Osama Daoud Abdellatif explains how he does business against a backdrop of sanctions and crises, writes Katrina Manson

When doctors told Osama Daoud Abdellatif, Sud­an’s leading businessman, that he should take it easy and go back to tending cattle as a way to calm his ulcer, the result was all too predictable. Within months the head of Dal Group, the country’s biggest conglomerate, had hatched a plan to start Sudan’s largest and most successful dairy farm.

Now, only a few years later, Khartoum, the hot, dusty capital that is home to economic crisis, a pariah president and international sanctions, is also home to a state of the art 600,000-litre-a-day dairy processing factory. And while Mr Abdellatif was raising a herd of 50 cows just outside the capital at the time of his doctor’s advice, he now has more than 3,800 – with a further 3,000 arriving in March. Thanks to animal fodder grown on 25,500 acres of irrigated land nearby, they are also well fed, pushing milk yields 25 per cent higher than average in the western countries from which the cows have been imported.

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