A tough transition: unrest in Sudan

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Ora Ugumbi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Europe smells pretty bad. Increasingly crowded centers and an unfortunate legacy of communist-era homes have been choking the continent's cities for years. Now, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine is making it even harder to clear the air.

And our famous Big Mac Index is a burger-based way to show purchasing power parity across currencies. But what about the environmental impact of that burger, its calorie content, its protein power parity. For green-minded eaters, we introduce our Banana Index.

But first, this morning in Sudan, residents of the capital city, Khartoum, woke to the sound of gunfire. Clashes across the country between the ruling military junta and a rival paramilitary group have spilled into their third day. Nearly 100 civilians are reported to have been killed, and medics are warning of difficulties at hospitals. But it wasn't meant to be this way. The African state had been in the process of a transition to civilian rule. And this month was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era. An agreement to end hostilities between the warring, power-hungry factions was on the table. But as fighting spreads across the nation, that transition now appears to be in jeopardy.

It's been nearly 5 years since the start of the Sudanese revolution and the overthrow of the country's longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir.

Tom Gardner is The Economist's East Africa correspondent.

Since then, there has been a coup d'état and a military junta has been running the country. The armed factions in charge, however, are divided, and the country is at the mercy of two warring military factions. And there is a real chance now that this is about to slide into a civil war, and certainly the final nail in the coffin of of her hopes towards democracy.

Who are these two factions and why has conflict broken out now? Give us a bit of background.

Sure. So for months, tensions had been building between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. He's the de facto leader, president of Sudan, the head of the ruling junta, the army, and his deputy, who is Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, better known as Hamiti, who's the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF. The RSF is a paramilitary unit that grew out of the Janjaweed militias, which are known for having committed genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan in the mid-2000s. They evolved into this paramilitary unit, the RSF, which is almost as powerful as the national army itself. Ultimately, this is about who will control the direction of Sudan's political transition and the country. It's essentially a struggle for power between this very complex constellation of not just these rival generals and armies, but also the political parties, militias, rebel leaders, and even the foreign powers allied to them.

Okay, Tom, tell me a bit more about the RSF. How have they got so powerful?

So the RSF was created by former President Bashir basically as a counterweight to the army and the intelligence services. I mean, this is all part of his strategy of divide and rule in order to kind of coup-proof his own regime, which ultimately obviously failed. But he has, in creating the RSF with his own command structure, its own funding, he basically created a second army for the country, which is a very dangerous thing to do, of course. Mr. Dagalo, the man at its helm, he's since grown fabulously wealthy, or reported to have grown fabulously wealthy, due to the RSF's control of various extractive industries such as the country's gold mines. Part of the problem then is you have two rival security forces, both with their roots in Bashir's government. And over time, over the last few years, it's been pretty clear that this is a problem that's not going away. Trouble was really obviously brewing. The junta had, in the days before this most recent escalation, had warned of an imminent confrontation between itself, the army, and the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF.

Okay, so you say that trouble has been brewing, but what actually lit that powder keg and started the violence that we've seen over the past few days?

Well, the backdrop really is this political agreement that's been hashed out over the last few months that was supposed to lay the foundations for a transition back to civilian rule with elections in a couple of years. But that agreement would have required that the RSF be integrated into the army, the creation essentially of a single national army under civilian oversight. That prospect of a settlement appears to have hastened the showdown. I mean, both men could stand to lose considerably from this agreement. It seems both sides would rather fight it out than cede ground to the other, and I think in the last few days, elements within the army seem to have decided the time was right to take on the RSF and deal with the problem of a rival army, essentially, for once and for all.

And how's that going? How's the fighting played out so far?

Well, the real alarming thing is the fighting has broken out in Khartoum, in the center of the country, in the capital. We've had airstrikes right from basically the first few hours on April 15th. There was fighting between the two armed forces, heavy artillery, rockets in the center of Khartoum, residents cowering in their homes. You know, I was texting someone in Khartoum this morning who described it as like Call of Duty. You know, they're hearing airstrikes the National Air Force aiming to target the bases of the RSF, which are in the capital city. So it's a really dangerous situation.

Tom, you mentioned that foreign powers are allied to both sides. What are the international dimensions to this conflict, and how are these foreign allies weighing in?

