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.

Ethiopia farmer threatens lawsuit against UK over rights abuses

Mohammad Awad | 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.

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.

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 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 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.

Ethiopians 'forced off land' for sugar projects AFP

Ethiopians 'forced off land' for sugar projects

(AFP) – 6 hours ago  

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia is forcing thousands of people from their land in the southern Omo valley to make way for sugar plantations, Human Rights Watch said in a report Monday, a charge denied by the government.

"The Ethiopian government is forcibly displacing indigenous pastoral communities in Ethiopia's Lower Omo valley without adequate consultation or compensation," the New York-based group reported.

Pastoralists are communities whose main livelihood is raising livestock.

An official with the group estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people have been displaced.

About 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of land has been earmarked for commercial agriculture in the Omo valley, where several state-run sugar plantations and cotton farms are already in operation.

The government denied the accusation and said any relocation in the area is happening voluntarily.

"There is no forcing out of people from their residence, the direction of the government in this regard is to engage the public, if there is any reason to relocate people, then it is based on... open communication," government spokesman Bereket Simon told AFP.

The rights watchdog accused Ethiopian authorities of intimidation, arrest and violence against those who oppose the plans.

"Government officials have carried out arbitrary arrests and detentions, beatings, and other violence against residents of the Lower Omo valley who questioned or resisted the development plans," HRW said.

But Bereket said the sugar plantation schemes in the Omo valley will develop and modernise the region.

"We are concerned with (community) wellbeing, their cultural heritage and this is not a project to dismantle their cultural heritage, it's the opposite actually," he said.

Most of the 200,000 people living in the Omo valley are agro-pastoralists using the land for cultivation and animal grazing.

The Omo river is also a lifeline for the communities in the valley who rely on its annual flooding for growing crops.

Rights groups say the construction of the Gibe III dam upstream -- already half complete -- will regulate the river's flow, threatening the livelihoods of the communities that rely on it.

The government rejects these claims, saying the dam will provide a steady water source and will produce electricity for the 55 percent of the Ethiopian population that does not have access to power.

But HRW's senior Africa researcher Ben Rawlence accused the Ethiopian government of neglecting the needs of local communities.

"Ethiopia's desire to accelerate economic development is laudable, but recent events in the Omo valley are taking an unacceptable toll on the rights and livelihoods of indigenous communities," he said in a statement.

The rights group called on the government to halt construction of the dam and stop the development of sugar plantations.

Bereket accused HRW of trying to "micromanage" Ethiopia and of routinely opposing development schemes.

"They want us to remain poor and I don't know how these people can claim to be humanistic when they just oppose any endeavour that we do to benefit our people," he said.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in May that four million hectares of land have been earmarked for commercial investment throughout the country.

Indian Farmer’s African Safari's odds against him are as big as his dreams | Businessworld

Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi dreams of becoming one of the world’s biggest farmers. But the odds against him are as big as his dreams

Rajeev Dubey

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SOARING AMBITION: Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi at his farm in Gambela, Ethiopia
(BW Pic By Rajeev Dubey)

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April 2008. The government of Gambela state in Ethiopia had invited Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi to discuss his offer to lease 100,000 hectare for farming. Karuturi’s expectations of a deal going through were so low that he sent his public relations officer Ashok Sharma and some  lawyers for the meeting. The managing director of the world’s largest rose exporter, the Rs 645-crore Karuturi Global (KGL), had better things to do with his time than take a 700-km ride from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa for a deal that seemed unlikely to materialise.

But his father, Karuturi Surya Rao, promoter of a Bangalore-based cable maker, and also chairman of Karuturi Global, offered to join the troupe. Though the deal seemed unlikely, Karuturi senior was worried about his son’s soaring ambitions and wanted to make sure that no undue risks were being taken.

As it turned out, Karuturi was both right — and wrong. The state would not offer 100,000 hectare (ha). Instead, it wanted him to take 300,000 ha (or 741,000 acre, an area twice the size of the National Capital Territory of Delhi) on a 99-year lease at 20 birr (about $1.5) per ha per annum.

HOME ALONE: An empty village of pastoralists at Gambela farm (BW Pic By Rajeev Dubey)

Karuturi senior wanted nothing to do with the deal. The team was walking out when Ram called for an update. “Sign it right now,” he shouted over the phone from Addis Ababa when he heard the terms. “I want it signed and sealed before they change their mind.” Karuturi senior could hardly believe what was going on. “What’s the point of taking land that you cannot walk (across)?” he asked his son on the phone.

