Tuesday, November 6, 2012

How Africa could feed the world – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs

How Africa could feed the world
November 6th, 2012
10:35 AM ET

How Africa could feed the world

By Olusegun Obasanjo, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Olusegun Obasanjo is a former president of Nigeria and a member of the Africa Progress Panel, chaired by Kofi Annan. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Images of starving children, epitomised in news coverage from Ethiopia in the 1980s, have given Africa a reputation for famine that does an injustice to the continent’s potential.
It’s true that a recent report by three U.N. agencies said nearly 239 million in Africa are hungry, a figure some 20 million higher than four years ago. And recent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel certainly highlight the desperate uncertainties of food supply for millions – malnutrition still cuts deep scars into progress on health and education.
But the Africa Progress Panel and many others believe that Africa has the potential not only to feed itself, but also to become a major food supplier for the rest of the world
Consider, for example, Africa’s agricultural land. According to an influential recent analysis, Africa has around 600 million hectares of uncultivated arable land, roughly 60 percent of the global total.
And on the land that is being used, outdated technologies and techniques mean productivity is low. African cereal yields, for example, are just over one-third of the developing world average and have barely increased in 30 years. One major issue is that as much as 80 percent of Africa’s agriculture still depends on rain not irrigation.
So what should be done to increase agricultural productivity in Africa?
First, African and donor agricultural policies must focus on the smallholder farmers. Some African governments see the efficiencies of large scale commercial farming as a means to increase productivity. But Africa cannot increase its food production, create jobs and reduce poverty on the scale required without unlocking the potential of smallholder agriculture.
In addition, Africa’s rapidly growing youth population makes job creation an urgent matter for many of the continent’s governments. Already, nearly two out of three Africans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
And in countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya, agriculture is key to reducing poverty. In these countries, agricultural growth has been shown to reduce poverty twice as fast as any other sector.
Governments must invest in infrastructure that gives these smallholders better access to markets, including storage facilities to keep produce in good quality, and new and better roads. Governments must also invest in research and development to help smallholder farmers access new techniques and technologies such as drought resistant seeds. They should encourage innovations in information and communication technologies, which may also help to involve young Africans in the sector.
Second, African government s must deal with the land grab issue, as mentioned in an earlier article for this series by my fellow Panel member Michel Camdessus.
Population growth, a burgeoning global middle class, and the search for low-carbon energy sources mean that demand for food and biofuels has shot through the roof. Spotting profit opportunity, foreign investors are scrambling for a piece of the action. They rent land, use the latest agricultural methods (plus precious water from nearby sources), export the food, and make a fortune.
Africa has been at the epicentre of global land deals. Between 2000 and 2011, for example, Africa saw an estimated 948 land deals, covering 124 million hectares – an area larger than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined. Many of these transactions involve countries along the Nile and Niger rivers, whose water will be used to irrigate thirsty agricultural schemes. Typically, foreign investors win concessions at low rent and with extensive tax exemptions.
Contracts are often negotiated behind closed doors without consulting affected communities. Indeed, many of these schemes have seen local communities forcibly removed from their land.
Some deals have been complicated for investors, too. In Ethiopia, an armed group ambushed workers from a Saudi-owned agribusiness project, killing five.Analysts say the ambush in April 2012 was linked to the project’s plan to use large amounts of precious water from the nearby Alwero River, upon which thousands of people depend for their survival.
At the Africa Progress Panel, we support the combination of foreign expertise with local knowledge to increase production, generate jobs, and transfer technical know-how. But what Africa does not need, and cannot afford, is the use of African land and water by foreign investors who use Africa’s scarce resources to supply food and biofuels to other countries. And for Africans, the benefits of large-scale land acquisitions have been questionable.
Africa’s smallholder farmers need protection in such deals. The African Union should develop a framework for managing foreign investment in agriculture, and governments should assess large-scale land deals and consider a moratorium pending legislation to protect smallholder farmers.
Third, governments and others must help smallholder farmers manage risk more effectively. Crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel have highlighted the risks faced by smallholder farmers, who are barely able to feed themselves and their families as it is.
Governments and donors should provide cash or food that enables rural producers to get through the difficult periods of drought, for example, without compromising long-term productivity or withdrawing their children from school. Governments and donors should help household enterprises reduce their dependence on agriculture.
Fourth, we want to see the international community devote more money and more effort to improving food security and nutrition in Africa, an issue that goes to the heart of so many other development challenges. By weakening a child’s resistance to disease, malnutrition is a major contributor to child mortality. Aglobal study in 2008 found that an average one third of all child deaths were related to malnutrition.
The Panel welcome this year’s Camp David G-8 commitments to launch a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. This New Alliance aims to lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next decade. And we will be watching eagerly when the United Kingdom assumes presidency of the G-8 next year.
Fifth, and finally, the international community should step up their support for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Higher temperatures, increased water evaporation, less predictable rainfall, increased water stress and an expansion of drought zones is likely undermine production. Cassava and maize yields could fall by 15 percent and 30 percent respectively by 2050, for example. And research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) suggests that climate change effects alone will push an additional 1 million children into malnutrition by 2030.
At the Africa Progress Panel, we hope these risks and the enormous opportunities of a growing global market will lead African governments to invest in agriculture and raise productivity. We fear that such risks could lead to a dramatic worsening of poverty and malnutrition among vulnerable communities.
But while rich countries have been spending billions of dollars on climate change adaptation, such as flood defenses, Africa has been receiving peanuts.
One recent study for Tanzania concluded that an annual investment of $100 million in adaptation for smallholders – encompassing support for small-scale irrigation, terracing, rural roads and research – would prevent annual losses of several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Consider that while the U.K. spends $1.2 billion annually on flood defenses, African nations receive just $100 million to $200 million for climate adaptation through the specialized multilateral funds created for this purpose. This amounts to what Desmond Tutu has aptly described as “adaptation apartheid.”
African leaders and their partners must all do more to shape the continent’s mighty farming potential. One day Africa could feed the world. But first it must feed itself.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Land grabs in Ethiopia leave tribes hungry on World Food Day - Survival International

