Grabbing of pastoralists’ traditional land to put it under the commercial farming system, which has
widely been adopted as a development and investment strategy in Sudan, is creating a cruel
dilemma of increasing both resource conflict and environmental degradation. This is one of the
fundamental reasons that the country has earned the reputation as a home of bloody civil wars and
the country is unlikely to see lasting peace until such issues have been addressed. My aim in this
research is to provide evidence-based information by mapping out the encroachment of large-scale
agriculture into transhumance migration routes in Gadarif State (eastern Sudan), with a two-fold
approach. First, I tracked the land-use/land-cover (LULC) change using satellite imagery. Second, I
interviewed transhumant pastoralists to obtain information about their perspectives on major
problems facing them along the routes in their seasonal journey. It is clear that state policy has failed
to provide support to pastoralists. Animal mobility in space and time are severely constrained. The
average of the annual encroachment of mechanized farming along the routes is 3 percent. The most
substantial LULC change occurred after 1999. Other challenges facing the routes are: lack of water
resources, design of the routes and degradation of rest places. Due to the abolition of their native
administrative system and lack of education, pastoralists have no way of influencing any decisions
that impacted their system.