Do the world a favour

After 9/11, American consumers realised with a shock what gum Arabic really was, and that Sudan, that ‘pillar of international terrorism’, was its largest producer, exporting roughly three-quarters of the world's annual supply. Nothing could be done about it. One of the largest industries in the United States, soft drinks and food, cannot do without it, and is thus entirely dependent on the world's largest producer, Sudan.

In 1997 the US had imposed a general trade embargo on Sudan because of its relations with radical Islamist groups and its support for terrorists, without thinking about the consequences for its own food and soft-drinks industry. It immediately turned out that other Sahel countries did not produce nearly enough to meet the American demand for gum Arabic. American companies were forced to buy gum from European importers, gum that supposedly came from Chad and Nigeria, but had to a large extent been smuggled from Sudan. This arrangement was expensive, it benefited European companies, and it failed to have any impact on Sudan. Two major importers of gum, based in New Jersey, joined the National Soft Drink Association in asking their Congressional representatives to plead for the gum to be exempted from the trade embargo. And that was that: the exemption took effect in 1999.

Then came the 9/11 attacks. Within days, some American patriots were calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, because they had discovered that Osama bin Laden had a large stake in it; in the almost six years (1991 to 1997) that he had spent in Sudan, Bin Laden had acquired a 70 per cent share in the state-owned Gum Arabic Company. ‘Every time a soft drink is sold in the world, there is a chilling possibility that Osama bin Laden's wealth increases – and with it the power of his terrorist network to wage war on the West’, wrote the London Telegraph on 16 September 2001, identifying known Al-Qaeda dealers in the Sudanese gum trade.