Listening to their silence? The political reaction of affected communities to large-scale land acquisitions: insights from Ethiopia

Abstract

In Ethiopia, large-scale land acquisitions have been growing ever larger over the last few years, mainly in the lowland parts of the country. A substantial amount of land has already been acquired by both domestic and foreign investors in the Benishangul-Gumuz region. The land acquisitions pose apparent threats to the economic, cultural and ecological survival of local indigenous communities. In particular, Gumuz ethnic groups, who depend on customary forms of land access and control, and whose livelihoods are based heavily on access to natural resources, are being differentially affected. Through a case study in some selected administrative districts of the Benishangul-Gumuz region, this paper uses empirical evidence to examine how local indigenous communities are engaging with or challenging the recent land acquisitions. By doing so, the paper shows how the apparent silence of the Gumuz people regarding the land acquisitions is misleading. It shows how local communities, although not organized either politically or economically, express their discontent in differentiated ways against the state and social forces – particularly over land and access to employment, and around state politics. As I show in this paper, local reactions range from covert to more open forms of resistance.

Keywords:

• large-scale land acquisition
• local resistance
• Benishangul-Gumuz
• Ethiopia

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jun Borras, Max Spoor and Ian Scoones for their assistance, constructive comments and suggestions. A draft of this paper was first presented in a seminar on ‘The Politics of Land Grabbing; Strategies of Resistance’ at the University of Limerick, Ireland on 4–5 June 2013, and a revised version was later presented at the FLACSO-ISA Joint Conference on the panel ‘Land, Land Grabbing, Resistance and Agrarian Struggles’ at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina from 23–25 July 2014. I thank the participants in these fora for their constructive comments, particularly Rachel Ibreck, Tom Lodge and Matias Margulis. Also, I am very grateful to this journal's two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding

I would like to thank the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP) and the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) for providing financial support to conduct the fieldwork.

Notes

¹In analyzing large-scale land acquisitions, the notion of property rights is here conceived not just as ‘a bundle of rights’ over land but as ‘a bundle of powers’ that focuses on ability, and this brings attention to relationships that enable or constrain the ability to access resources (Ribot and Peluso 2003).

²As a counter to this ‘state simplification’, emphasizing the notion of ‘land sovereignty’ is crucial for grounding analysis from actually ‘existing local land-based social relations’ in order to ensure that local people are consulted appropriately and their priorities addressed in the process (Borras and Franco 2010a). What lies at the core of the ‘land sovereignty’ concept is ‘the rural poor people's right to land’ (Borras and Franco 2010a, 35).

³There are five tiers of government administration in the country, which include (from the highest to lowest administrative unit): federal, region, zone, woreda and kebele. Woreda is roughly equivalent to district, while kebele, especially in rural areas, corresponds to a group of villages.

⁴This perception by the federal state and local political elites appears to have shaped the current policy of leasing vast tracts of the region's land to investors.

⁵Unlike other regions, for instance the Amhara region, land registration and certification has not been undertaken in the Benishangul-Gumuz regional state and, thus, traditional land-tenure systems are still widely practiced. Note that the difference in the de facto tenure system between highland regions and the lowlands, including the Benishangul-Gumuz region, cannot be attributed to the absence of land registration in the latter, as land registration is a recent phenomenon that took place in most highland areas only from 2003 onwards. Despite the Derg's 1975 land reform proclamation that abolished differences in land tenure over the whole country by distributing usufruct rights only, tenure in the highlands has long been based on individual holdings, while customary forms of tenure have been largely practiced in the lowland regions.

⁶Historically, a large part of the Benishangul-Gumuz region was ‘a buffer zone and a trade entrepôt’ between Ethiopia and Sudan (Markakis 2011, 84).

