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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
By 1991 only partial surveys of Sudan's land resources had
been made, and estimates of the areas included in different landuse categories varied considerably. Figures for potentially
arable land ranged from an estimate of 35.9 million hectares made
in the mid-1960s to a figure of 84 million hectares published by
the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources in 1974.
Estimates of the amount actually under cultivation varied in the
late 1980s, ranging from 7.5 million hectares, including roughly
10 or 11 percent in fallow, to 12.6 million hectares.
Substantial variations also existed in land classified as
actually used or potentially usable for livestock grazing. The
ministry and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) have classified about 24 million hectares as pastureland.
The 1965 estimate of land use classified 101.4 million hectares
as grazing land, and in 1975 an ILO-United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) interagency mission to Sudan estimated the total
potential grazing land at between 120 million and 150 million
hectares.
Forestland estimates also differed greatly, from less than 60
million hectares by staff of the Forestry Administration to about
915 million hectares by the Ministry of Agriculture and Natural
Resources and the FAO
(see Forestry
, this ch.). Dense stands of
trees only covered between 20 million and 24 million hectares of
the total forestland. Differences in land classification may have
been accounted for by use of some woodland areas for grazing and
some traditional grazing lands for raising crops. Given the
dearth of rainfall during the 1980s and early 1990s, the
ecological damage from mechanized farming, and the steady march
of desertification, discrepancies in these statistics had little
meaning in 1991.
It was generally agreed, however, that in the late 1980s
Sudan still had a substantial amount of land suitable for future
cropping. The ILO-UNDP mission believed that two-thirds of the
potential area for livestock grazing, however, was already in
use. In addition to land suitable for cultivation and livestock
grazing, Sudan also had about 76 million to 86 million hectares
of desert. Additionally, an area of about 2.9 million hectares
was covered by swamps and inland water, and about 280,000
hectares were occupied by urban settlements and other man-made
features.
Data as of June 1991
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