Lands in Ethiopia , December 30th, 2014 | ||
The company is owned by Mohamed al-Amoudi, who was born in Ethiopia to a Saudi father and an Ethiopian mother. Al-Amoudi made a fortune from construction contracts to build Saudi Arabia's national underground oil storage complex. Now a billionaire many times over, al-Amoudi has invested heavily in Ethiopia where he owns a gold mine and a majority stake in the national oil company. Al-Amoudi was one of the first to invest in a new scheme under which president Meles Zenawi offered to lease four million hectares of agricultural land to foreign investors and his company was also one of the first to become the subject of controversy. After Saudi Star was awarded a 10,000 hectare (24,700 acres) lease in 2008, a dozen aggrieved Anuak villagers attacked Saudi Star’s compound in Gambella in 2010 and killed several employees. Saudi Star abandoned work at the time but this past November the company announced that it would return to invest millions to grow rice using new large-scale flood irrigation techniques. Saudi Star hopes to sell its produce to Saudi Arabia under King Abdullah’s Food Security Program. “We know we’re creating job opportunities, transforming skills, training local indigenous Anuak,” Jemal Ahmed, Saudi Star CEO told Bloomberg. “The government wants the project to be a success and see more Gambella people able to work and produce more, that’s the big hope.” But activists say that Saudi Star’s newly invigorated project in Gambella is likely to have a detrimental impact on the local population, notably pastoralist groups like the Anuak as well as the Nuer. “Sadly, right now, the Anuak, nearly all small subsistence farmers, are becoming refugees in their own land as they are internally displaced from indigenous land their ancestors have possessed for centuries,” Obang Metho, Executive Director of Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia, told the Africa Congress on Effective Cooperation for a Green Africa. “They have become ‘discardable’ by a regime that wants their land, but not for them, in order to lease it to foreigners and regime-cronies for commercial farms,” he added. All told as many as 1.5 million subsistence farmers are expected to be offered voluntary relocation to new settlements where the government has told them that they will be given housing, social services and support infrastructure under the villagization program. However, activists like Human Rights Watch and the Oakland Institute say that the relocation process has been plagued by violence and broken promises. Instead of getting housing, villagers are forced to build their own tukols – traditional huts – and risk beatings if they speak out, says Human Rights Watch, which conducted interviews of 100 residents during the first round of villagization that occurred in 2010. The majority of resettlements did not have a school, health clinic or even water wells, says the Oakland Institute. Lack of agricultural assistance such as seeds, fertilizers, tools and trainings, have further exacerbated the risk of hunger and starvation among families. The traditional pastoralist communities also say that they are having a hard time adapting to sedentary farming practices in the new settlements. “We want you to be clear the government brought us here…to die…right here,” an Anuak elder in Abobo district told Human Rights Watch. “They brought us no food, they gave away our land to foreigners so we can’t even move back. On all sides the land is given away, so we will die here in one place.” |
To Resist against international Land Grabbing working against the local population by evicting them from their ancestral lands and from rendering them internally displaced ...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Saudi Star To Restart Rice Project on Disputed Anuak Lands in Ethiopia - CorpWatch :
Saudi billionaire to invest $100 million in Ethiopian farm -
Saudi billionaire to invest $100 million in Ethiopian farm by William Davison Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc, an Ethiopian company owned by billionaire Mohamed al-Amoudi, said it plans to invest $100 million in a rice farm in western Ethiopia next year to kick-start the stalled project. The company leased 10,000 hectares (24,711 acres) in the Abobo district in the Gambella region, where it’s based, in 2008 and bought the 4,000-hectare Abobo Agricultural Development Enterprise from the government 18 months ago for 80 million birr ($4 million). After delays caused by unsuitable irrigation design and contractor performance issues, Saudi Star wants to accelerate work in 2015 after a change of management, a redesign of the farm and a successful trial of rain-fed rice on 2,000 hectares at the formerly government-owned operation, Chief Executive Officer Jemal Ahmed said by phone. “We have a very aggressive plan,” he said on Nov. 26 from Jimma, about 260 kilometers (162 miles) southwest of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. “If we’re able to do that we’ll be able to produce more.” The project is part of a government plan formalized in 2010 to establish commercial farms on 3.3 million hectares of fertile land in sparsely populated parts of the country such as Gambella. Ethiopia expected to earn $6.6 billion a year from agriculture exports in 2015, according to a five-year economic plan published in 2010, though total goods exports last fiscal year brought in $3.3 billion. Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn said in October 2013 that progress on the program had been “very slow.” Billionaire Investor Ethiopia-born al-Amoudi is worth $8.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks him as the world’s 157th richest person. His company built underground oil-storage facilities in Saudi Arabia and he owns Preem AB, Sweden’s largest crude oil refiner. Al-Amoudi is increasingly investing in formerly government-owned farms in Ethiopia, a nation where companies under his Midroc group operate the only commercial gold mine and built the largest cement plant in 2011. Saudi Star’s $100 million investment will focus primarily on building irrigation infrastructure, including finishing the main canal from the more than 25-year-old Alwero Dam built by Soviet engineers, as well as a rice de-husking plant, storage silos and land clearing, according to Jemal. An initial plan to have the farm divided into 3.75-hectare plots to produce rice from submerged paddy fields has been shelved as unworkable, he said. Only 350 hectares has been developed since 2008 on the land leased for 300,000 Ethiopian birr ($14,908) a year. Economically Unviable “It was not environmentally and economically viable, that’s why they were struggling, so we stopped that,” Jemal said. “We want to make it large-scale flood irrigation, not small ponds.” Saudi Star’s revenue is forecast to be about $60 million in 2016 once the irrigation system is developed, with 60 percent of the aromatic rice exported mainly to Arab nations on the Persian Gulf, Jemal said. Hampering current harvesting are late rains and, for two days in October, unrest in Abobo town after violence between ethnic Anuak, who are indigenous to Gambella, and other Ethiopians. The company has Ethiopian soldiers guarding its compound and about 100 stationed nearby. Two Pakistanis and three Ethiopians employed by Ghulam Rasool & Co., a closely held Pakistani engineering company building the irrigation canal, died in April 2012 after an attack by a group of gunmen. Security Addressed The government has “taken care” of security issues, farm manager Bedilu Abera said while seated in one of the air-conditioned trailers that are now Saudi Star’s headquarters after they were moved from Addis Ababa. Anywaa Survival Organization, a Reading, U.K.-based rights group, said in an Oct. 14 statement that land leases in Gambella have fueled conflict. “The rush for land, water and other essential natural resources has become a curse for indigenous and minority peoples who barely have legal protection and redress,” it said. Saudi Star says only two Anuak villages of huts with sweeping grass roofs lie just outside the project’s boundaries in deep forest. Some local residents complain they’ve not benefited from the investment and that they suffer collective punishment by the military. “They used to kill people from the village,” Akea Ojullo, a 27-year old teacher, said in a Nov. 23 interview in Perbong village. “It got worse after the attack on Saudi Star,” he said. ‘Wrong Project’ The company plans to work with local residents by investing in workers, distributing rice and plowing land for them. “We know we’re creating job opportunities, transforming skills, training local indigenous Anuak, but there’s a campaign to have people perceive it as a wrong project,” Jemal said. The farm still has the backing of officials, even though progress has been slow, Jemal said. “The government wants the project to be a success and see more Gambella people be able to work and produce more,” he said. “That’s the big hope.” Large, complex projects like Saudi Star’s need many years to produce results, Gambella President Gatluak Tut Khot said in an interview in Gambella town. “We are not disappointed about the operation because we know that agricultural operations are very difficult,” he said. “We are giving them time in order to correct every mistake, overcome every obstacle, every challenge they face.” To contact the reporter on this story: William Davison in Addis Ababa at wdavison3@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net Paul Richardson, Michael Gunn, Sarah McGregor
Ethiopia: Onslaught against Somali-Issais ongoing silently in the Awash River | Somalicurrent.com
Ethiopia: Onslaught against Somali-Issais ongoing silently in the Awash River
Tweet LinkedIn Pinterest Facebook Google +Ethiopian government is implementing a program aimed at selling large swaps of land to foreign and international investors and to fulfill that purpose it wants to clear the area from indigenous Somali-Issa. Already, investors from Saudi Arabia and India are growing crops destined for the international market but not for Ethiopia.
Unfortunately those investments are made at the expense of dwellers like the Somali-Issa who live near the Awash River as pastoralists or agro-pastoralists.
Often the Ethiopian government deports villagers and pastoralists at gunpoint without any compensation. As documented by Human Rights Watch, Survival International and the Oakland institute regarding what happened in Gambella and the Omo River between 2010 and 2012, any resistance is suppressed violently on the assumption that those areas are so remote that neither local nor international media are able to reach and report incidents.
Following the demonstration on 25 November 2014 by the Somali-Issa inhabitants in which 4 elders and 16 youths were jailed respectively for 3 and 2 years in Jigjiga, the capital of the Somali Regional State; another one took placethe14 December 2014 in the town of Gadmaytu.