I think the most important one is Egypt. Egypt has had historic ties to the military in Sudan, and they are very much backing General Burhan, the de facto president. Indeed, there were videos released early on in the conflict on April 15th by the RSF which appeared to show captured Egyptian soldiers or pilots at the Meroe airbase in the north of the country. Meanwhile, Mr. Dagalo Hamiti, he's close to, for example, Isaias Afwerki, who's the president of neighboring Eritrea, a country known for meddling in the affairs of its neighbors. But he has also counted previously on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as his patrons. It's not clear today whether they are backing him. He certainly is seeking their support. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has reportedly spoken to both leaders, and he's called for an end to the fighting. International aid is also a factor. The World Food Programme has had to temporarily halt its work in Sudan after 3 of its staff were killed in the west, in Darfur. All of this, of course, makes things very difficult for Sudan's collapsing economy. This agreement that was due to be signed would have opened the door to foreign aid and to debt relief, and that's now more distant than it has been even before the fighting.

Do you think that the fighting could be contained, or does it look like this could get worse?

The trouble is both sides have said they will not stop to negotiate, and for example, Mr. Daglo on day one describes General Burhan as a criminal who would either be captured or die like a dog. So that kind of rhetoric is not encouraging. The African Union and America have both called for a stop to the fighting and for talks for restoring civilian rule to resume, as has the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD, a regional bloc which held an emergency meeting. It's agreed to send the presidents of Djibouti, Kenya, and South Sudan to Khartoum as soon as possible to try to reconcile both parties. But certainly there are, I think, many Sudanese who think, or maybe fear, that the two sides will need to fight it out for a bit longer before they decide to come to the table, that this is a dispute that needs to be settled through force of arms or it won't be at all, which is a depressing thought, I have to say. But at the moment, prospects of peace talks to bring this conflict to an end are not looking particularly optimistic.

Tom, thank you so much for joining me this morning.

Thank you.

Mention air pollution and you might think of crowded megacities like New New Delhi or Beijing. Europe, on the other hand, prides itself as a green kind of place, the land of 15-minute cities where residents cycle from work to yoga classes. But that isn't quite the full picture. Those cyclists travel on streets that are packed with diesel engines. And much of the continent still uses fossil fuels to heat homes, creating clouds of particulate matter which clogs human lungs. All of this adds up to a big, smelly, smoggy problem.

Europe is a rich place, and most rich places are pretty clean, they have good air quality. Europe on the whole is way below America, for example.

Stanley Pinyal is our Brussels bureau chief and writes the Charlemagne column in The Economist.

96% of people who live in cities have air quality which is below World Health Organization standards. Across the EU, over 300,000 people die prematurely from poor air quality every year. To put that in perspective, that's nearly half the number of excess deaths caused by COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic.

Okay, so Europe's cities have an air quality problem, but how bad are we talking about here?

So to be clear, Helsinki's not Delhi, right? And Paris isn't anything as bad as Beijing, but it's far worse than people would imagine. If you look at comparable cities in rich countries like the G7, the most polluted ones, are in Europe. And while Europeans might pride themselves on their environmental regulations, one thing that most people would find surprising is that the towns with the best air quality in Europe are roughly as clean as those with the dirtiest air quality in America. Now, there are a couple of reasons for that. I think probably the principal reason is Europeans live densely, right? European cities are very dense. So if you compare Paris to New York or Madrid to Houston, you're gonna have way more people living often in a smaller footprint, and that obviously has an impact on pollution.

And which European cities are seeing the worst air pollution?

So in Europe, as elsewhere, air quality is a result of geography and economics. So start with geography. The most polluted big city in Europe is Milan. That is largely because Milan is in the Po River Basin, which is hemmed in basically by the Alps. So that's the geography bit. And the economics bit is that there's also a lot of industry and a lot of farming and nowhere for the pollution to go. So that's one big kind of center of pollution in Europe. The other one is more kind of linked to economics, and that's in Central and Eastern Europe. For decades, coal deposits in the region meant that energy was very cheap, and that was used abundantly by communist-era factories and industries that had an almost endless appetite for it. And there was enough coal byproduct left over to be used in home furnaces. Now these, for good reason, were known as smokers and they let locals heat their homes very, very cheaply. But even as the communist-era industry disappeared a long time ago, those smokers and the poorly insulated homes that they were heating, they still remain.