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A boy from the Lower Omo stands on the riverbank.
A boy from the Lower Omo stands on the riverbank.
© Survival
Violent land grabs in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley are displacing tribes and preventing them from cultivating their land, leaving thousands of people hungry and ‘waiting to die’.
As the world prepares to raise awareness of the issues behind poverty and hunger on October 16 (World Food Day), Ethiopia continues to jeopardize the food security and livelihoods of 200,000 of its self-sufficient tribal people.
Tribes such as the Suri, Mursi, Bodi and Kwegu are being violently evicted from their villages as Ethiopia’s government pursues its lucrative plantations project in the Valley.
Depriving tribes of their most valuable agricultural and grazing land, security forces are being used brutally to clear the area to make way for vast cotton, palm oil and sugar cane fields.
Cattle are being confiscated, food stores destroyed, and communities ordered to abandon their homes and move into designated resettlement areas.
Security forces are confiscating cattle and forcibly evicting Lower Omo tribes.
Security forces are confiscating cattle and forcibly evicting Lower Omo tribes.
© Survival International
One Mursi man told Survival International how the process of villagization is destroying his family. ‘The government is throwing our sorghum in the river.  It has cleaned up the crops and put them in the river. I only have a few sacks left…We are waiting to die. We are crying. When the government collects people into one village there will be no place for crops and my children will be hungry and have no food.’
A Suri man also said, ‘They cleared the land. Why did the government sell our land? There is no grass for the cattle. People are hungry…. We are worried about fodder. We have become angry and hopeless.’


From the Omo Valley
A Mursi woman speaks out against the destruction of the tribe’s crops. Her identity has been hidden to protect her from reprisals.
Key to the plantation program is Ethiopia’s controversial Gibe III dam. Once completed, the dam will stop the Omo River’s annual flood, preventing tribes from using its fertile banks to produce valuable crops and feed livestock.
Ethiopia has not consulted any indigenous communities over the construction of Gibe III or its aggressive plantation plans in the Valley, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Stephen Corry, Survival’s Director said today, ‘On World Food Day, people need to be aware of Ethiopia’s decision violently to strip Lower Omo Valley tribes of their self-sustaining way of life. These peoples have used their land to cultivate crops and graze cattle to feed their families for generations. This basic right has now been taken from them, in a brutal manner, leaving them hungry and afraid.’

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Should Africa especially Ethiopia due to famine be growing more wheat? - Businessweek

