yke Kaag is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands. Within the African Studies Centre she is the convenor of a collaborative research group on Africa in the World: Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections. Annelies Zoomers is professor of international development studies (IDS) at Utrecht University and chair of LANDac. She has published extensively on sustainable livelihoods, land policies and the impact of privatization, tourism and international migration.
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The Global Land Grab
Beyond the Hype
By Mayke Kaag, Annelies Zoomers
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Mayke Kaag and Annelies Zoomers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-894-2
Contents
Figures, tables and boxes,
Introduction: the global land grab hype – and why it is important to move beyond Mayke Kaag and Annelies Zoomers,
Africa,
1 Modernizing the periphery: citizenship and Ethiopia's new agricultural investment policies George Schoneveld and Maru Shete,
2 Large-scale land acquisitions in Tanzania: a critical analysis of practices and dynamics Jumanne Abdallah, Linda Engström, Kjell Havnevik and Lennart Salomonsson,
3 Kenya and the 'global land grab': a view from below Jacqueline M. Klopp and Odenda Lumumba Latin America,
Latin America,
4 The rapid expansion of genetically modified soy production into the Chaco region of Argentina Lucia Goldfarb and Annelies Zoomers,
5 Transnational land investment in Costa Rica: tracing residential tourism and its implications for development Femke van Noorloos,
6 Water grabbing in the Andean region: illustrative cases from Peru and Ecuador Rutgerd Boelens, Antonio Gaybor and Jan Hendriks Asia,
Asia,
7 Land governance and oil palm development: examples from Riau Province, Indonesia Ari Susanti and Suseno Budidarsono,
8 Vietnam in the debate on land grabbing: conversion of agricultural land for urban expansion and hydropower development Pham Huu Ty, Nguyen Quang Phuc and Guus van Westen,
9 'Land grabbing' in Cambodia: land rights in a post-conflict setting Michelle McLinden Nuijen, Men Prachvuthy and Guus van Westen,
10 Beyond the Gulf State investment hype: the case of Indonesia and the Philippines Gerben Nooteboom and Laurens Bakker,
11 Tracing the dragon's footsteps: a deconstruction of the discourse on China's foreign land investments Peter Ho and Irna Hofman,
12 Conclusion: beyond the global land grab hype – ways forward in research and action Annelies Zoomers and Mayke Kaag,
Notes,
About the contributors,
Bibliography,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
Modernizing the periphery: citizenship and Ethiopia's new agricultural investment policies
George Schoneveld and Maru Shete
Introduction
As a country endowed with vast reserves of fertile agricultural land and water resources, Ethiopia has become one of the top five destinations for commercial agriculture investment in sub-Saharan Africa (Schoneveld 2011). In the period 2007–09, during the height of the food and energy price crises, more than 1.6 million hectares of land were allocated for large-scale commercial agricultural investments – equivalent to almost two-thirds of land allocated for this purpose over the preceding two decades. The vast majority of these investments are located in just three of Ethiopia's nine regions, namely Benshangul Gumuz, Gambella and Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region (SNNPR). These are all so-called 'lowlands', a low-altitude periphery that surrounds the highland plateau, which is the economic and political heartland of Ethiopia.
In contrast to the highlands, where more intensive, mixed forms of agricultural production prevail, lowland production systems typically involve agro-pastoralist livelihood systems, characterized by opportunistic flood-retreat agriculture and seasonal cattle migrations (Bishaw 2001; Tolera and Abebe 2007). Owing to the high spatial and temporal variability in rainfall distribution in the lowlands, these areas are particularly susceptible to drought and, therefore, food insecurity (Pantuliano and Wekesa 2008). Agricultural production is thus concentrated in the highlands, which, covering only 45 per cent of Ethiopia's land area, support more than 90 per cent of its population (Zeleke 2003).
This has created a distinctive geographical divide in Ethiopia: between an ethnically homogenous highland population comparatively well articulated to markets and the public administration, and a considerably more autonomous, albeit highly economically and politically marginalized, ethnically very diverse lowland population. Although the government made various attempts to promote highland-to-lowland migrations in the 1980s to reduce interregional disparities and alleviate pressure on highland resources, poor infrastructure and harsh natural conditions have long inhibited the effective incorporation of Ethiopia's periphery (World Bank 2004; Hammond 2008).
With the recent rush in demand for farmland, however, the Ethiopian government is ostensibly seeing new opportunities to capitalize on the 'underutilized' land and water resources of these regions, while simultaneously addressing issues of productive and political integration and food insecurity. However, since existing systems of production and affiliated (ethnic) identities have largely been a product of noninterference and ecological adaptation, changes to the resource base and increasing subjection to central planning could potentially have profound implications for local livelihoods. As land in Ethiopia is owned exclusively by the state and much of the lowland population enjoys no formal claims to land, this minority population is particularly exposed to the threat of dispossession. Thus, whether these investments ultimately serve the interests of the local population depends on how well the government is able to incorporate these local realities into the project development process.
This chapter seeks to address some of these early issues associated with the introduction of large-scale commercial agriculture in the Ethiopian lowlands. It does this by tracing the process by which investments are established and the manner in which local interests are incorporated. In so doing, we shed light on some of the motives that underlie the government's renewed interest in its neglected periphery, and some of the obstacles to aligning local and national interests.