“I can’t walk it, but I can fly over it, dad,” Karuturi replied nonchalantly, “This is my company. Let me handle it.” There was a deafening silence at the other end of the phone. Even as the agreement to make Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi the biggest land-holding Indian on Earth was being signed, Karuturi senior walked out in protest and sat in the car, fretting over the risk.

The 25,274 sq. km  Gambela bordering South Sudan is among the poorer states of Ethiopia. A majority of its 300,000 populace is pastoral. Gambela and other states have since leased out land to others, including India’s Shapoorji Pallonji & Co. (50,000 ha) to grow biofuel, and Spentex Industries (25,000 ha) to grow cotton. To understand what prompted Gambela to make Karuturi an offer he could not refuse (another 12,000 ha was leased to KGL at Bako, near Addis Ababa), swing across 2,400 km to this animated discussion in Nairobi, Kenya.

A Chicken And Egg Situation
April 2012: John M.N. Mututho is livid. “Mr Minister, this time you better take this seriously,” he says. Tension hangs in the air in the 9th floor boardroom overlooking the Kenyan Parliament in Nairobi. It is from there that Mututho draws his powers to admonish the farm minister. He is the chairman of the Parliament-appointed Agriculture, Livestock and Cooperatives Committee. Mututho monitors the agriculture ministry’s budget proposal for self-sufficiency in foodgrain. “Honourable minister, we feel really heavy at heart. We really don’t like it,” says Mututho, on the ministry’s inability to achieve food security.

The discussion that follows could well have been a Cabinet discourse in the Nehruvian-era when India was food-scarce. But this is the state of granaries in many African nations. In 2011, Africa imported food worth $50 billion, most of which came as aid from the US and Europe. “We have a very nasty situation. We import everything except air,” Mututho tells BW just after the panel meeting. For the first time, Kenya is inviting foreigners for large-scale corporate farming. Land will be free of lease for 25 years. Kenya is facilitating deals by consolidating 131 agriculture laws into just four. There will be no restriction on exports either (but local prices are higher than international prices; farmers will find it lucrative to sell domestically).

Kenya joins Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal and Sierra Leone, in offering vast tracts to feed their growing populations. NGOs, human rights groups and activists call it corporate colonialism and land grab, and are mounting pressure to desist. “There is opposition from west Africa... that we not give foreigners any more land. For Kenya, that does not stand,” says Mututho.

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But it all began in Ethiopia which was a symbol of starvation in the 1980s. The $32-billion Ethiopian economy — about half the size of Reliance Industries — has the fastest-growing African GDP at 10 per cent. Around 75 million of its 120 million ha is arable. But only 15 million ha is cultivated. In 2003, Ethiopia set aside 3 million ha for commercial farming. Of that, 1 million ha has been leased, inviting the wrath of activists protesting natives’ displacement. “No debate has taken place. In a country where you have 13 million people dependent on food aid, (if) you unleash this development model where human development and consensus is being ignored, the fallout is huge,” says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of California-based policy research body, Oakland Institute. “They are trying to take potshots at non-European, non-American investors. It is almost racist,” counters Karuturi.

Acres Up To The Horizon
The elevated but non-asphalt road stretches 72 km from one end of the KGL farm to the other. It’s the highway to South Sudan, 100 km away. A white flag-waving party of 20 Sudanese refugees passes by. Acres of cultivable land meet the horizon as big bulldozers, earth movers and dumpers work round the clock to clear shrubs, anthills and trees; 65,000 ha have been cleared. The rest will be done by March, promises Karuturi during one of the gut-churning rides.

The Gambela project has enormous implications for him. Success here could open the floodgates for similar deals in other African countries. Failure could consign him to obscurity, besides attracting the ire of investors and financial institutions. As the sowing season approaches, visits to each of the sites are mandatory, followed by marathon problem-solving sessions at the main camp in Ilea that start post-dusk and go on till midnight, over loads of tea, soft drinks and beer.

Planning takes up most of the time. The last time he had a crop in the fields, Karuturi grossly underestimated nature’s influence on his farm that lies between the Baro and Alwero rivers. Floods consumed 60,000 tonne of maize sown on 12,000 ha. It was a $15 million write-off. “We were caught napping. Later, when I spoke to villagers, they showed me (water) marking on trees. It is so simple. It was there. I felt like an idiot,” says Karuturi. When he told the flood woes to rose buyers in the Netherlands, they had a ready answer: build dykes. The Dutch have mastered of it. Nearly 25 per cent of the Netherlands is below the sea level and 21 per cent of the population lives below sea level.  Another 50 per cent land is barely 1 metre above the sea.