DEBRE ZEIT, Ethiopia (AP) — Bedlu Mamo stood in middle of his field in Ethiopia and cast a wary eye at the new variety of wheat he planted for the first time.
"The price is good, better than what we get for other crops. But the companies that buy the wheat may not come to buy," Bedlu said.
But despite the farmer's misgivings, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center says demand for wheat is growing faster than for any other food crop in sub-Saharan Africa, where corn has long been considered the most important cereal crop. As the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization marked World Food Day on Tuesday, experts are reexamining what crops are best produced in Africa, for Africans.
Ethiopia last week hosted a conference to look at ways to increase the amount of wheat African farmers grow. Only 44 percent of the wheat consumed in Africa is produced locally.
"The first task is to convince policy makers that there is a potential to produce wheat in Africa," said Asfaw Negassa, a consultant with the center. "With the right policy, right seed and marketing system, there can be enough wheat production in Africa to substitute the significant portion of imports that costs the continent scarce hard currency."
The corn and wheat center says African countries in 2012 will spend $12 billion to import 40 million tons of wheat — money that could be used for other pressing needs.
Wheat production in sub-Saharan Africa dropped sharply in the 1980s after an influx of food aid made the crop unprofitable, said the maize and wheat improvement center, which is known by the initials CIMMYT. At the same time, the focus of international development shifted to corn and cassava. A growing demand for wheat has led agricultural experts to rethink the crop in Africa, the group said.
But sometimes the farmer must confront market forces that can be a disincentive to plant.
For Bedlu, the Ethiopian farmer, this season marks the first time he has planted the Mangudo variety of durum wheat. He has high hopes for it, but worries he may not find a buyer. Showing how complicated global agricultural can be, Bedlu and Asnake Fikre, the director of the Debre Zeit Agriculture Research Center, say imported wheat can often be bought for less.
Ethiopia's government in recent months has struggled to stabilize rampant food inflation — a big burden for a country that solicits food aid. Some 3.5 million Ethiopians required humanitarian assistance this year alone. The U.S. government contributed $427 million to agricultural development, food security and emergency aid to Ethiopia in fiscal 2011, said Diane Brandt, an embassy spokeswoman.
World Food Day is dedicated to remembering the importance of global food security. The theme for 2012 is "Agricultural cooperatives - key to feeding the world."
Hunger is declining in Asia and Latin America but is rising in Africa, according to the FAO. The World Bank says agricultural productivity must increase in Africa because African farm yields are among the lowest in the world.
One in eight people around the world goes to bed hungry every night, the FAO says. But things are turning in the right direction: The total number of hungry people in the world is 870 million, down from 1 billion 20 years ago.
Some of the efforts have been at the grassroots level. In East Africa, an American aid group called One Acre Fund is working with 130,000 farming households to increase food production through improved seeds and fertilizer. Nick Handler, the group's country director in Kenya, said the households his organization works with are becoming more aware of the benefits that improved seeds and fertilizers can have.
"On average we're seeing a tripling of yields and a doubling of profit once you net out the additional costs for farmers who sign up for the program," he said.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Ethiopia plans to lease land to developers despite human rights concerns


Ethiopia land to be offered to developers despite rising human rights concerns.
ADDIS ABABA: In a move that already has Ethiopia’s activist community on edge, the government has announced it will lease land to developers and investors despite widespread concerns over human rights abuses of rural citizens in the country.
On Friday, the government announced it would lease 100,000 hectares of land to local and international investors.
But activists told Bikyamasr.com that “much of this land was taken illegally and there have been reports of violence and murder in rural areas over land and the government.”
The Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture said details on the leases will be provided in the upcoming budget.
The ministry indicated that it had prepared large fertile tracts of land in Gambella, Benshangul-Gumuz, Oromia and Amhara states to be offered to investors.
Already, a large number of foreign investors are competing for the government’s favor in various agro industries in the country, mainly Indian and Saudi investors.
The move, however, comes on the heels of reports of forced removal of farmers and villagers from areas by local and international human rights groups.
The government maintains that the land to be offered to investors is “free from any abuse.”
This past week, Ethiopia’s Anuak indigenous people filed a complaint with the World Bank Inspection Panel that puts blame on the World Bank and the Ethiopian government for human rights abuses over its “forced villagization” program in the country.
According to the complaint, the indigenous population is claiming the World Bank-financed and administered Protection of Basic Services Project (PBS) had resulted in the direct contribution to the government’s forcing of resident to establish villages
“Villagization plans have been implemented by Ethiopian public servants, who are paid through the World Bank-financed project,” reported Bank Information Center.
PBS has provided $1.4 billion in budget support for basic services to the government of Ethiopia since 2006, according to the World Bank.
But the indigenous population said that the program was supposed to be on a volunteer basis only and they have accused the government, with the World Bank’s knowledge of using force and violence to force citizens into the villagization.
There have also been reports of violence including rape and torture in military custody and extra-judicial killing.
“Ethiopia’s villagization plan sees people in four other regions of Ethiopia being resettled as well. In total, the project calls for the resettlement of approximately 1.5 million people by 2013,” the report stated.
While not directly linked in this complaint, the United Kingdom could also face a lawsuit over its role in aid to Ethiopia after a farmer alleged human rights abuses as a result of one of its programs.
According to a BBC report, the farmer, Mr. O, is accusing the British government of responsibility in his eviction and beating as well as having witnessed rapes as part of a “villagization” scheme put forward by the UK government.
Human rights activists Rita Desalgna told Bikyamasr.com in Addis Ababa that the farmer’s accusations have been reportedly corroborated by other residents in the area.
“We have heard and talked to a number of individuals who have reported rape and other violent actions as a result of this program, but it is still unclear if the British government is responsible for the actions of their Ethiopian partners,” she said.
The BBC report said that the farmer’s lawyers say the program “receives funding from the UK Department for International Development (Dfid).”
However, Dfid denied the accusations, saying it does not fund “any commune projects” in the country.
UK aid to Ethiopia is among the East African country’s largest, with the foreign ministry reporting having sent $61 million for the country’s drought problems in the past decade.
“The UK government has been extremely positive in its efforts to assist Ethiopia so I would be surprised if they had any knowledge of the violence and evictions,” added Desalgna.
But the married farmer, a father of 6, told his lawyers from London’s Leigh Day and Co that his family was forced off their land in November 2011 after soldiers from the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) came to the area for the eviction.
His lawyers said he claimed that “several men were beaten, women were raped and some people disappeared” during the resettlement.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Ethiopia farmer threatens lawsuit against UK over rights abuses

