Sudan is a country that has experienced three political upheavals in fewer than five years. The 2019 revolution that ousted Omar al-Bashir after thirty years of autocratic rule raised hopes for democratic governance and international re-engagement. The October 2021 military coup dashed those hopes. Then, on April 15, 2023, fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), plunging the country into a civil war that the United Nations described by mid-2024 as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Against this backdrop of cascading political collapse, wildlife conservation in Sudan has effectively ceased as an organised state function.
For pangolin conservation, Sudan matters for two distinct reasons. The country's savannah borderlands with South Sudan and Ethiopia host populations of Temminck's Ground Pangolin (Smutsia temminckii), Africa's most widely distributed pangolin species, though one under mounting pressure across its entire range. And Sudan's Red Sea coast, anchored by the commercial port of Port Sudan, has emerged as a documented waypoint in a lesser-discussed trafficking axis connecting Sub-Saharan poaching grounds to Arabian Peninsula and Asian markets via the Gulf of Aden.
Geography and Pangolin Habitat
Sudan is the third-largest country in Africa by area, covering approximately 1.86 million square kilometres. Its landscape is dominated by the eastern Sahara in the north and west, the Nile River corridor running north to south, and transitional Sahel and Guinea-Sudan savannah zones in the south and southeast. The northern two-thirds of the country are largely hyperarid and support minimal vertebrate wildlife. Pangolin habitat is concentrated in the southern strip: South Kordofan State, Blue Nile State, and the Gedaref region bordering Ethiopia.
These savannah zones receive enough seasonal rainfall to support the termite and ant colonies that Temminck's Ground Pangolins depend on. Historically, populations extended across a broad band of acacia-grass savannah from the Sudan-South Sudan border northward into the drier margins of Kordofan. The Dinder National Park, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve on the Sudan-Ethiopia border covering 10,291 square kilometres of miombo woodland and floodplain, represents the most formally protected piece of pangolin habitat in the country. Dinder is also one of the few protected areas in Sudan with any residual management capacity, though that capacity is severely diminished by the 2023 conflict.
The April 2023 Civil War and Institutional Collapse
The fighting that began in April 2023 initially concentrated in Khartoum, where RSF forces seized military bases and government buildings while SAF responded with airstrikes on urban areas. Within weeks the conflict had spread to Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile State, engulfing the very regions where residual pangolin populations and what remained of wildlife management infrastructure were located. The Wildlife Conservation General Administration, the federal body responsible for wildlife law enforcement and CITES implementation, lost functional capacity as government offices in Khartoum were looted and staff displaced.
International NGOs that had maintained conservation programmes in Sudan faced an immediate forced withdrawal. WCS Sudan, which had supported Dinder National Park management and wildlife survey work, evacuated international staff. The World Wildlife Fund, which had limited operations in Sudan, suspended field activities. The crisis created conditions of near-total enforcement vacuum across the country's wildlife-rich south, with no functioning rangers, no anti-poaching capacity, and no government oversight of wildlife offtake.
In this environment, bushmeat hunting, including pangolin collection, is almost certainly increasing. Communities displaced from agricultural land and deprived of livelihood by conflict have historically turned to wildlife exploitation as a survival strategy, a pattern documented in DRC, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and other prolonged conflict zones. While direct data from Sudan's current conflict is unavailable for obvious reasons, the pattern is consistent enough to make elevated pangolin pressure in southern Sudan a near-certainty.
The Red Sea Trafficking Corridor
Port Sudan, located on the Red Sea coast roughly 800 kilometres northeast of Khartoum, is Sudan's sole significant commercial port and a documented node in the African wildlife trafficking network. The port handles bulk commodities including agricultural exports, petroleum products, and manufactured imports, as well as significant informal trade flows with Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the UAE, Oman, and India across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
Wildlife trafficking intelligence collected by TRAFFIC and UNODC has identified the Red Sea corridor as an active route for pangolin products moving from Central and East Africa toward Gulf markets and, through transit ports like Dubai and Jeddah, onward to Southeast Asia. The logic of this routing is geographic: pangolins poached in South Sudan, DRC, or Tanzania can be moved north through Uganda, Kenya, or Ethiopia and then shipped from Port Sudan or Djibouti more directly to Gulf markets than the overland routes through West Africa would permit.
