The perils of development from above: land deals in Ethiopia

Abstract

The paper examines Ethiopia's program of large-scale land investments with special emphasis on the rapid expansion of these investments between 2008 and 2011 when huge tracts of agricultural land were leased out to foreign and domestic investors over a short period of time. It is estimated that the total land ceded to investors from the mid-1990s to the end of 2011 may be in the order of 3.00–3.5 million hectares. I shall present a discussion of the program in the context of the government's grand strategy of state-led development, followed by an examination of the serious difficulties the program is presently facing. State-led development is characterized by emphasis on large-scale public investment and huge public debt which has damaging implications for people's livelihoods and has led to a non-inclusive and skewed growth path. Land investment, it is argued, is one among a number of public sector initiatives meant to enhance the country's export market and contribute to the growing demand for state accumulation. The real needs of the country on the other hand are poverty reduction and food security which the program does not address to any significant degree. It is further argued that the problems faced by the program are not solely caused by poor governance and lack of capacity but raise questions of policy choice and democratic decision-making. State-led development enhances the power of the state and exacerbates the vulnerabilities of small producers in the rural areas whose lands are increasingly being threatened by expropriation.

Keywords::

• Ethiopia
• land deals
• land grabbing
• agricultural investments
• state-led development

Notes

^1. Documents posted on MOARD's website in 2008/2009 spoke of competition with other African countries, but were full of high expectations from foreign land investment. All early MOARD documents have since been removed.

^2. Much of the debate on land grabbing has been conducted in the pages of the Journal of Peasant Studies; see the special collection in Vol. 39, Nos. 3 and 4, 2012. Advocacy groups that have been highly critical of Ethiopia's land deals include GRAIN, HRW, and the OI.

^3. This section is based in part on the findings of field work and interviews carried out in 2010 for an earlier study (Dessalegn, 2011). See also Fouad (2012), Lavers (2012), and Cotula, Vermeulen, Leonard, and Keely (2009) has some discussion on Ethiopia.

^4. On food security, see the recent collection of papers in Dessalegn, Pankhurst, and van Uffelen (2013); on land and landownership, see Dessalegn (2009).

^5. See Dessalegn (2011). Other works include Lavers (2012) and Malik (2012).

^6. Interview with Bizualem Bekele, coordinator at the Agricultural Investment Support Directorate, MOA, in Reporter, 8 September 2013. MOARD is previous name of MOA. UNDP (2012) gives much higher figures.

^7. Under the Federal system the country is divided into nine major ethnic-based administrative units called Killils in Amharic (rendered as Region in English, but I prefer the Amharic term). The lowest unit is the kebelle (equivalent to a sub-district), and above it is the woreda (district).

^8.http://www.etsugar.gov.et Accessed November 2013. Information posted earlier, in 2011, but since removed, provides different figures.

^9. According to press reports, it may be 100,000 or more (Reporter, 8 April 2012, and 13 January 2013); the Corporation's website provides the most minimal information and no word on displacements.

^10. The higher figure is in HRW (2012b), the lower in OI (2011, 2013). William Davison, ‘Development, rights, and restrictions in Ethiopian's South Omo,’ 16 September 2013.

^11. A rare exception is the recent paper by Tewolde and Fana (2013), which was based on field work in one of the Corporation's sites in SNNP; the paper raises concerns about conflicts and ‘cultural invasion’ by outsiders.

^12. See http://www.moa.gov.et

^13. Based on MOA and MOARD websites, and local press reports (Reporter and Fortune). Some of the companies have since pulled out.

^14. For the purposes of this work, I shall use the terms ‘development from above’ and ‘state-led development’ to mean more or less the same thing.

^15.Reporter, 22 April 2012, Ministry of Mines quoted in Reporter, 27 May 2012; Fortune, 8 April 2012; The Hindu, 1 June 2013 and 5 November 2013.

^16. William Davison, Ethiopia's push to lure farm investment falters on flood plains, Bloomberg News, 25 November 2013.

^17. Both the arson attack and the Gambella authorities complaints against Verdanta are covered in Reporter, 28 October and 11 December 2013; also in the Indian paper, The Hindu, 5 November 2013.

^18. See Borras and Franco (2010), De Schutter (2011), and White, Borras, Hall, Scoones, and Wolford (2012) for the criticism.