Ethiopia farmer threatens lawsuit against UK over rights abuses

 | 7 September 2012 | 0 Comments

An Ethiopian farmer has claimed UK government responsible for eviction, beating and rapes in funding project.
ADDIS ABABA: The United Kingdom could face a lawsuit from an Ethiopia farmer after he argued that a British fund led to widespread human rights abuses in the East African country.
According to a BBC report, the farmer, Mr. O, is accusing the British government of responsibility in his eviction and beating as well as having witnessed rapes as part of a “villagization” scheme put forward by the UK government.
Human rights activists Rita Desalgna told Bikyamasr.com in Addis Ababa that the farmer’s accusations have been reportedly corroborated by other residents in the area.
“We have heard and talked to a number of individuals who have reported rape and other violent actions as a result of this program, but it is still unclear if the British government is responsible for the actions of their Ethiopian partners,” she said.
The BBC report said that the farmer’s lawyers say the program “receives funding from the UK Department for International Development (Dfid).”
However, Dfid denied the accusations, saying it does not fund “any commune projects” in the country.
UK aid to Ethiopia is among the East African country’s largest, with the foreign ministry reporting having sent $61 million for the country’s drought problems in the past decade.
“The UK government has been extremely positive in its efforts to assist Ethiopia so I would be surprised if they had any knowledge of the violence and evictions,” added Desalgna.
But the married farmer, a father of 6, told his lawyers from London’s Leigh Day and Co that his family was forced off their land in November 2011 after soldiers from the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) came to the area for the eviction.
His lawyers said he claimed that “several men were beaten, women were raped and some people disappeared” during the resettlement.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Ethiopia’s landgrabbers: Ravaging or raising resources? CIFOR Forests News Blog »


Photo by Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR
The race is on to grab the world’s most precious and irreplaceable resource: land. And environmental writer, Fred Pearce, has gone in pursuit of the globe-trotting landgrabbers – a larger-than-life cast of characters that includes City speculators, gulf oil sheikhs, Chinese entrepreneurs, big-name financiers like George Soros, and industry titans like Richard Branson. Pearce’s findings, chronicled in his new book The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the Earth, are extraordinary.
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Gambella, Ethiopia. Tragedy in the commons.We sincerely thank Fred Pearce and Transworld Publishers for allowing us to reproduce this work. You can buy the ebook here.
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Omot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbuck skin, and eating maize from a calabash gourd. He was lean and tall, wearing only a pair of combat pants. Behind him was a straw hut, where bare-breasted women and barefoot children were busy cooking fish on an open fire. A little way off were other huts, the remains of what was once a sizeable village.
Omot said he and his family were from the Anuak tribe. They had lived in the forest for ten generations. “This land belonged to our father. All round here is ours. For two day’s walk.” He described the distant tree that marked the boundary with the next village. “When my father died, he said ‘don’t leave the land, we made a promise. We can’t give it to the foreigners.’”
When my father died, he said ‘don’t leave the land, we made a promise. We can’t give it to the foreigners.’
Our conversation was punctuated by the rumble of trucks passing on a dirt road just 20 metres away. The dust clouds they created wafted into the clearing and rained down on the leaves of the trees. Beyond the road, huge earth diggers were excavating a canal. Omot watched them.
“Two years ago, the company began chopping down the forest and the bees went away. The bees need thick forest. We used to sell honey. We used to hunt with dogs too. But after the farm came, the animals here disappeared. Now we only have fish to sell.” And with the company draining the wetland, the fish will probably be gone soon, too.
Gambella is the poorest province in one of the world’s poorest nations – a lowland appendix in the far southwestern corner of Ethiopia. Geographically and ethnically, the hot, swampy province feels like part of the neighbouring state of South Sudan, rather than the cool highlands of the rest of Ethiopia. Indeed, Gambella was effectively in Sudan when it was ruled by the British from Khartoum, until they left in 1956.
For the half-century since, the government in Addis Ababa has ruled here, but it has invested little and cared even less for its Nilotic tribal inhabitants, whose jet-black skin and tall, elegant physique mark them out from the lighter-skinned and shorter highlanders. The livestock-herding Nuer, who frequently cross the border into South Sudan, and the Anuak, who are farmers and fishers, are peripheral to highland Ethiopia in every sense.
Only three flights a week go to the small provincial capital, also called Gambella. When you get there, there are no taxis, because there is no demand. The road from the airport is a dirt track through an empty landscape. Gambella town is a shambles. Its population of 30,000 has no waste collection system, so garbage piles up. The drains don’t work, public water supplies are sporadic and electricity is occasional. There are few public latrines. The couple of paved roads are heavily potholed and give out before the town limits. My billet, the Norwegian-built guesthouse at the Bethel Synod Church, was probably the dirtiest, bleakest and most ill kempt building in which I have ever rested my head. The only vehicle in town for hire was a 40-year-old Toyota minibus of dubious roadworthiness, with a crew of three. I took it.