...WHAT WORKS FOR HIM The world's largest exporter of cut roses, generates 40 per cent gross margin from rose business The Gambela farm between two rivers, Baro and Alwero, has high (6 per cent) organic matter in soil 65,000 ha of 1,00,000 ha have already been cleared for farming, rest by the end of 2013 Stable government in Ethiopia (ruling since 1991) ensures support to projects awarded by current regime

...WHAT DOES NOT No experience in largescale farming. Lost a maize crop due to poor anticipation of the power of nature Gambela farm needs $380 million of investment for two crops a year; Karuturi has invested only $128 million till date Still learning to use modern farming equipment; training workers on new equipment Farm is still to be secured from wildlife from the Gambela National Park,especially deer

...WHERE THE OPPORTUNITY LIES Africa is a net importer of food and requires vast tracts of land to be cultivated to feed population Food prices in Africa are 200-300 per cent higher than global prices, ensuring high margins Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone are opening up for large-scale farming

...WHAT COULD TRIP HIM Inability to arrange funds or bring in agripreneurs for revenue share Anti-land grabbing activists and human rights bodies are raising the pitch against scale farming Ethiopia may decide to cap land holdings to 100,000 ha under political, NGO pressure Unexpected rains, floods or natural disasters could destroy crop

If Karuturi is nervous, he hides it behind the bravado. “I’m not boasting. It’s a wild west project,” says the 6-foot-tall farmer. “It has never been done before.” He expects to earn $500-700 million annually from this project when it is fully commissioned in three years. That’s six times the revenues KGL generates from rose exports. The $380 million investment ($128 million has been invested so far) is 12 times KGL’s FY11 net profit.

But his dreams are not prisoners of scarcity. “In a few years (we will) develop at least 1 million ha (2.47 million acre) of farmland in Africa and produce 8-10 million tonne food,” says Karuturi. What he does not say is, that could make his the world’s biggest farming company. “Size mein kya rakha hai (why go after size)? We want to be the best.” Kazakhstan’s Ivolga-Holding and Argentina’s El Tejar are the biggest with 600,000 ha (1.5 million acre) each. Karuturi believes at 1 million ha, he would be among the top 5 producers of maize, rice, palm oil, sugar and sesame.

He says exploratory talks are on with Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal and Sierra Leone. “We have sent reconnaissance teams. We are looking at these four and DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) as a funnel.” Discussions are at an advanced stage in Tanzania and Mozambique. “In Senegal, we have made an exploratory probe and in Sierra Leone we have made initial contacts,” says Karuturi.

Interestingly, the million ha dream cannot be realised by KGL all by itself. It does not have the $5 billion it will need. To realise the dream, KGL will have to morph into a farm management firm. For instance, the Gambela land itself will need $1.2 billion in investment — a tall order for the $115-million firm. “I want to be a farm-enabler. We want to build something like an agri SEZ. (We will) develop land suitable for farming, with irrigation, mechanisation, storage, post-harvest transportation and bring in agri entrepreneurs for a revenue share.” His proposal to convert millions of ha of fallow land into cultivable land through agri SEZs is pending with the Ethiopian government.



The model is evolving, but for now Karuturi has brought in a farmer from Punjab, a Uruguayan and an Australian firm in a 30:35:35 model for 5,000 ha parcels each. While the agripreneur and KGL would share 35 per cent each of the produce, 30 per cent would be the cost of sowing, equipment, maintenance and land lease.

Up Against The Real World
Farming at this scale throws up problems of equal magnitude. The region was not introduced to electricity. KGL had to import 30 gensets from India to power the farm, even supply to nearby village Ilea for free. Karuturi imported Indian equipment — earth movers from BEML, tractors from TAFE, trucks from Tata and Scorpio pick-ups from Mahindra. Only to realise he made the wrong choice. Frequent breakdowns and lack of support made him change his mind. The last straw, he says, was when BEML told him to wait three months to supply spares, after receiving payments. He now buys Toyota Land Cruisers to traverse the dirt roads. And the monstrous 500 HP tractors from John Deere and Case New Holland — almost 50 of them at $1 million each — to take over from the 55 HP TAFE tractors. The John Deere tractors, he says, cover 50 ha a day, as against TAFE’s 4-6 ha.

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It’s time for site visits. Two 1.7 km-long airstrips are to be readied at two ends of the farm for the two planes arriving in November to spray  insecticides, fertilisers, etc. The Chinese, when they were searching for oil, left one airstrip. It can do with recarpeting. Work on the second one is up to Karuturi’s satisfaction. But the 5,000 ha rice farm at Jikao is not. The previous evening, Karuturi pitted the progress of the Uruguayans manning the site against the American representatives manning the maize site. The Uruguayans lost badly. The site is lagging. Karuturi is anxious. About 1.5 km away, he notices only three of the five 500 HP tractors emitting exhaust smoke. “Why are only three of them ploughing, Jagdeesh?” he asks the farm in-charge. “They might have stopped for greasing or cleaning filters,” replies Jagdeesh. These are million-dollar properties. They should work 24x7 to eke out maximum productivity.

