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India commits $4.2 billion to buy farm land from Ethiopia

Didn’t the dumb regime in Ethiopia say that 6 million people are currently facing starvation because of rain shortage? If so, how are the Indians and Saudis going to grow crops on the land they are buying from the regime — the same land that we are told cannot produce food for Ethiopians?

How about the question of sovereignty? These land leases and international agreements that are signed by the illegitimate regime in Ethiopia that has no mandate to govern are serious threats to Ethiopia’s long term interest. In early last century, the British signed away the Nile River to Egypt without Ethiopia’s knowledge and now if Ethiopia tries to adjust or cancel the treaty, it will face war, as the government of Egypt warned recently. When the Woyanne regime goes away, if a new regime tries to adjust or terminate all these ill-advised land lease treaties, Ethiopia may face war from the 1-billion-strong India, not to mention Saudi Arabia, Korea and the other countries that are taking over Ethiopia’s land at “bargain-basement prices.” Woyanne’s land giveaway in such a manner is the worst kind of treason.

Washington Post reports the following on the scramble for Ethiopia’s land.

Ethiopia — In recent months, the Ethiopian regime began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.

”Why attractive?” reads one glossy poster with photos of green fields and a map outlining swathes of the country available at bargain-basement prices. ”Vast, fertile, irrigable land at low rent. Abundant water resources. Cheap labour. Warmest hospitality.”

This impoverished and chronically food-insecure nation is fast becoming one of the world’s leading destinations for the booming business of land leasing, by which relatively rich countries and investment firms are securing 40-to-99-year contracts to farm vast tracts of land.

Governments across South-East Asia, Latin America and especially Africa are trying to attract this new breed of investors, creating land-leasing agencies and land catalogues to display their offerings of earth.

In Africa alone, experts estimate more than 20 million hectares have been leased in the past two years.

The trend is driven in part by last year’s global food crisis. Wealthy countries are shoring up their food supplies by growing staple crops abroad. The desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for instance, is shifting wheat production to Africa. The government of India, where land is crowded and overfarmed, is offering incentives to companies to carve out mega-farms across the continent.

Increasingly, though, purely profit-seeking companies are snatching up land, making a simple, grim, calculation. As one Saudi-backed businessman here put it: ”The population of the world is increasing dramatically, so land and food supplies will be short, demand will be higher and prices will rise.”

The scale and pace of the land scramble have alarmed policymakers and others concerned about the implications for food security in countries such as Ethiopia, where officials recently appealed for food aid for about 6 million people as drought devastates East Africa.

A code of conduct to govern land deals was discussed on the sidelines of last week’s UN Food and Agriculture Organisation food security summit in Rome. ”These contracts are pretty thin; no safeguards are being introduced,” David Hallam, a deputy director at the FAO, said. ”You see statements from ministers where they’re basically promising everything with no controls, no conditions.”

The harshest critics conjure images of poor Africans starving as food is hauled off to rich countries. Some express concern that decades of industrial farming will leave good land spoiled even as local populations surge. And sceptics also say the political contexts cannot be ignored.

”We don’t trust this government,” said Merera Gudina, a leading opposition figure who accuses the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, of using the land policy to hold on to power. ”We are afraid this government is buying diplomatic support by giving away land.”

But many experts are hopeful, saying that big agribusiness could feed millions by industrialising agriculture in countries such as Ethiopia, where about 80 per cent of its 75 million people are farmers who plow their fields with oxen.

”If these deals are negotiated well, I tell you, it will change the dynamics of the food economy in this country,” said Mafa Chipeta, the FAO’s representative in Ethiopia, dismissing the worst-case scenarios. ”I can’t believe Ethiopia or any other government would allow their country to be used like an empty womb. The human spirit would not allow it.”

Few countries have embraced the trend as zealously as Ethiopia, where hard-baked eastern deserts fade into spectacularly lush and green western valleys fed by the Blue Nile. Only a quarter of the country’s estimated 70 million fertile hectares is being farmed.

