Natural resources

Petroleum is Sudan's major natural resource. The country also has small deposits of chromium ore, copper, iron ore, mica, silver, tungsten, and zinc.

The Nile is the dominant geographic feature of Sudan, flowing 3,000 kilometers from Uganda in the south to Egypt in the north. Most of the country lies within its catchment basin. The Blue Nile and the White Nile, originating in the Ethiopian highlands and the Central African lakes, respectively, join at Khartoum to form the Nile River proper that flows to Egypt. Other major tributaries of the Nile are the Bahr el Ghazal, Sobat, and Atbarah rivers.

Land use

Sudan’s total land area amounts to some 2 510 000 km². About half of this land is suitable for agriculture, of which about 170 000 km² are actually cultivated.
1993 estimates:

• 5% arable land
• 0% permanent crops
• 46% permanent pastures
• 19% forests and woodland
• 30% other areas
• 19 460 km² irrigated land

Environmental issues

Sudan suffers from inadequate supplies of potable water, declining wildlife populations because of warfare and excessive hunting, soil erosion, desertification, and periodic droughts (see Merowe Dam). For example, Sudan historically offered habitat for the endangered Painted Hunting Dog, Lycaon pictus; however. this canid is presently deemed to be extirpated or of very limited population in Sudan, due to the pressures of the human population as well as warfare/genocide.

Geographical regions

Northern Sudan, lying between the Egyptian border and Khartoum, has two distinct parts, the desert and the Nile Valley. To the east of the Nile lies the Nubian Desert; to the west, the Libyan Desert. They are similar—stony, with sandy dunes drifting over the landscape.

There is virtually no rainfall in these deserts, and in the Nubian Desert there are no oases. In the west, there are a few small watering holes, such as Bir an Natrun, where the water table reaches the surface to form wells that provide water for nomads, caravans, and administrative patrols, although insufficient to support an oasis and inadequate to provide for a settled population. Flowing through the desert is the Nile Valley, whose alluvial strip of habitable land is no more than two kilometers wide and whose productivity depends on the annual flood.

Soils

The country's soils can be divided geographically into three categories. These are the sandy soils of the northern and west central areas, the clay soils of the central region, and the laterite soils of the south. Less extensive and widely separated, but of major economic importance, is a fourth group consisting of alluvial soils found along the lower reaches of the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers, along the main Nile to Lake Nubia, in the delta of the Qash River in the Kassala area, and in the Baraka Delta in the area of Tawkar near the Red Sea in Ash Sharqi State.