Inequality is a major determinant of access to food in Sudan, with power, wealth and services concentrated within a central Sudan elite, leaving much of the country marginalized, impoverished and suffering repeated emergencies. This article discusses how food aid both contributed to the state’s exclusionary development process and tried but failed to assist crisis-affected populations in its peripheries. In the 1950s, food aid explicitly aimed to support the state but from the late 1980s, emergency food aid bypassed the state and its manipulation led to economic and political benefits for the Sudan government and its closely-aligned private sector. By the 2000s, the Sudan government controlled international food aid and established its own food aid apparatus, which it could use to further its political and military goals. New resilience-based food technologies developed in the aftermath of the 2008 food crisis, and applied in Darfur, have unintentionally facilitated the government’s strategies. This article argues that the ‘actually existing development’ resulting indirectly from food aid has benefited the government and private sector but has left most people facing a protracted emergency.

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