ethiozoo

Small farmers are being threatened by large agriculture.

The African nation of Ethiopia has struggled with war, famine and drought for decades, yet today’s government is aggressively pursuing a policy that is seeing large tracts or fertile land sold to foreign entities with little or no benefit to Ethiopians. Ethiopia’s Ambassador to India Gennet Zewide is encouraging investment in agriculture at a cost to private companies she describes as ‘negligible’.

Ethiopia’s Constitution prohibits private ownership of land, instead it vests ownership and control in the State. However the Ethiopian government is offering long term leases to foreign owned entities, essentially forbidding their own citizens from land ownership while encouraging foreign possession.

The economic advantages to Ethiopians from this style of investment may be just as negligible as the cost of investment. In a country where 13 million people still rely on food aid, and the conditions for growing crops are fragile, exporting food to India and other countries will entrench existing problems.

A recent report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization et al warns that although land in Africa may seem abundant and available existing land users often lack the means to register title or claim the land they are using. Many land users are marginalized from mechanisms allowing them to demonstrate ownership.

Understanding the scale of the development is extremely difficult due to the overlapping regional and national registers as well as the likelihood of undocumented land deals. The Oromia state investment promotion agency revealed 22 actual or existing land deals, while their national counterpart boasts 148 deals.

Indian firms are certainly not the only ones buying up valuable land in Ethiopia, the Saudi’s are also heavily investing in the region. What is troubling is that the government’s eagerness to secure such investment may come at the price of securing its citizens basic human rights to food, water and shelter. Given Ethiopia’s Constitutional view that private property rights do not exist, their willingness to lease their land to foreign owned entities is worrying.