The leasing of land in Ethiopia to rich foreigners is taking on dramatic dimensions, warned the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) in Göttingen, Germany Wednesday in a press release.
The STP said, that the planned leasing of huge tracts of land will exacerbate (forværre) the poverty of small-scale farmers and threaten the existence of many smaller ethnic groups.
Smallholders (småbønder) are the vast majority of Ethiopians.
The Ethiopian Minister of Agriculture, Tefera Derbew, reported on his return from a trip to India at the beginning of February that foreign investors would additionally be offered 3,6 million more hectars of land for lease.
This came after he had already given the go-ahead for over 1,8 million hectars to be leased. The new total is equivalent to over 54.000 square kilometres, an area larger than Denmark.
– The large-scale plantations are generally planted by foreign investors in export crops and hardly benefit the small Ethiopia farmers at all – nor the rural population, who suffer from frequent famines, criticized the head of the Africa section at the STP, Ulrich Delius.
– Particularly among the Oromo, Afar, Anuak and Somali peoples, as well as smaller ethnic groups in southern Ethiopia, this land robbery has led to massive problems in feeding their own populations, said Delius, adding:
– It is scandalous that Ethiopia has requested international food aid for the Oromiya and Ogaden regions while at the same time stealing more and more land from the farmers in these regions to make room for export production by foreign investors.
Due to very low rainfall, the Ethiopian government appealed to the international community last week for 226 million US dollar worth of aid to help three million drought victims in the eastern and southern parts of the country.
Some 307.000 hectars of land have already been put in the hands of foreign leaseholders, who are able to lease land directly from the government, as all land in Ethiopia in principle belongs to the state – a left over from many years with bedrock Socialism.
The main investors are Indian companies, which have secured rights to 79 percent of the leased land for the coming 70 years. Many land deals are kept secret, and normally investors are under no obligation to better the conditions for the local people.
According to the Minister of Agriculture, these Indian companies have already invested 4,7 billion US dollar in Ethiopian agriculture. They are primarily overseeing the cultivation of cotton, oil palms, rubber, oilseeds (oliefrø) and sugar cane.
The sellout of the land has not only been criticized by the farmers affected; now, Ethiopian president Girma Wolde-Giorgis has joined in.
It has recently been made public, that he wrote a letter to the Minister of Agriculture on 10 December 2010 speaking out against the felling of forests in the Gambella region for construction of large-scale farms for foreign investors.
DEN ER OGSÅ GAL I MALI
An opposition party in Mali has written to the country’s president demanding that details of contracts leasing out massive areas of agricultural land in the poor West African nation be made public.
In the letter Wednesday, the Party for National Renaissance said that since 2003 almost 800.000 hectars of farm land have been leased out in secret contracts to Chinese, Libyan and South African firms in the vast country on the southern edge of Sahara.
For further information pleace contact Ulrich Delius:
0049-(0)551-49906-27 – web: http://www.gfbv.de
En international NGO, der bl.a. beskæftiger sig med begrebet “landgrabbing” (jordtyveri), er Grain, hvis site på nettet har adressen www.grain.org/front
Se også telegrammet
http://www.u-landsnyt.dk/nyhed/17-02-11/sm-b-nder-i-zambia-b-der-rige-udl-ndinges-jordopk
