves Couteaudier, who wrote a World Bank study of the market. A Khartoum trader pointed out that the West now favoured organic produce, and Sudan produced the best gum in the world, worth $40m a year to Sudan.
Trade embargo
Sudan is still an outlawed state, on every diplomatic blacklist, and President Omar al-Bashir and his military regime are both dominant and paranoid – policemen and soldiers are stationed outside strategic buildings and bridges. The oil boom has opened Sudan to the outside world: the China National Petroleum Corporation and Malaysian and Indian companies share the extraction of 500,000 barrels a day, but there have been no western oil companies there since Canadian Talisman Energy left in 2002. Chinese and Libyans can be seen in the restaurants, but it is rare to see an American or European. Businesses can only take cash, no cards, because of the US embargo.
Last December in Washington, lobbyists, diplomats, journalists and politicians took a keen interest in southern Sudan’s referendum on independence, since if the vote went ahead peacefully (which it did), it would end the long diplomatic freeze between Sudan and the US. Among them was Ted Dagne, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, considered one of the brains behind US foreign policy towards Sudan over the last 20 years. Although relations deteriorated after the coup that brought Bashir to power in 1989, Dagne said “that the US administration really began to take an interest in Sudan” only from 1992, when Sudan was seen as promoting Islamist extremism, crushing rebellion among the Nuba and harbouring terrorists, including the late Osama bin Laden.
Dagne says he formed a discreet network, the Council, with eight senior officials and politicians alarmed by Khartoum’s actions. From the 1990s this lobby influenced the hardening of US attitude towards Sudan. In 1993 five Sudanese men were implicated in the first attack against the World Trade Centre, and the Clinton administration put Sudan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. When Dagne told influential legislators about the southern Sudanese rebels’ vague desire for independence, they gave financial and logistical aid.
In 1997 the hawkish Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and John Prendergast, East Africa specialist at the National Security Council, advocated confrontation with Sudan. Noting “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the US”, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13067 on 3 November 1997, imposing extensive trade sanctions.
Relations deteriorated further over the next decade: 300,000 dead and two million displaced in Darfur led President George W Bush to impose new sanctions, extended by President Barack Obama. The US froze Sudanese assets, banned financial transactions and the import and export of goods and services. Sudan was forced to survive on the margins of the western economy.
’That’s the problem with sanctions’
“American Home Products, which makes the medicine Advil, realised that people would die if we couldn’t get this gum,” said lobbyist Janet McElligott. There was a similar problem with fizzy drinks, for which “Sudanese hashab gum gives the best emulsion. It’s a key element of the recipe,” according to Dennis Seisun, vice president of IMR International. The former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright realised that that was the problem with sanctions: you don’t always see who you are really punishing (1).
Without a suitable substitute, it was vital to ensure the continued supply of Sudanese gum. In 1997 Paul Flowerman, whose business is based in Morristown, New Jersey, was the sole importer of E414 into the US, but that business was at risk from the blockade. McElligott, who at that time advised the Sudanese ambassador to the US, Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, said Flowerman dined at the ambassador’s private residence with clients from American Home Products, Coca-Cola, and Fanta. Mohamed, a good tactician, saw that if he could get an exemption for gum, that would open the way for other adjustments to the embargo. He agreed to give US manufacturers priority, and provided information to support their argument: jobs would be threatened, and US agribusiness would be at the mercy of French gum traders active in Sudan.
Most of the US importers are based in New Jersey, so they turned to their state representative, the Democrat Robert Menendez, who approached the White House, Clinton’s security adviser and the State Department. Albright got a call from Menendez: she asked him why he wanted an exemption for Sudan, when he was vehemently opposed to any exception to the trade embargo on Cuba. (His parents are Cuban immigrants.) He answered: “Jobs.”
The Clinton administration passed the Sudanese sanctions regulations in July 1998, which stipulated that the trade embargo applied to everything except gum arabic; two years later Menendez slipped this exception into regulations on international trade. (That year, his campaign accounts showed that he had received donations from Chris Berliner, vice president of the gum trading company Importers Service Corporation, the carbonated drinks industry and the Coca-Cola group. According to Steven Glazer, journalist on the weekly Urban Time News, between 1997 and 2002 Menendez received $55,669 in donations from the soda, agribusiness and pharmaceutical industries.)
