Land-grab noise is aimed at scaring off investment from emerging economies
The article in The Hindu, by Ashish Kothari, “How Ethiopians are being pushed off their land” (Op-Ed, February 19, 2013) is far from the truth and makes charges that are unfounded.
Had the organisers of the so-called “India-Ethiopia Seminar on Land
Investment” been interested in presenting a legitimate report to the
Indian public, they would have invited the Embassy of Ethiopia in New
Delhi or Indian investors who can give first hand information on
Ethiopia’s land policy.
The prime focus of the policy of the government of Ethiopia is ensuring
food security of its citizens. To this end, the priority area is the
enhancement of agricultural productivity at household levels. This
implies that the bulk of the government’s positive intervention in the
area of ensuring food security involves helping the millions of
smallholder farmers in the country. The government believes that such a
focus can best address the bulk of the population.
Not only is the government focused on providing the necessary support
and leadership to small holders, but it has a clear policy that no small
holding farmer will be dispossessed of his/her land for the purpose of
foreign investors intending to engage in commercial farming. There is
absolutely no farmer displaced from his or her land for any such
purpose.
In this regard it is worth noting that most criticism against the
government had in the past largely been about the government’s
“over-protection” of smallholders and its reluctance to fully embrace
massive commercial farming.
Now that the government has launched an ambitious Growth and
Transformation Plan (GTP) to double the nation’s GDP in five years, the
role of agro-investment becomes all the more decisive. Most of the
companies will be involved in the production of highly needed cereals,
which will not only earn the nation highly needed foreign currency but
also contribute to the ensuring of food security and food
self-sufficiency in the country.
It is also the policy of the government that large swathes of hitherto
uncultivable land in very remote and inaccessible parts of the country
should be made available to foreign investors interested to invest in
commercial farming. The government wants to put to use hitherto-unused
and mostly inaccessible-swathes of land for the purpose of augmenting
its campaign to ensure food security.
Negligible displacement
Here again, the focus of the GTP is that beyond scaling up the
productivity of small holders, more attention must be paid to raise the
level of contribution of extensive and mechanised farming in the
nation’s endeavour to extricate itself out of poverty.
The majority of these lands are to be found in sparsely populated
regions of the country, where the risk of displacing local populations
for this purpose is far too negligible, at worst. The areas being
allocated for this purpose are totally inaccessible in terms not only of
infrastructure development, but also those which have hardly been
inhabited by people. So in all fairness, the talk about people being
displaced for the purpose of land lease is unfounded at best and even
deliberately contrived at worst.
The Government of Ethiopia takes the issue of climate change and social
impact seriously. The lands that are made available for investors are
thoroughly studied in order to ensure that the investment projects’
impact on the livelihood of the local communities as well as their
impact on climate is kept to the most minimum possible.
Any reader of the article can say with certainty that we don’t hear much
fuss over similar projects in other parts of the world such as Latin
America. It can be surmised that the noise about “land grab” in Africa
has everything to do with the paternalism of some of the “activists” as
well as with the identity of the investors who are currently benefiting
from the deals.
Quite obviously, the investors are mainly from India, China and Middle
East countries — unlike in the case of, say Latin America, where such
projects are mainly owned by western investors.
It would, therefore, be important, particularly for a newspaper like The Hindu, which mainly targets Indian readers, to keep this fact in mind.
The noise about land grab also has another face. It is a clear reminder
of the condescending outlook reflected by many western institutions
doubting the capability of African states to sincerely advocate the
interest of their citizens.
Hence the whole report of the so-called seminar was a reflection of the
usual effort to daunt investment activities from emerging economies like
that of India.
(Metasebia Tadesse is Minister Counsellor at the Embassy of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, New Delhi.)
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