As the Land Cruiser closes in, Karuturi’s instinct proves right. One tractor is stationary. Jagdeesh jumps out even before the car stops. “He was cleaning the filter, sir,” he says. Karuturi bursts out, “Your tractors will function for 100 years, but I won’t be there for 100 years.” Dissatisfied, he hops on to the driver’s seat of a TAFE tractor himself, apparently to time the distance from one end to the other. By the time he finishes, his white shirt is covered in soot patches. Before proceeding, he turns to Jagdeesh: “I want crops. I want production. Come to the AGM and see how investors roast me.” By the next afternoon, executive director Birinder Singh is dictating marching orders at the Addis Ababa office. Jagdeesh is transferred from Jikao.

A Love-Hate Relationship
Investors have been vicious since KGL’s first crop — maize — in Gambela was destroyed in August 2011, a month before it was to be harvested. The stock has fallen nearly 60 per cent since then and has languished between Rs 4 -6 for the past eight months ( 31 May: Rs 4.8). At its peak, the Rs 10 share (before it split into 10 shares of Re 1 each on 4 April 2008) closed at Rs 430.85 on 8 January 2008. “A lot of growth was expected. It has not happened,” says Rohit Inamdar, senior vice-president, ICRA Equity. “It is the floods. This will be a blip on the horizon,” says Karuturi. “In October, I give you a harvest; it is going to be back to where it was.”

OTHER BIGGIES

FARMING PASSION:Gustavo Grobocopatel is among the world’s largest farmers (Reuters) Among conglomerates, Kazakhstan’s Ivolga-Holding and Argentina’s El Tejar manage 600,000 ha (1.48 million acre) each. Ivolga operates in Kazakhstan and Russia and El Tejar in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia. As an individual, Argentina’s Gustavo Grobocopatel’s firm Los Gobo manages 300,000 ha. With most of its land devoted to wheat, Ivolga has emerged as one of the biggest wheat-producing firms in the world. El Tejar, on the other hand, is the world’s biggest grain producer, but it also raises cattle for meat production. Los Gobo grows soybeans, corn, wheat and sugar in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Increasingly, large agri companies are listing on stock exchanges. Argentina’s Adecoagro, Los Gobo came out with an IPO in Brazil in 2011. Now, El Tejar has declared it will tap the stock market in 2012.

“There were two setbacks: an entire crop got washed out; expansion has suffered since Axis Bank did not disburse $180 million... the company could not meet a condition that the National Bank of Ethiopia should approve repatriation of funds,” adds Narendra Dokania, senior analyst at ICRA. “It was a syndication. It lapsed. We didn’t seek re-approval,” says Karuturi. Axis Bank declined comment. “The major challenge is towards fund-raising,” says Inamdar. Developing 100,000 ha needs an investment of $380 million over three years. KGL has invested $128 million. Where will the rest come from? “It will be debt, over three years. We have got financial closure for $50 million from the Indian Overseas Bank,” says Karuturi.

Water And Dykes
The rains are due in June and Karuturi knows his future is at stake. Going by the Dutch advice, KGL has been building 78.9 km of 15-metre-high, 15-metre-wide dykes along the farm. But heavy machine operators are in short supply. Karuturi shouts at his cook in his native tongue. “I was telling him I have brought you here at three times your salary. Why can’t you double up as an operator?” he explains. Machine operators building the dyke spotted a pride of lions the previous evening. Perhaps, they had strayed from the Gambela National Park, looking for water on the dry bed of Alwero. Karuturi is at the spot at 8.30 am. Not for the lions, but because of the dry bed. He rubs his eyes in disbelief. “I can’t believe this is dry,” he says.“I have asked my people to build a dyke and divert the Alwero outside of our land,” he says.



But what happens when rain water drains from higher areas (423 metre above sea level) to lower areas? It will destroy the crop. The project’s vice-president gets the flak over the phone for not anticipating this. Karuturi sits on a plough and begins calculating the pumping capacity to ease water over dykes. The calculation goes all wrong, causing him anxiety. “Who can build this level of capacity? This kind of water goes through Sardar Sarovar,” he mutters. To his amusement, he finds he had over-calculated. A gasp and a sigh later, he shoots off instructions with details of locations. The pumps must be installed by the time he is back the next fortnight.