Lokuda Losil (not his real name), 60, says his land was taken by the New Forest Company. There are another 22,000 farmers like him. Simon Rawles/Oxfam
Of late, the central government in Adis Ababa has stopped pretending that the province of Gambella doesn’t exist. It now seems intent on taming a populace that might prefer rule from Juba, the capital of South Sudan. In practice, that means bringing in foreign agribusiness and collecting the province’s dispersed population in state-designated villages, while their forests, fields and hunting grounds are handed over to outsiders. In the service of capitalism, the Gambella “villagisation” programmed will relocate a domestic population much in the manner of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
I set out along the only road south from Gambella town to find the land grabbers. On the outskirts, as we hit the dirt, my driver decided to pick up a dozen hitchhikers. From then on, we were the local bus service. To an outsider, much of the province looks deserted. Its expanses of lowland forests and bush, grassland and marsh, are wide open to wildlife migrations, passing cattle herders and occasional shifting cultivators.
For miles, the only obvious sign of human activity was the odd mobile phone mast, usually with a generator to power it and a resident native guard. But there were hidden villages in the bush. Their members would sit by the roadside trying to sell mangoes and other fruit to any vehicles that passed. Mangoes cost less than three cents each, and the price had halved by late afternoon.
Soon after the small town of Abobo, the road passed through a landscape of ash, smoke and charred trees. This was land newly acquired by my first land grabber – Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Amoudi, a Saudi oil billionaire with large holdings in Ethiopian plantations, mines and real estate. In 2011, Fortune magazine put his personal wealth at more than $12 billion. Ethiopian-born, he is often described as the world’s richest man.
He is a million dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation, and also a close confidant of Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, and his ruling party, which had granted a 60-year concession on 10,000 hectares of Gambella to Al Amoudi’s company, Saudi Star.
Al Amoudi has been eyeing agriculture since the world food price spike in 2008 sent Saudi Arabia into a spin about its future food supplies. He is intent on shipping most of his intended produce, including in excess of a million tones of rice a year, to Saudi Arabia. There he has been feted by the king for making investments abroad to keep the kingdom fed. To smooth the wheels of commerce, Al Amoudi has recruited one of Zenawi’s former ministers, Haile Assegdie, as chief executive of Saudi Star.
Al Amoudi has been eyeing agriculture since the world food price spike in 2008 sent Saudi Arabia into a spin about its future food supplies. He is intent on shipping most of his intended produce, including in excess of a million tones of rice a year, to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Star’s concession is based around the Alwero dam, built in the 1980s to irrigate a state cotton farm that never happened. The dam’s rusting sign still advertises the consulting services of Soviet engineers Selkhozpromexport. Al Amoudi is digging a 30-kilometre canal from the dam to irrigate rice paddies. Once the old state farm is watered, he wants to expand to at least 250,000 hectares, to grow sunflowers and maize.
At the gate of the Saudi Star compound, I watched soldiers usher in giant Volvo trucks and Massey Ferguson tractors and workmen starting to replace the temporary buildings with new permanent structures. Close by, they were laying an airstrip in a recently made clearing in the forest. Nobody at the company here or in Gambella town would talk to me. Perhaps they thought there was nothing to add to their boss’s media statement that “land grabbing poses no harm on the environment or on the local community”.
Our next hitchhikers were a couple of schoolgirls who wanted a lift to their home 2km away. It was there, in a small clearing in a forest by the road, where we found Omot Ochan in his combat pants, describing how Amoudi and his company were destroying his world. Hearing his testimony of ancestral connection with this patch of forest, and his determination to keep it, I was struck by how most westerners have lost any sense of place and attachment to the land. I move around all the time and buy and sell houses without feeling ties to the soil. But here in Gambella, their land is like their blood. It is everything. And to lose it would be to lose their identity.
Omot insisted Saudi Star had no right to be in his forest. The company had not even told the villagers that it was going to dig a canal across their land. “Nobody came to tell us what was happening.” He did remember officials from the “villagisation” programme dropping by to say the families should go to the new village at Pokedi, across the River Alwero from Saudi Star’s compound. But that was all. Omot had no doubt the purpose of the new village was to clear them and others off land taken from them to give to Saudi Star. So far, his family and their neighbours had refused to go, even though their children walked to the school at Pokedi on a Monday morning and didn’t return until Friday evening.
“In our culture, going to a different place is unusual. You get different people and there is quarrelling,” he told me, as his children gathered and grabbed the remaining maize. “We should remain in our own area. We won’t go unless we are forced. God gave us this land.” Another truck rumbled past, spraying dust over the tiny forest community now ostracised by its own government and under siege from a Saudi billionaire. After the truck had gone, I noticed a large, dead stork in the road. A woman headed off down the road with a bucket, on a long walk to find water.
Saudi’s farm looked huge, extending for miles along the road. But it was nothing compared to what I saw the next day, driving west on the other road out of Gambella town. At another roadside farm complex, most of the way to the border with South Sudan, I dropped in unannounced on Karmjeet Sekhon, an Indian agriculturalist recently arrived in Ethiopia. He took a parasol to shade himself from the fierce sun as we met at the gate of his compound, then settled into his air-conditioned mobile cabin.
Resplendent in his turban and tweaking his long moustache, Sekhon said he could not believe his luck at being in charge of his land. In 2009, the Ethiopian agriculture ministry gave his company, Bangalore-based Karuturi Global, a 50-year lease on 100,000 hectares, either side of the road through the north of the province. It promised 200,000 hectares more if he cleared the first tranche within two years. He was well on the way.
Sekhon had a long career as a dairy man in India, where the options for expansion are constrained by more than a billion people. But here he had an area twenty times the size of Manhattan to do anything he wanted – with an option on sixty Manhattans. “The soil is excellent. It is virgin land,” he told me. “You can grow anything here; the climate is ideal. We had no land like this in India. There we are lucky to get 1 percent of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5 percent. We don’t even need fertiliser.” All for an annual rent of about a dollar a hectare.
“The soil is excellent. It is virgin land,” he told me. “You can grow anything here; the climate is ideal. We had no land like this in India.” And all for an annual rent of about a dollar a hectare.
Outside the pool cabin, Gambella’s dry season was ending, and smoke plumes dotted the horizon. Sekhon’s men were burning the bush to drive out snakes. He said he would soon have put in 600 kilometres of private roads, more than all the tarred public roads in the province. A South African remote sensing company had mapped every half metre of the concession for him. Fifteen huge 475-horse-power John Deere tractors were clearing and levelling 500 hectares every day. Drainage ditches and irrigation canals were being dug, and an irrigation kit was being shipped in from Israel and India. He had storage for 50,000 litres of diesel, mainly to run the pumps.
Soon, Sekhon would be planting. He had half a million oil-palm seedlings growing in a nursery. Within a year, he intended to be growing 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane, 25,000 hectares of rice, and 10,000 hectares each of maize and sorghum. Contractors would soon be on site building processing works to extract palm oil, crush sugar cane and mill rice. Then they would start work on the townships, with schools and hospitals, shopping centres and housing for up to 50,000 people.
The company had hired two tugboats to pull barges carrying its harvests from the banks of the Baro River, a tributary of the Nile that ran through the mega-farm, upstream to Uganda and Lake Victoria, and downstream to Khartoum and beyond. The boats would follow the same route that British river traders took a century ago to export to the world Ethiopian coffee that they bought in Gambella town. The echoes of a new imperialism were strong.
I asked Sekhon whether locals would get jobs. He said most of his technical people would be Indian or Ethiopians from the highlands. He had absorbed the Ethiopian ethos that the local tribespeople from the Gambella lowlands were lazy. “But labourers will be from the villages whose land has been allotted to us. About 85 percent of our drivers are from local tribes,” he assured me. Several dozen women from the nearby village of Iliya, which woke in 2009 to find itself surrounded by Karuturi concession, now earn a dollar a day tending the oil-palm nursery rather than their own fields. Iliya is the home village of Nyikaw Ochalla, an exile I met in Reading, England. “All the land round Iliya has been taken,” he told me. “People have to work for the Indian company. They have no real choice.”
Karuturi is owned by Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, an Indian engineer in his forties. Starting from scratch, he has become the world’s largest owner of greenhouses, many of them in Ethiopia.

Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi wants to becoming one of the top five agro-commodities producers in the world. Planète à vendre
Under glass roofs, he has created the world’s largest rose-growing business, selling 650,000 million stems a year. This is a stunning 10 percent of the global market. He employs 10,000 people in Africa alone. But Karuturi reckons he cannot sell any more roses. The market is sated. So he is moving into mainstream agriculture. “I want to be among the top four or five integrated agri-product companies in the world. And I will implement this vision out of Africa,” he says. He plans on having a million hectares of land under his ploughs in Africa – a third of them in Ethiopia and, he suggested in late 2011, another third in Tanzania.
All the land round Iliya has been taken. People have to work for the Indian company. They have no real choice.
Karuturi promises to invest a billion dollars in the virgin fields of Gambella alone. Flash floods from the River Baro obliterated thousands of hectares of the first maize harvest in late 2011, but his response was to bring in Dutch consultants to prevent a repetition. He means business. His investment should see handsome returns both for him and for his US private equity investors, including Bethesda-based Monsoon capital and Boston-based sandstone capital. The investment seems set to create Africa’s largest privately-owned farm, and make Karuturi one of the world’s largest producers of a range of foodstuffs, able to take on long-standing US and European commodity giants like Cargill, ADM and Dreyfus.
But will promise become reality? Sekhon and his Indian lieutenants are a long way from home. They have little experience of Africa or Africans, and know little of the people whose land they are now tilling. Nor, it seemed, did they know about the anger caused by the land grab: The tales of government intimidation, of massacres, of vanishing livelihoods and wildlife, and the mutterings I heard in huts and clearing across the province about arming the tribal youth to reclaim their land.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Mirage in the desert: The myth of Africa's land grab - CNN.com