The federal army fired swiftly and indiscriminately into the crowd. As a result, several pastoralists were killed and dozens were seriously wounded by bullets, among them MahamedDageyeh, AduanBouhdil, HousseinGuirehAinan, HabibaAinan, Ahmed Ali Iliyeh.
Some of the injured were brought to hospitals as far as 150 km in the city of Nazareth. Others who had no chance simply sufferedin silence without getting any help at all,as medicine is scarce in those rural villages of Ethiopia. At the same incident, Moussa Hassiliyeh, HocheAinan, BouhRobleh, IguehGuedi, Hassan Farah and 7 fellow men were taken into custody and disseminated in others cities far from home and no one knowsof their whereabouts to date.
The Ethiopian government is further damaging its volatile reputation abroad by repeatedly conducting ethnically based violence and fuelling intractable borders disputes among the multiples tribes that make-up Ethiopia.
The slow economic recovery dubbed as “double digit growth” and highlighted from 2010 by Western media for a country known for drought and famine since the 1970’smay nothide the dark side of this populated country -80 million inhabitants- and the oppression that the EPRDF, the ruling party dominated by the Tigreans, is forcefully exerting against other ethnic groups such as Somali-Issa.
The ethnic federalism that the EPRDF has put in place in Ethiopia since 1991 has been praised and welcomed at the time by the entire spectrum of the Ethiopian political and civil society. Indeed everyone was expecting adecentralized state with the empowerment of local municipalities vested at managing their own policies.
Instead the EPRDF has swiftly transformed itself into a gigantic one-party which has re-established the top-down rigid hierarchy that has been in place from Menelik II through the DERG, something that everyone was fed up with.
As described in July 2012 by MrHagmann, an independent academic,“Ethiopia is a highly centralized one-party state. No independent media, judiciary, opposition parties or civil society to speak of exists in today’s Ethiopia. Many of the country’s businesses are affiliated with the ruling party.
Most Ethiopians do not dare to discuss politics for fear of harassment by local officials.As I found out in dozens of interviews with Ethiopian Somalis, security forces indiscriminately kill, imprison and torture civilians whom they suspect of aiding Ogaden rebels.”
All Ethiopians are eager to see a fair and shared economic development for their beloved country; but forced displacement, expropriation without compensation, and brutal repression of peaceful demonstration must stop.
No later than 19 December 2014, some Ethiopian websites are reporting another demonstration in Bahirdar, the capital of Amhara Regional State, where clashes with the police left three deaths and several injured. One 25 December 2014, Waberi Ali Bouh who was member of a delegation, sent from Dire-Dawa by the Ogass of Somali-Issa to visit the 4 elders unjustly jailed in Jigjigafor three years last month,has been arrestedand jailed upon arrival in the city.
The crude force used by the EPDRF ruling political party and its ally the SPDP in the Somali Regional State and elsewhere in Ethiopia may drag it to its demise.
The crude force used by the EPDRF ruling political party and its ally the SPDP in the Somali Regional State and elsewhere in Ethiopia may drag it to its demise.
We are only giving the following common sense advice to the EPDRF: It is not in the interest of the Ethiopian governmentto fuel and entertain violence anywhere in the country; and especially along the Addis-Abeba/Djibouti corridor-transit for 85%of Ethiopian trade- within the dwelling area of the Somali-Issa pastoralists.
By: Waddour Issa
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Engineering Ethnic Conflict: The Toll of Ethiopia's Plantation Development on Suri People | oaklandinstitute.org
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Recently dubbed “Africa’s Lion” (in allusion to the discourse around “Asian Tigers”), Ethiopia is celebrated for its steady economic growth, including a growing number of millionaires compared to other African nations. However, as documented in previous research by the Oakland Institute, the Ethiopian government’s “development strategy,” is founded on its policy of leasing millions of hectares (ha) of land to foreign investors. Implementation of this strategy involves human rights violations including coerced displacement, political repression, and neglect of local livelihoods, and places foreign and political interests above the rights and needs of local populations, especially ethnic groups who have historically been marginalized and neglected by the government.
Read the full report
Access the Photo Gallery
Recently dubbed “Africa’s Lion” (in allusion to the discourse around “Asian Tigers”), Ethiopia is celebrated for its steady economic growth, including a growing number of millionaires compared to other African nations. However, as documented in previous research by the Oakland Institute, the Ethiopian government’s “development strategy,” is founded on its policy of leasing millions of hectares (ha) of land to foreign investors. Implementation of this strategy involves human rights violations including coerced displacement, political repression, and neglect of local livelihoods, and places foreign and political interests above the rights and needs of local populations, especially ethnic groups who have historically been marginalized and neglected by the government.
Read the full report
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
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