Okay. And given all these historical factors, what would it take for cities in Central Europe to improve their air quality?

So across Europe, the air quality is getting better. And part of the reason is that Europe is getting richer and Central Europe in many ways is catching up to the European average. So things are going in the right direction. Once you get to a certain level of wealth, people aren't willing to tolerate smog. They're not willing to tolerate stuff which they know is bad for their health, for the health of their children, and society can afford, for example, better technologies. So as Central Europe gets richer, it is improving in this way. People are pushing for change, and the region is on a clear trajectory to easier breathing. So take Krakow, which is a fairly rich city in the south of Poland. I spoke to some air quality campaigners, a group called Polish Smog Alert, which lobbies for improvements and air quality. And a guy there, Andrzej Gula, he had a memorable line. He said, Krakow used to be known for its air being so thick that you could taste it. But thankfully, that started to change as Krakow got richer, as Poland got richer. So a decade ago, that group led a campaign to ban the use of wood and coal for home heating in Krakow, which is a ban that came into force in 2019. And in order to encourage that transition, subsidies were introduced. To encourage less polluting technologies such as heat pumps, and some things were banned. So a mix of kind of nudges and regulation pushed Krakow towards cleaner air. So that's the trend overall in Poland and in other bits of Central and Eastern Europe. But things have run into a bit of a challenge recently.

And tell us a bit more about that.

So the war in Ukraine has really taken the wind out of the sails of better air campaigners. It's just not the priority now. The price of energy shot up. There's been a cost of living crisis, inflation crisis in much of the region. And so these luxuries, if you want, of continuing to improve on air quality have been put a little bit on the back burner. So, for example, in Poland, limits on the sales of the smokiest coal grades were suspended and many people started burning just about anything they could find in their home furnaces. So for the purposes of reporting the Charlemagne column in this week's issue, I went down to a place called Nowy Targ, which is in southern Poland, and you could really tell that people were putting stuff in their furnaces that wasn't coal, and it probably wasn't wood, and I can't imagine what it was, but it really smelled like rotten boots sometimes. And that is actually kind of more or less encouraged by politicians who are saying, you know, ignore these kind of goody-two-shoes environmental rules during the energy crisis, just do whatever you need to keep warm. So there's still clearly a lot to do, but if you're a glass-half-full type of person, you might think that there's actually an opportunity here because Europe's still bad air essentially gives something for green-minded politicians, green-minded policymakers to work with.

In what way?

Well, much of what is needed to de-smog the air is the same thing that you would do to bring down climate emissions as well. So the EU speaks of cleaner air as a co-benefit of cutting emissions, right? The EU has very ambitious plans to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. And just by doing that, the quality of the air should improve. Now, you can flip that essentially. There are many voters, especially in Central Europe, who generally don't see the urgency in combating climate change. They kind of see it as a luxury problem that other Europeans have imposed on them. But a policy that can be shown to make local air cleaner as well, that's a much easier sell for people.

But with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, what chances do such initiatives have?

So it's true that making the case for cleaner air over the past few months, it's been hard. It just hasn't been front of mind. But even a cloud of throat-burning smog has a silver lining, as it were. The energy crisis is going to cause a bump in unhealthy air in the short term. There is no doubt about it. But in the long term, there may be benefits because of the crisis. Things like renewables, things like heat pumps are being deployed faster than they otherwise would've been. And this is going to pay dividends not just with energy security, not just with climate change, but also with the air quality too. So the hope is that in the longer term, you're going to see a durable improvement that in many ways is a continuation of what we've seen over the last couple of decades. So with any luck, hopefully Europe's next energy crisis will be a little bit less pungent.

Stanley, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, I'm just a real sucker for a steak. Ribeye, preferably. Look, I know I should probably be eating tofu. That luscious steak comes from a soya bean-munching, methane-belching, water-glugging environmental problem on hooves. I could just cut out the middle moo and eat what the cow eats, the premise of environmental veganism. That would dramatically cut my carbon footprint. But the trade-off isn't that simple. How much do I have to eat to get enough enough protein, to get enough calories even. Helpfully, my colleagues have come up with a graphical tool to help with striking these balances.

So to make the relative carbon impact of different foods easier to understand, or to digest if you will, we propose a banana index.

Sondre Solstad is a senior data journalist at The Economist.