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Agriculture is the key battlefront to tackling hunger and poverty in Africa
  • Two schools of thought have emerged on large-scale foreign investment in the continent
  • Agricultural crisis of rural Sudan is one of great drivers of widening inequality
  • Land grab phenomenon in Sudan resembles a fata morgana -- mirage in the desert
Editor's note: Harry Verhoeven is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University. Dr Eckart Woertz is a fellow at Princeton University's Environmental Institute.
(CNN) -- In the 1970s the world was coming to an end. Famines in Bangladesh, the Sahel and Ethiopia seemed to prove Malthus finally right. Population growth was outstripping food supplies, food prices skyrocketed: people like Paul Ehrlich warned of a "population bomb".
Yet, the apocalypse did not happen. Agricultural productivity growth not only fed more people, but also accommodated a resource guzzling boom in meat consumption.
If skeptics pointed to inequalities and persisting hunger, the neoliberal orthodoxy would tell them to be patient until trickle-down effects would have worked their magic.

Sudan and South Sudan tensions escalate

Struggling for survival in South Sudan

South Sudan refugee camp faces crisisSouth Sudan refugee camp faces crisis
African agriculture key
If it has ever worked, it does so no more. The number of chronically hungry people has hovered around one billion for more than a decade. Large swathes of the developing world, including Africa, have seen a worrying decoupling from the trend of long-term economic growth.
Given that the livelihoods of most Africans are linked to the agricultural sector, there is widespread agreement that African agriculture is the key battlefront to tackle hunger and poverty.
Heated debate
In the last three years, a virulent debate has unfolded between two camps with diametrically opposed views. In one corner, we find global agro-business, the international financial institutions and governments ofemerging powers like China, India and the Gulf Arab states.
They advocate a transformation of African agriculture through commercialization and large-scale foreign investment with the goal of increasing food supply and augmenting productivity of African farms.
This, or so the theory goes, is generating income, employment and export revenues for impoverished African states, while providing food to the Arabian Peninsula and industrial inputs like cotton to East Asia.
The other camp, consisting of international and African NGOs and skeptical academics, rejects this logic as an unconvincing excuse for lucrative collusion between African and foreign elites, largely at the expense of the rural masses.
They denounce these "land grabs" by referring to large-scale displacement of farmers deemed "unproductive" and claim that the investments increase rather than decrease global hunger, as the benefits accrue to transnational partnerships while producing little food or income for locals.
Groundwork
So what is actually happening on the ground? The truth is that, despite years of heated debate, we still know very little. The much hyped "Land Matrix"-initiative claims to have put together the single largest, most comprehensive database so far on international agricultural investments ("land grabs") to further inform policy.
Yet, it reports deals that have never happened, like the alleged acquisition of millions of hectares in Madagascar and Congo by South-Korean Daewoo and Chinese ZTE.
There is a fairly uncritical reliance on extensive media reporting of big deals. 'Landgrabs' sell newspapers and raise funds for NGOs and academics, so why ruin a good story?