Desperate for foreign currency, the government of former Marxist rebels who once proclaimed ”land to the tiller!” has set aside more than 2.5 million hectares for agribusiness. Lured with 40-year leases and tax holidays, investors are going on farm shopping sprees, crisscrossing the country to pick out swathes of Ethiopian soil.

”There’s no crop that doesn’t grow in Ethiopia,” said Esayas Kebede, who works for a government agribusiness agency, adding that too many requirements on investors might scare them off. ”Everybody is coming.”

Especially Indian companies, which have committed $US4.2 billion ($4.6 billion).

Anand Seth, director general of the Federation of Indian Export Organisations, described Africa as ”the next big thing” in investment opportunities and markets.

As he stood on a hill overlooking 12,000 hectares of rich, black soil, Hanumantha Rao, chief general manager of the Indian company Karuturi Agro Products, agreed. So far, he said, the Ethiopian Government has imposed few requirements on his company. ”From here, you can see the past and the future of Ethiopian agriculture.”

From there – a farm just west of Addis Ababa – it was possible to see a river designated for irrigating cornfields and rice paddies; it is no longer open for locals to water their cows.

Several shiny green tractors bounced across the field where teff, the local grain, once grew. Hundreds of Ethiopian workers, overseen by Indian supervisors, were bent over rows of corn stalks, cutting weeds tangled around them with small blades. Many of the workers were children.

The day rate: 8 birr – about 70 cents.

”The people are very happy,” Rao said. ”We have no problems with them.”

As a worker spoke to one of his supervisors, he whispered that the company had refused to sign a wage contract and had failed to deliver promised water and power to nearby villages.

Supervisors treat them cruelly, he said, and most workers were just biding time until they could go work for a Chinese construction company rumoured to pay $2 to $4 a day.

”We are not happy,” said the man, a farmer-turned-tractor driver who did not give his name because he feared being fired.

”I’m a machine operator and I make 800 birr [about $65] a month. This is the most terrible pay.”

Rao said he had trained about 60 Ethiopians to drive tractors; others would learn to run shellers and how to fertilise and irrigate land. If things work as they should, he said, Ethiopians will adopt the modern techniques in their own farms.

Along a muddy road leading to Karuturi farm, people said they were hopeful that might happen. But they were not sure how. Ethiopians cannot own land, instead holding ”use certificates” for their tiny plots, making it difficult to get loans, or to sell or increase holdings.

”We think they might be beneficial to us in the future,” said Yadeta Fininsa, referring to the new companies coming to town. ”But so far we have not benefited anything.”

(Souce: The Washington Post)

6 thoughts on “India commits $4.2 billion to buy farm land from Ethiopia

  1. I cannot say much because tear comes to my eyes every time I read this story that Ethiopia is leasing land while her own people are dying of starvation. If we have the land, the water and the labor then what hinders us from using and cultivating our own land ? why the Indians from thousands of miles away use it and not us ? Can any leader who cares for his people do that ????????

  2. I think the other side of the coin is that leasing the land to rich foreigners would mean just buying additional muscle to TPLF. No buyer would like TPLF to go which probably will make their ownership of the lands more precarious.

    I believe Woyane might have also seen this from that angle. If big influential private investors are involved, which in the final analysis would mean the West, serious condemnation of their ownership of Ethiopian land by the opposition parties could mean a further justification of the West for Woyane. We must be able to wisely explain our condemnation of the Woyane plot to the West.

    Remember, we are talking about what is called Foreign Direct investment. When we see foreign direct investment in the agricultural sector, India dominates ($2103) followed by EU ($1440), US ($542) Israel ($528), and Saudi Arabia ($172) in millions. (http://www.ecofair-trade.org/pics/en/FDIs_Ethiopia_15_10_09_c.pdf)

    So we are playing with big guys and our lobbying should be wise, seasoned, and informed.

  3. An important democratic lesson from the recent history of South Asia is that a democracy that creates two different kinds of citizen rapidly evolves into something else.
    India didn’t go down this road for reasons of history.
    India may be poor but it has remained a democracy
    Pluralist nationalism in the 19th century was invented as an answer to the specific challenges of contemporary colonialism. It was founded on the claim that the anti-colonial Indian National Congress could speak for the nation-in-the-making because its membership included representatives of all of India’s human species.

