Ethiopia evicts farmers as starvation grows

The Ethiopian government is evicting up to 90,000 of its own people from their land to lease to foreign investors to grow crops for export. And they are doing this at a time when 4.5 million Ethiopians in the south-east of the country face starvation.

Survival International has charted the government’s theft of the country's most productive farmland, using so-called “nationalisation of land” to further the interests of a corrupt élite.

Along the Omo River in south west Ethiopia, Malaysian, Italian, Korean and Chinese firms are operating agri-businesses. The government is clearing as much as 245,000 hectares for vast state-owned, sugar-cane plantations. The self-sufficient, and efficient, Omo Valley people who have lived for centuries on small-scale mixed farming - the most sustainable kind of farming - are being forced out. Threats, jailings, beatings and rape are used to silence opposition.

The government deems the Omo valley people 'backward' and in need of modernisation. In other words, from independent farmers they will become landless labourers - either working for foreign interests or building a series of dams. This is an ecological disaster in the making that will deprive the land of its annual irrigation.

Survival International’s Director, Stephen Corry, said: "The Omo Valley tribes people are neither ‘backward’ nor need ‘modernising’ – they are as much a part of the 21st century as the multinationals that seek to appropriate their land. The tragedy is, forcing them to become manual labourers will almost certainly lead to a drastic reduction in their quality of life and condemn them to starvation and destitution like so many of their fellow countrymen."

The Ethiopian Minister for Mines clarified his government's investment policy when he said that the country's deposits of gold, silver, copper and other metals and minerals are "totally open" to foreign investors, with "no restrictions" at all.

China is seizing the opportunities on offer - some might call it a simple buyout. China's trade with Africa will exceed $110bn (£71bn) in 2011 and in Ethiopia they are creating a huge construction boom and increases in food and other exports.

Ethiopia is a capitalist success story, with GDP rising from $6.88bn in 1994 to $28.53bn in 2010. The annual growth rate is 8% but the impoverishment of the majority is the price being paid. Half the country's 72 million people live on less than $1 a day. Children as young as eight labour in government-owned sugar cane plantations, managed by Indian agri-businesses, who pay the equivalent of $0.83 a day. Newly-landless Omo Valley people who don't find work will be forced to move to the capital, Addis Ababa – dubbed “the world's biggest slum city” – in search of work.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi cynically defends these rapacious policies and says those who accuse foreign companies of land grabbing are ill-informed, saying: “We do not want to admire the beauty of our country while we starve.” Zenawi and his EPRDF party are a corrupt élite who stole the 2005 election. In a wave of protests, 30 people were killed and 80,000 students rounded up; many oppositionists are still in jail.

This opposition movement, driven temporarily underground, will re-emerge as Africa's peoples set out to complete their struggle for liberation from colonialism with a struggle for democracy. But to succeed it will need outside assistance and what happens now in Egypt - Africa's second most populous and politically now most advanced country – is absolutely crucial to all of Africa.

The establishment of a popular democracy in Egypt, based on People's Assemblies, could rush aid and support to democratic struggles elsewhere. The future of Africa is not in the hands of the Chinese government, the World Bank or the aid agencies - it is to a very great extent, in the hands of the Egyptian masses.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Ethiopia drives farmers off their land

It’s Christmas time, and the old favourites are being wheeled out, including Band Aid’s Do they know it’s Christmas, which in 1984 brought together top musicians in response to the terrible famine then raging in Ethiopia. No-one who saw the Michael Buerk’s reports for the BBC will ever forget them.

Now Ethiopia is one of Africa’s booming economies with a current annual growth rate of 8%. Addis Ababa, itself hosts one of the world’s biggest charity events. The Great Ethiopian Run harnesses the national passion for running to raise money for those in the countryside whose lives have not been improved by the boom.

In the next phase of economic expansion, the government of Meles Zenawi plans to lease 100,000 hectares of land over the next five years to global agribusiness. Companies include Saudi Star, owned by the Saudi royal family, which plans to grow water-hungry crops like rice and sugar.

The Ethiopian government claims the land is empty and unused and that inward investment will improve infrastructure and lift people out of poverty. But In reality this is an enforced land requisition, complete with repression and bribery. Ten people have already been killed in protests.

In a BBC report from the south west of the country, one of those protesting against the plans, explained how the land has been used by Ethiopia’s pastoralist, criss-crossing it with their animals in annual cycles, literally from time immemorial.

He told reporter Ed Butler: “There is no empty land in Gambella without a history. Village areas have been cleared and villagers have been bribed to sell their own farm. They can’t sell the land, it’s not theirs. That land is ancestral land.”

Ethiopian writer Dr Magn Nayang argues that it is possible to achieve modernisation WITHOUT handing over land to the global food companies who are “arguably the greatest generators of poverty, and consequently social and political instability in the world today”.

He recalls how farmers in the 1990s were encouraged to plant coffee, and as a result the price of coffee fell as the market was flooded and the incomes of more than 25 million coffee growers, including Ethiopians, were devastated.This is what happens when you drag farmers who want to stay on their land forever, into the capitalist farming model without the kind of state subsidies enjoyed by European and American farmers. Dr Nayang puts is succinctly:

According to the economic theory of commodity industries, rising production and falling prices continue until profits are so low that investment capital moves elsewhere. The Karuturi Global, the Saudi Star, and the likes are bound to move somewhere else, once they deplete the long-term fertility of the soil. However, poor farmers do not have this option. In fact, poor farmers typically keep trying to expand production even when costs exceed prices in desperate attempts to maintain their incomes and stay on their land.

Agricultural commodity prices are soaring – cotton is up 100% over the year; soybeans 27% and wheat has also increased dramatically. Food prices are rising across the globe. This is partly due to demand from the growing economies of China, India and Brazil. But it is also a result of the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, where money pumped into the economy is finding its way into speculation on commodity prices.

In the meantime, marginal land is being despoiled by intensive farming, water wasted on inappropriate cash crops – and at the end of the day the agri-corporations will move on leaving a desert behind them.

To protect the land, the farmers and the world’s food supply we need a new concept of commonwealth – a local and community-based framework for land use. It would reject the idea that the land belongs to the state, or to anyone – whilst protecting the rights of farmers to go on farming it and having agreed rights over it.

Penny Cole
Environment editor