Iraq the Kuwaitis stopped investing in Sudan. As imports were severely constrained and the price of inputs went up, tenants failed to make a profitable business and repay the costs for the services they received from the cooperative for cultivation.

The government plunged into economic crisis. Eager to get rid of strongholds of bureaucratic power of previous regimes that persisted in the sizable agricultural and irrigation bureaucracies and unions, the government reoriented its attention towards oil production, real estate and communications (El-Battahani and Woodward 2013). Between 1993 and 2005 there was little government investment and less recovery of costs from Waha. The scientific model of profit sharing through in which Amar believed was reversed by the laborers who had not formal share in the agreement. With limited investments, dieselpumps and local labor they started producing sorghum and vegetables for the local market. When the Government, like Amar, saw its income curbed it revoked the land allocation to the company and the tenants and leased the land to Cemal’s company which had been taken over by his son Omer at the time and named after his father (COM).

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Amar lost his tenancy without compensation. The COM enterprise bulldozed most of the cooperative scheme and constructed a new high-tech low-labour scheme on top of it. Whereas between 1990 and 2010 more than 2000 people worked on the land, COM employs only 600 people. Amar too was employed by COM through connections with two of his classmates from University of Khartoum who