In the main camp, it’s problem-solving time, just seven days short of sowing time, the first crop of the season. Also the first since floods. Anxiety is high. Chief representative of Farmers’ National Corporation, the US firm contracted to farm, is upfront: “My big worries: Floods, deer, weeds and bugs.” KGL has imported chemicals to tackle weeds and bugs. Dykes should save the crop from floods. But deer? There are thousands of them. Protests from environmentalists forced the government to create a 10,000 ha deer corridor dissecting the farm for a million-strong migration of white-eared kob from Gambela National Park to Baro. A 30-km solar electric fence is being imported to keep the deer out.

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Will It, Won’t It?
It’s uncertain whether KGL will get the remaining 200,000 ha from Ethiopia. According to the Land Rent Contractual Agreement signed between KGL’s 100 per cent arm Karuturi Agro Products and Ethiopia’s agriculture ministry  on 5 November 2010, KGL was handed over 100,000 ha with the promise of the rest on completion of farming on the first parcel within two years. But pressure mounted from anti-land grab activists and the West. So Ethiopia has set up Agricultural Investment Support Directorate to monitor land allotment. Its chief Essayas Kebede has said land allotment to KGL will be capped at 100,000 ha. Any cap on land, however, will be a setback for KGL’s ambition. “We are lobbying the international community to see if we can stop the land grab by KGL, Ruchi Soya and others,” says Nyikaw Ochalla of Anywaa Survival Organisation, which represents the 100,000-strong Anywaa tribe of Gambela. In a letter to Karuturi (November 2011), Human Rights Watch highlighted “Villagisation and Rights Abuses in the Gambela region”. It asked: “There is evidence that Anuaks used and occupied land that is part of KGL’s lease area. What process has KGL undertaken to ensure appropriate compensation, as per Ethiopian law and international best practices?”


Karuturi responded: “Anuaks use and occupy land within KGL’s lease area without any disturbance. KGL has made no effort to disturb them.” But with rising pressure, is he confident of getting the remaining land? “Absolutely. There is no way this country will go back on the contract,” he says. “If there is a macro element because of politics and social pressure, we are fine. We have not invested on 200,000 ha.”

He pauses. “Honestly, I don’t care. I have got Tanzania. They want to give me a million ha. Mozambique, they have a 100,000 ha. DRC has so much of land.”  “There are social issues, but Ethiopia is supportive,” says ICRA’s Dokania. “Agriculture is a big focus for Ethiopia and so is manufacturing,” says Mayur Kothari, convenor, India Business Forum in Ethiopia.

Opponents, though, do not relent. “You can say, well, it’s the Ethiopian government’s fault, but you have to look at the role of the investor too,” says Mittal. “Oakland Institute! I don’t even know who they are. We have invited them over. Come and have a look. What are you guys talking about? They quote us but they still besmirch us. What can we do?” Karuturi asks. A lot will depend on how deftly KGL tackles Human Rights Watch, Anywaa and Oakland, among others. Karuturi says there are five villages with 1200-odd people on his farm.“I have not displaced anybody. These are pastoralists. We leave 5 km around the village for them to graze cattle,” he says. “This is a myth. In Gambela, land belongs to the indigenous people,” says Ochalla.



Even before he gets over that hurdle, Karuturi has a lot to prove. “All of them are going to make a loss. There is no infrastructure there. How will you sell?” asks Ajay Jakhar, chairman of the Bharat Krishak Samaj. Karuturi plans to use river navigation via Baro to access markets up to 2,000 km away. KGL has commissioned 500-tonne barges to be pulled by tugboats. “We can go up to North Sudan upstream. Down the Nile, we can go up to lake Victoria, 2,000 km away. Lake Victoria has Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda along its shores,” says Karuturi.

As the government does not subsidise food or farming in Africa, local prices are higher. Wheat and maize quote at about $250 per tonne on the Chicago Board of Trade. But in Africa, they are sold at about $400 per tonne. But what could trip the world’s largest farmer dream? Fund-raising and ability to bring in agripreneurs will be key. Karuturi is still $200 million short on funding Phase 1 of the 300,000 ha. Besides, “there are political risks in Ethiopia and Kenya,” says Inamdar. Ethiopia is stable today, thanks to its autocratic Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Asres. If the 57-year-old PM loses his hold, his detractors may attack projects he has okayed.

Karuturi may seem prepared, but he knows he is in a zero-tolerance zone. After all, he wouldn’t want to live his late father’s worst fears. “I promised myself that never again will we be caught napping,” says Karuturi. That’s as far as predictions go. But in a project of this scale, who can account for the unpredictable?

rajeevdubey(at)abp(dot)in

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 11-06-2012)