    The challenge of representing India to a hostile colonial state and then the trauma of Partition committed the republican state to pluralist democracy.

    Pluralism, a stratagem born of weakness (the early nationalist elite had no other way of demonstrating that they represented anyone but themselves), became the cornerstone of Indian political practice, because it legitimised the compromises essential for keeping hundreds of jostling identities aboard the good ship India.

    This was the ultimate political goal: to keep the diversity of a subcontinent afloat in a democratic ark. Everything else was negotiable.
    Balancing of interests between Ethiopia and India is a challenge.
    The political culture of the republic consisted of the balancing of special interests, procrastination, equivocation, pandering, tokenism and selective affirmative action: in a word, democratic politics.
    Gender, language, religious identity, class and caste were all pressed into India’s political mill, but no single identity or principle was used consistently enough to satisfy its champions.
    It is a political culture that worked, approximately but demonstrably.
    Not only did it work, it allowed Indians a worldview born out of their own political experience.
    The reason India is so important to the history and practice of democracy is its success in making a system of representative government work in a bewilderingly diverse country
    For example, when a “people” elsewhere asks for self-determination (the Kurds, the Eelam Tamils, the Basques) an Indian should ask, what for?
    If the point of self-determination is to allow a “People” to become a hegemonic majority in its own right, an Indian is entitled to say that whatever its rhetorical power, self-determination does not seem like an emancipatory or interesting or original political idea.

    If a state with a majority of Oromos or Amharas is to be premised on Oromigna or Amharic, better that it not exist at all because Ethiopians know from their own history that pluralist democracies can be worked despite terrible violence and they also know where ethnic nationalisms lead.
    The reason India is so important to the history and practice of democracy is its success in making a system of representative government work in a bewilderingly diverse country.
    This achievement liberates the idea of democracy from specific cultural contexts and subverts a certain sort of political argument.
    For example, to excuse the occupation of Ethiopia by Woyane, some western opinion-formers cite the presence of three distinct communities, Amhara, Oromo and the rest. A country odd enough to be home to such a variety of peoples is, in their minds, an artificial state with arbitrary boundaries, doomed to disintegrate.

    Under this argument, Ethiopia cannot make it as a democracy or even a nation because it is too poor or too fractious or too diverse.

  4. India is truly a matured and the biggest democratic country in the world. Indian constitution is based on Piece Everywhere. If you see in the history, India is the only country who is genuinely concern to the poor and their problems, no matter the people belongs to won country India or to other nations. India itself is an agricultural country, but in India there are lots of climate related issues. If you go in details, you will find hundreds of farmers are doing suicides. India never do business with other countries by measuring them in terms of poor and rich. Ethiopia is a rich in terms of fertile farms and pool of farmers. The low cost farming in Ethiopia is the key to attract foreign direct investments. In India also, there is a direct investments from big developed countries is done. So its a part of globalization. India has never attacked any country, instead India had been ruled by many outsiders. So, I am sure, India will never attack and impose war on Ethiopia. India’s most population is below poverty line. India need support, and it will not misuse it.

  5. @ Nikhil: “India is the only country who is genuinely concern to the poor and their problems” – are you kidding?
    India’s cast system entrenched poverty and discrimination. India has no problem using child labour, in India or elsewhere as this article shows. As with everything in India, it does embrace the extreme opposites poverty & wealth, cruelty & kindness, etc etc.

    Don’t be so naive as to think that Karuturi Global – a massive capitalist profit driven company – will be kind to Ethiopians unless forced to do so by the Ethiopian people and government.

    At the same time, Ethiopia does not generally have the capital or expertise for large scale farming required to improve productivity levels and reduce poverty.

    So the point is that Africa should stop complianing about land-grabs, and start discussing how to effectively implement land tenure systems and international FDI in agriculture to develop the economies.

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