What we've done is we compared popular foodstuff on weight, calories, and protein. To the banana, which is a fruit that's middle of the road in all 3 categories. And you can check it out online and look up your favorite foods.

Okay, I have the link. I have the page up. I see actually 3 charts here: emissions by weight, emissions by calorie count, emissions by protein content. There's a whole bunch of different circles on there spread out broadly left to right. A few of them are marked out: meat-free burger, almonds, rice, salmon. All the way at the right, beef burger. Talk me through it. What's going on here?

So there's 3 different charts, and on all 3 charts you have these circles. Each circle is a food, like a beef burger, beef mince, meat-free burger, almonds, rice, what have you. And their position is how good or bad they are compared to a banana. So if you're further to the right, then your emissions are higher than a banana per calorie, per protein, or by weight. And if you're on the left, then you're doing better than a banana. So producing 1 kilogram of beef mince causes as many emissions as 109 kilograms of bananas. So that's a banana score of 109. But of course, beef is more nutritious than bananas. And in fact, if you do it by calorie, the banana score is 54, meaning that it's 54 times the emissions of bananas adjusted for calorie content. So a banana score of 54 means that if you only care about calories and the climate, that beef needs to be roughly 54 times more tasty than bananas for it to be worth it for you. Now, if you look at protein, beef is better, so it's a 7, but it still needs to be 7 times more tasty. And so that's why we came up with this index where you can essentially compare foods and say, is a beef steak 54 times as delicious as bananas? Maybe yes.

Thick cut, medium rare ribeye steak, absolutely 54 times or more, more tasty than a banana for sure. Sorry. Sorry.

Yeah, no, sure, sure. But if you care about climate and deliciousness equally, then that should make you indifferent between the two.

Or as much environmental stuff does, just make me feel guilty about the choices that I ultimately make and want to make.

Perhaps, though I do think that there is a tendency to see this in terms of losses, like everything you you give away. Maybe a different framing could be, here are things I'm kind of indifferent about. I can do stuff that's much better for the climate if I just make a slight modification to my diet. Needn't be going full vegan, but it can just be switching, say, pork for beef.

Or chicken for pork. I mean, let's do a little comparison here. I can see the chicken breast does pretty well, comes under bananas on the protein graph.

Yes. So the chicken breast scores 11 bananas by weight and 4 by calorie, but actually less than 1 by protein. What that means is that if you buy a ton, 1,000 kilograms of chicken breast, it's going to cause a lot of emissions. Even if you measure it by calorie, it's going to be worse than bananas, but if you do it by protein, then it's going to be better. The same thing applies to salmon, which is also relatively carbon-friendly if you think about protein, though worse if you think about calories or weight. Though I should mention that unsurprisingly plant-based alternatives to meat do even better than these. So, meat-free burger, for instance, is just 1/5 of the emissions of bananas per gram of protein. And with, say, beef being, I think it's 7 times the bananas per protein, that just makes a meat-free burger roughly 35 times better than a beef burger per protein. I should mention though that there are some plant-based foods that score pretty horribly on the protein basis, such as grapes, sugar, coconut milk, which is obviously because they barely contain any protein at all.

But I don't choose grapes in particular for protein content, or indeed many foods for their protein content. Sometimes it's just that's what I want to eat. Is that how this should or could be used?

Yeah, I think so. It's not necessarily about telling you exactly what to eat. It is just about giving you the information on how they compare with regards to the climate. So some foods like croissants are bad per kilogram, but really good by calorie, for instance. And some foods are just really good across across the board.

I've been sort of messing around here while you've been talking, and it seems that if I can give up my beef, the answer is I'm just going to keep piling almond butter into my mouth. It's second best on emissions by weight. It's best on emissions by calorie count. It's best on emissions by protein content. That's the answer. We just need to change the whole global agriculture system to make almonds for almond butter.

I think almonds are great. I think a lot of foods are great. I think in the end, it's about making better choices, and that depends on having better information, and our banana index is one way to try to do that. We looked at some polling and actually most people say they want climate labels on their food, at least in Europe. So there were 12 countries surveyed. In every single one, people want these labels. Climate change is obviously a huge problem and roughly 25% of emissions are associated with food production in some form. So making better choices I think could be important to make a difference.

Well, thank you for helping to inform my choices, André.

My pleasure, my pleasure. Anything I can do.

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