Famine and abundance rub shoulders in Ethiopia

Famine and abundance rub shoulders in Ethiopia

21 July, 2011 | By Philipp Hedemann (Swiss Info)
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While millions of people in the Horn of Africa suffer a terrible
drought, foreign investors are harvesting tonnes of cereals to
be exported to Asia and the Gulf states.

swissinfo.ch reports from western Ethiopia on farmland leased by an
Indian entrepreneur, where it is not unusual to see young children
labouring in the fields.

Kneeling in the middle of a

sugar-cane field in blistering

40-degree Celsius heat, a

young boy is digging up

weeds. An Indian worker

stands over him to make

sure he doesn’t miss any.

Red is eight years old and

earns €0.83 (SFr0.96) for a

day’s work, less than the

cost of using pesticides.

The United Nations says

4.5 million people in Ethiopia are currently in need of aid as a result
of a devastating drought. Three million are affected in Somalia,
where there are pockets of famine, 3.5 million in Kenya and
120,000 people in Djibouti.

The humanitarian crisis threatens to become worse than the terrible
1984-85 famine which devastated the region and caused the deaths
of a million people. Today most emergency food aid is imported.

Meanwhile, Indian tenant farmers are hoping to earn millions by
exporting crops grown in Ethiopia. In the world’s twelfth poorest
country the race for the country’s most productive agricultural land
has only just begun and the social and environmental consequences
are immeasurable.

“It’s still total wilderness here, but we will soon start growing sugar
cane and palm oil,” explained Karmjeet Singh Sekhon as we drove
through burning bush land in his Toyota 4x4.

The 68-year-old Indian investor is the manager of a huge farm,
which covers an area of nearly 300,000 hectares in western
Ethiopia, one of the biggest in the region.

Land rush

Since 2008 there has been an unprecedented rush to secure
farmland in Africa, South America and Asia as a result of rises and
fluctuations in prices of foodstuffs on world markets and food riots
in a number of countries.

Countries including India, China and the Gulf states want to feed
their own growing populations but are also looking to position
themselves in the race to produce biofuels.

The World Bank says 45 million hectares of farmland were
negotiated in 2009 – up from four million a year between 2006-
2008. It is estimated that by 2030 another six million hectares will
be leased annually in developing countries, two-thirds in sub-
Saharan Africa and South America.

“Land acquisitions are a huge risk. The veil of secrecy that hangs
over these deals must be lifted so that poor people do not pay the
ultimate price and lose their land,” declared Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,
managing director of the World Bank.

Modernise

In Ethiopia 85 per cent of the 80 million population live off the land.
But little has changed in the past 100 years and most of the barren
fields are still worked using ox-drawn ploughs.

The government hopes that leasing farmland to foreign investors will
lead to a wave of modernisation.

According to the Rome-based UN Food and Agricultural
Organization (FAO), food production needs a 70 per cent boost
between 2010 and 2050 to meet global needs.

Investors seem to have woken up to this fact, however. Agricultural
groups like Karuturi Global are blooming. The firm, owned by
Ramakrishna Karuturi, is the world’s largest rose producer and
wants to become the number one agricultural business. And the
Ethiopian government should help.

All Ethiopian land belongs to the state, which hopes to dedicate
three-quarters of it to agriculture in the years ahead. This remains an
ambitious target as so far only 3.6 million hectares, mainly in the
west, has been leased to investors. But with one hectare of land
only costing SFr5 a year to rent the situation could change rapidly.

Sold off

Critics say the developing world is being sold off but Ethiopian
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi rejects the attacks.

“Those who accuse foreign companies of landgrabbing are ill-
informed,” he said. "We do not want to admire the beauty of our
country while we starve.”

It is not surprising that the Ethiopian government has become the
darling of international agro-business investors.

But local farmers like Ojwato despair. It only takes him a few
minutes to cross his one hectare of sugar cane on foot, whilst
Sekhon takes several hours to cover his by jeep.

The idea that his neighbour’s harvests are being exported while the
country is on the verge of famine makes him angry.

“Foreigners promised to bring electricity, water and hospitals. But in
the end only a few of us have worked in their fields and the pay was
poor,” Ojwato told swissinfo.ch.

(Translated from German by Simon Bradley)

Courtesy