Gabon's vast rainforestsGabon's vast rainforests
Case study: Sudan
Still, it is worth insisting: What is actually happening on the ground? An interesting case in point is Sudan. It has been the focal point of agro-investments by Gulf countries in the 1970s and again today. The country is best known for decades of violent conflict and devastating hunger.
Yet the controversy in Western media over the secession of South Sudan and the war in Darfur has sometimes obscured the important hydro-agricultural dynamics of recent years.
While the Land Matrix, to our surprise, scarcely reports any major agricultural investment in Northern and Central Sudan and uncritically copies a report on South Sudan with unimplemented project announcements, the military-Islamist government has spent the better part of the last decade positioning itself as a potential "breadbasket" for East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
Omar Al-Bashir's Khartoum hopes to attract one billion dollars annually in investments from Kuwait, China, Qatar and other emerging powers, partly to offset the loss of 75% of oil revenues due to the Southern secession, partly to build new political alliances domestically and internationally to entrench the regime in power for another decade.
Untapped Resources
The basic logic, as presented by the Sudanese government and its Gulf Arab partners during grand televised conferences, is sound: Sudan has historically underused its vast agricultural potential and low productivity is one of the key problems locking farming communities in poverty.
Investment, foreign or domestic, in agriculture has been woefully low for 30 years; the agricultural crisis of rural Sudan is one of the great drivers of widening inequality, vulnerability to climatic changes and civil strife in the peripheries.

Festival of food and culture in DC

Sustainable technologies in Africa

Preserving a 'perfect world'
Sceptical Voices
At the same time, more sceptical voices have been right to warn against the euphoria of a possible agricultural revolution in Sudan with the assistance of Arab capital.
The memories of the last time such an ambitious project was launched, back in the 1970s, are still vivid: the projects never got off the ground or were unprofitable and the vision violently crashed when tens of thousands of smallholders were forcibly driven off their land to make way for big mechanised farming in Central Sudan.
This contributed to a country-wide civil war between 1983 and 2005. These ghosts of the past understandably influence alarmist accounts surrounding foreign direct investment (FDI) in Sudan and South Sudan.
Headline v Reality
But the emerging picture is neither one of grand capitalist transformation and agricultural revival, nor one of all-out land grab that is leading to dispossession and growing impoverishment of ever more Sudanese.
There is a striking gap between the spectacular headline announcements and the reality that little actual investment seems to have transpired. There are Gulf funds that have announced humungous agro-projects without a single agro-engineer among their ranks.
According to confidential Ministry of Investment statistics that one of the authors was able to see, only about 20% of all agricultural partnerships concluded between Sudanese and foreign investors actually have seen some degree of implementation. Perhaps only a quarter of all promised FDI sums for commercial agriculture reach Sudan.
An Africa-wide issue
The reasons for this botched agricultural revolution are many but they seem to apply not just to Sudan, but also elsewhere in Africa.
Whilst high commodity prices and growing resource pressures heighten the interest of emerging powers and Western investors, the fundamental obstacles that have held African agriculture back previously still remain largely in place.
The land grab phenomenon in Sudan...resembles a fata morgana, a mirage in the desert which completely distorts the object on which it is based
Harry Verhoeven and Eckart Woertz,
A chaotic regulatory framework; political instability; high costs of training local workers; poor infrastructure to bring produce to local and international markets; weakly integrated national and regional agricultural development strategies; hidden taxes and corruption; and elites looking for quick gains rather than long-term empowerment of rural areas which are left out of the process.
Mirage in the desert
The land grab phenomenon in Sudan and in many (though not all) African countries thus increasingly resembles a fata morgana, a mirage in the desert which completely distorts the object on which it is based.
Not only is far more thorough and non-ideology driven research needed on foreign investment and, where it actually takes place, its impact on local communities and national welfare.
Above all, the fata morgana nature of agricultural development in Africa calls for a serious re-examination of how the continent's farmers can move from being among the main victims of global hunger to becoming more productive cultivators of the commodities that Africa and the world sorely need.