Sudan's prolonged period of international sanctions under the Bashir regime (which ended only partially after the 2019 revolution) meant that customs and border control capacity developed largely in isolation from international norms and best practices. Container inspection infrastructure at Port Sudan is limited, wildlife forensics are absent, and the collapse of the customs directorate during the 2023 conflict has, if anything, increased the port's attractiveness to criminal networks seeking low-scrutiny transit. INTERPOL's Project CHALCEDONY, which targeted East African wildlife trafficking routes, flagged the Sudanese Red Sea corridor as a gap in regional enforcement networks as early as 2021.
Traditional Medicine and Local Demand
Beyond its role as a trafficking transit country, Sudan has a domestic demand dimension that is less frequently discussed. Traditional medicine practice (known locally as tibb al-nabawi and various forms of folk medicine) has historically incorporated animal products including pangolin scales in communities along the Nile corridor and in Darfur. The scales are attributed protective and medicinal properties analogous to those claimed in Traditional Chinese Medicine markets, and while the scale of domestic consumption is far smaller than Asian markets, it does represent a local driver of pangolin hunting pressure independent of export demand.
Conflict conditions tend to intensify traditional medicine use as communities lose access to formal healthcare infrastructure. The fighting since 2023 has destroyed hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies across large parts of Sudan, potentially driving increased reliance on traditional remedies including wildlife-derived products. This dynamic has been documented in other conflict-affected countries and is a concern for wildlife law enforcement once conditions stabilise enough to permit resumed monitoring.
Historical Conservation Efforts
Prior to the 2023 war, Sudan had a limited but functioning wildlife conservation framework. The Wildlife Conservation General Administration was responsible for 23 designated protected areas covering approximately 178,000 square kilometres, though most had nominal protection only and lacked active management. Dinder National Park was the most functional, receiving periodic international support and hosting a small ranger force.
Sudan ratified CITES in 1982 and periodically submitted trade reports to the secretariat, though monitoring quality was consistently rated as inadequate. The African Wildlife Foundation and WCS had run intermittent programmes in Sudan, focusing primarily on bird surveys, elephant monitoring, and Dinder management support rather than specifically on pangolins. No dedicated pangolin survey has ever been conducted in Sudan, meaning baseline population data for Temminck's Ground Pangolin in the country is effectively absent.
Post-Conflict Recovery Priorities
When the conditions for conservation engagement in Sudan eventually return, whether through negotiated ceasefire, political transition, or gradual stabilisation, several priority actions are evident. A baseline wildlife survey of South Kordofan, Blue Nile State, and Dinder's buffer zones would establish current pangolin presence and density after years of conflict-era hunting pressure. Rebuilding the Wildlife Conservation General Administration's capacity, including ranger recruitment, training, equipment, and operational funding, is a prerequisite for any sustainable enforcement.
Port Sudan requires targeted customs training and scanner investment to close the Red Sea corridor gap. UNODC's Container Control Programme, which has been deployed at other East African ports, represents a model that Sudanese customs authorities have expressed interest in but which has not been implemented due to political and security constraints. Intelligence sharing with Ethiopian and Egyptian wildlife authorities would help track movement of pangolin shipments along the Nile corridor and Red Sea approaches.
The elephant in the room for Sudan's conservation recovery is funding and political will. The international community's engagement with Sudan post-2023 is primarily humanitarian, focused on food security, refugee support, and medical aid. Conservation funding will compete with these immediate priorities and is likely to remain marginal until a degree of political stability is established. Conservation organisations planning for Sudan's eventual stabilisation would do well to begin designing programmes now, so that shovel-ready interventions are ready to deploy when the security environment allows.
Connection to the Broader Sahel Crisis
Sudan's pangolin conservation crisis cannot be fully understood in isolation from the broader pattern of Sahelian state fragility discussed in related articles on Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Across the Sahel belt, a combination of climate stress, armed group proliferation, coup cycles, and withdrawal of international security partnerships has created an extended zone of near-governance-free territory in which wildlife trafficking operates with minimal impediment. Sudan's 2023 crisis represents the eastern extension of this pattern, connecting the Sahel's wildlife enforcement vacuum to the Red Sea shipping corridor and the Gulf trafficking market.
Regional coordination that spans from the Senegalese coast to the Sudanese Red Sea shore is technically logical but politically and operationally challenging given the number of fragile states involved. The African Union's Environment for Development initiative and the SADC Wildlife Programme operate in adjacent political spaces but have not achieved effective cross-Sahel coordination. Until this regional gap is addressed, the zone from Sudan's Red Sea coast westward through the Sahelian states to the Atlantic will remain one of the least-monitored sections of the global pangolin trafficking network.