Menendez, who declined to be interviewed, wrote to The Washington Post in September 2000, saying no one should go into business with criminals; but if those criminals controlled an indispensable product, the market would find a way to get it on to the shelves. One of the “criminals” referred to was no doubt Bin Laden, since a 1996 memo from the US State Department, based on CIA information, confirmed he had a quasi-monopoly on Sudanese gum exports (2). “It is still possible that every time someone buys an American soft drink they are helping to fill Osama bin Laden’s coffers,” the Republican senator Frank Wolf had complained to Congress on 7 September 2000.
The US government asked Flowerman for the names of those in charge of Sudan’s gum companies and their shareholders. According to Flowerman, this information was passed directly to Albright and her successors.
US double-dealing
Exports were not interrupted while the State Department investigated these rumours. The recall of ambassadors, US air strikes on a pharmaceutical factory at Al-Shifa in August 1998, accusations of genocide in Darfur and reciprocal animosity have made little difference. “America and Sudan hate each other, but they need each other,” said a businessman. Trade may have been reduced by the imposition of quotas, but it is surprisingly regular.
US double-dealing does poison political life at home though. The Congressional Black Caucus wants to cut this final commercial link with a regime it holds in contempt, and in 2007, Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters tried in vain to do this with private bill HR 3464. But the gum lobby, headed by Menendez who is now a senator, works to maintain commercial relations with Sudan to preserve US consumer habits. All this harms US credibility on Sudan. If the US abandons sanctions against gum arabic, said The Washington Post on 10 September 2000, its claim to have an ethical foreign policy will have no authority. In Khartoum, attitudes fluctuate between mockery and pride that they are indispensable.
Despite the threats of its ambassadors, Sudan knows it is too dependent on its US clients to retaliate. According to the US Treasury office that deals with sanctions, 25 licences have been issued to date; 8,800 tons of gum were imported in 2009 and 10,450 in 2010. Flowerman claims five licences have been issued for a total of 4,000 tons. Gum traders stay silent when Sudan comes up in conversation, but to reduce the risk of bad publicity among the US public, importers now work with USAID (United States Agency for International Development) to diversify their sources of supply.
The US takes advantage of its powerful development network to meet the strategic needs of its agribusiness industry. Senegal, Chad and Nigeria now export large amounts of gum – Sudan controlled 90% of the trade 20 years ago, now that has dropped to 50%. Manufacturers have also turned to Kenya and Uganda, according to Seisun.
What about growing acacia trees in Europe? “It would not be profitable,” said Alland. “It is not hot enough, and the plantations would take up too much space.” Even so, French gum traders sell their processed gum with the label “Made in France”; a French manufacturer said he got his gum from 14 African countries before processing it. “We use our own recipes. The raw gum is unrecognisable from the product that leaves our factories”. The gum “loses its origin” before being re-exported to the US and others. But even if Americans get their gum from France or Italy, “it is still Sudanese gum,” said Siddig.
The whole process is distorted, according to Mansour Khalid, former president of the board of directors of the Gum Arabic Company. There are unverifiable rumours that exporters avoid the sanctions by sending the gum through southern Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, before re-exporting it to the West. In all, an estimated additional 5,000 tons annually reach the US, via European manufacturers.
With Southern Sudan’s vote for independence in January, Sudanese diplomats now hope the peaceful partition will mean the lifting of US sanctions and an increase in exports of gum. This is one of the things the US special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, is offering Sudan to persuade it to go in the direction it wants (along with removing Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism). US traders watch what is happening in Darfur, where stability would revive acacia cultivation and secure supply of E414. “The acacia is a fertile tree, and planting it is an ecological act,” said Jack Van Holst Pellekaan, a consultant with the World Bank who is running a programme to reforest Southern Sudan. He describes the partnership between gum-producing countries and their western clients as a win-win situation, and is sure gum arabic can bring peace. Flowerman described the resin as a “unifying” force that helps to emulsify US-Sudanese commercial interests.
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