The driver had obtained the documents. In August 2025, he was transporting 25 tons of gum arabic from western Sudan towards Chad with permission from authorities associated with the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary fighting Sudan’s army. That did not secure his passage. He told UN human-rights investigators that RSF intelligence personnel detained him for a week and forced him to unload the shipment, citing a decree stopping the trade. OHCHR’s account leaves its eventual destination unknown.
His predicament reaches beyond a confiscated truckload. Gum arabic—the acacia-tree product used to stabilise drinks and other manufactured goods—still has buyers abroad. Farmers need those buyers. But between harvesting the crop and collecting its value lie competing powers over possession, permission and payment. A trade can survive while the people doing its work lose their claim on the proceeds.
Some stolen gum became payment itself. In its April 2025 report, the UN Panel of Experts said RSF commanders acknowledged widespread looting and condoned it as compensation for commanders and soldiers, some unpaid for nearly a year. The Panel documented onward movement of looted gum towards neighbouring countries, including Chad. These were findings about 2024, not an explanation of what happened to the driver’s later load.
The distinction matters: a crop taken from a trader can retain its commercial value while its owner loses everything invested in it. Nor must goods be stolen for the producer’s return to shrink. OHCHR’s later interviews described layers of formal and informal charges across territory controlled by the RSF, the army and allied or local actors. Traders’ costs, the accounts indicated, were often pushed back onto producers through lower purchase prices.
The pressure also reaches the trees. Adam Ahmad, a farmer from near Al-Nahud, a trading town in western Sudan, told the Los Angeles Times in May 2026 that he had previously tapped four orchards at a time. Fear of RSF harassment had reduced that to one or two. His account describes a choice made before any sale: how much work to risk when reaching a buyer is dangerous.
Yet continued trade is not simply a story of theft. In March 2025, the industry association AIPG defended the legitimacy and traceability of exports, pointing to relocated activities in Port Sudan and secure corridors. RFI reported that month that sorting and cleaning had moved to the Red Sea port; a French industrialist described maintaining longstanding Sudanese suppliers. Neighbouring countries also grow gum. More exports from Chad cannot, by themselves, identify stolen Sudanese produce.
Those adaptations preserve an outlet for livelihoods. They do not settle who was paid along the way. OHCHR reported that looted gum could be resold and enter licensed export channels, while relabelling through neighbouring producing countries could obscure its origin. An acceptable export trail and an uncoerced purchase are different things.
Walking away is not an uncomplicated remedy either. OHCHR explicitly rejects treating responsible sourcing as a binary choice between continuing purchases and immediately withdrawing. Producers need a market, not merely a cleaner-looking supply chain elsewhere.