⁷As Gramsci (1971) argued, the dominant classes normally control not only the material means of production but also the symbolic means of production. Through creating discourses as well as through coercion, the dominant groups try to install or solicit ‘consent’ for their hegemonic rule by defining what is beneficial and legitimate and, as a result, the subordinate groups accept such hegemonic ideologies and exploitations as normal and justified. Nonetheless, Scott (1976, 1977) demonstrated that peasants were capable of opposing and struggling against exploitative practices and dominant ideologies that threatened their moral economies in ways that did not conform to the assumptions articulated in Gramsci's formulation and, hence, he contended that peasants were not in fact victims of ‘false consciousness’. According to Scott (1977, 280), ‘there can be no question of hegemony when vital needs are ignored or violated by elites, for these needs are an integral part of peasant consciousness and values'.

⁸Most of these seasonal wage labourers, migrating mainly from the central highlands of the Amhara region, are landless young men or those with small landholdings who are unable to provide for their families from such holdings. For many of these labourers, seasonal migration is the only available source of income.

⁹For a detailed analysis of more or less similar cases in Metekel, see Abbute (2002).

¹⁰Interview with managers of two investment projects in Dangur woreda, May 2012.

¹¹For further reading as regards the history of centre/periphery relationships, which was characterized by a long history of inequality, exploitation and marginalization, see Ahmad (1999), Gebre (2003), Abbute (2002), Pankhurst (1977, 2001), Zewdie (1991), Donham (2002), Markakis (2011) and Makki (2012).

¹²The use of land by pastoralists and shifting cultivators in the lowlands is contested by the state as such existing land uses are perceived to be unsustainable or inefficient (Lavers 2012b). This image of existing land uses in the lowlands has been very formative in the design of state policy that focuses on leasing vast tracts of land to investors in those areas.

¹³Above all, recentralizing the facilitation and administration of investment lands as observed in recent land deals in fact undermines the political process that was intended to promote and implement a decentralized land administration system, as was stipulated in regional land administration proclamation 85/2010 (BGRS 2010).

¹⁴See Kerkvliet (2009) for a discussion of this.

¹⁵During the interviews, especially with one of the higher officials in the zonal capital, Gilgel Beles, before starting the interview formally, I was asked by the official not to record any of the discussions that we would have on the issue, and for that, I had to remove the batteries from my voice recorder and hand it over together with my cellphone until we finished the discussions.

¹⁶The Constitution of Ethiopia adopted in 1995 gives regional states the power to administer all land and other natural resources. However, recent rises in land values have seen the federal government recentralize the administration of land resources (e.g., investment lands), taking the power from regional states, in a move which is, in fact, contrary to the constitution. While the federal system has restored some of the autonomy of lowland areas in terms of self-administration, in practice, these regions have nominal authority to administer their land resources, especially when it comes to much of the potentially cultivable and valuable land that can be brought under large-scale commercial agriculture. This is particularly interesting, as the exploitation of land resources in lowland regions was perceived on a grand scale. As Markakis (2011, 260) rightly pointed out, the recent ‘process of leasing land touched the very core of the federal arrangement, since the main advantage of decentralization from the viewpoint of the periphery was to give its communities a measure of control over their land, and to prevent it being taken over by [the centre] as in the past’. Similar remarks were also made by Lavers (2012b, 814): ‘Despite the creation of an ethnic federal system, which is intended to protect the rights of minority ethnic groups, recent processes of agricultural investment seem likely to continue past patterns of exploitation of the resources of minority ethnic groups for the benefit of the centre’.

¹⁷Given the country's civil society law, enacted in 2009, that appeared to severely weaken the work of civil society organizations, particularly those of human rights defenders and advocates of democratic governance, it seems very unlikely that local indigenous communities who are threatened by the land acquisitions will be supported by such organizations in defending their local land rights against the combined weight of the state and private capital (domestic and foreign). The Charities and Societies Proclamation No. 621/2009 prohibits all foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as those local NGOs that receive more than 10 percent of their funding from foreign sources from engaging in activities pertaining to human rights and conflict.

Additional information

Tsegaye Moreda is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His research interests focus on the political economy of land and livelihoods in rural Ethiopia, with a particular focus on land tenure, land conflicts, migration and resettlement, environmental degradation, agricultural commercialization and large-scale land acquisitions. Email: [email protected]