The following section will provide a brief summary of the geographical and temporal agricultural investment trends in Ethiopia. The chapter then proceeds to frame this topic by discussing the evolution of Ethiopia's agricultural development strategies and its underlying policy discourse. Following a brief overview of the study's methodological approach and the case studies, we discuss the project development process. The chapter concludes with a reflection on findings.
Background
Geographic and temporal investment trends Data on farmland investments in Ethiopia are not kept in a centralized manner. In order to gain insights into investment trends, we attempted to reconcile information from different government agencies responsible for maintaining records. The Federal Investment Authority and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD), along with different regional investment bureaus and environmental protection agencies, provided their data sets to the authors for this purpose.
On the basis of these data, it was observed that in the four main investment regions (SNNPR, Gambella, Benshangul Gumuz and Oromiya) nearly 1.69 million hectares of land were transferred to agricultural investors between 1992 and the end of 2010 (Table 1.1). With the exception of investment in Oromiya, most investment land is allocated in the lowlands. Although much of Afar and Somali are also lowlands, the government has not promoted these areas for investment owing to long-standing security issues (Agricultural Investment Support Directorate – AISD, personal communications 2012).
Multi-regional projects accounted for 560,020 hectares over this period, all being developed by foreign companies. Investors from East and South Asian countries are the most prolific, accounting for 29.8 per cent of the area acquired by foreign investors; this is followed by the Middle East (26.1 per cent) and Europe (19.1 per cent). Strong diplomatic relations between Ethiopia and countries such as India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have shown themselves to be important drivers of investment.
In certain regions, data on domestic investments were unavailable owing to poor maintenance of records (Table 1.1). The data show lower investment intensity in those regions, with only 225,260 hectares acquired for the purpose by foreign investors. Assuming that the ratio of domestic to foreign investments is similar in those regions, then the total area transferred in these regions would likely range from 312,861 to 500,578 hectares. This then would imply that between 1992 and 2010, between 2.55 and 2.71 million hectares of land across Ethiopia has been transferred to investors. This is equivalent to between 54.2 and 58.2 per cent of the total area suitable and available for agricultural production (derived from World Bank 2011).
Trends of licensed investment projects in four Ethiopian regions show a rapid rise in the number of agricultural investment projects in the period 2007–09, with a strong peak in 2008, when 69.1 per cent of all project licences for the period 1992–2010 were allocated. Arguably, high global food prices were a primary driver of land acquisitions over this period, as is evidenced by a statistically significant correlation between the FAO Food Price Index and investment intensity (Figure 1.1). Undoubtedly, the change in emphasis of Ethiopia's agricultural policies since 2005 also contributed significantly to rising investor interest, as detailed in the following section. The year 2010, however, appears to be an anomaly, when, despite high food prices, investment intensity was comparatively low. In all likelihood investments were deterred by unfavourable global financial conditions.
Strategies and policy discourse for large-scale commercial agriculture In the 2010 iteration of the five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), the Ethiopian government made the promotion of large-scale commercial agriculture one of its core strategic objectives (p. 8), thereby building on earlier commitments made under its predecessor, the 2005 Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP). Although agricultural policies since the early 1990s have placed a strong emphasis on smallholder productivity and domestic linkages, owing to the limited successes of these strategies the government is increasingly focusing on more trade-oriented, large-scale commercial agriculture as the impetus for agricultural industrialization (Lavers 2012). This is premised on the assumption that such developments will contribute both to macroeconomic and rural development objectives. Macroeconomically, the government seeks to increase foreign exchange earnings, enhance food and energy security, generate fiscal revenues, and provide inputs for import substituting industries (FDRE 2007a, 2010a, 2010b). Locally, large commercial farms are assumed to contribute to poverty alleviation through technology transfers, off-farm employment, new market outlets for smallholders, opportunities for the uptake of high-value cash crops, and investments in social and physical infrastructure (FDRE 2010a; Kebede 2011; FDRE 2011a; Lavers 2012).
A survey conducted by Shete and Schoneveld (forthcoming) among forty-two district and regional government officials in Benshangul Gumuz, Gambella and Oromiya highlights similar sentiments among lower levels of government. Respondents exhibited particularly high expectations of the potential of commercial agriculture to contribute to technology transfers and local employment generation. The adoption of contract farming models is widely thought to contribute to the uptake of modern farming practice, which will elevate subsistence farmers into a commercial farming class, while the new employment opportunities are argued to bring about a shift from a subsistence to a cash economy.
To facilitate the government's policy shift, MoARD established a one-stop investment centre in 2010, the AISD. The AISD is responsible for all matters pertaining to agricultural investment, including land identification and allocation, investment promotion, monitoring and evaluation, management of spillovers, and the environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) process. Formerly, these functions were handled by regional and district government, the Ethiopian Investment Agency (EIA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
To streamline land allocations, the AISD Land Identification Group has established a land bank, which by late 2011 included 3.99 million hectares of land across five regions, equivalent to approximately 84 per cent of agro-ecologically suitable and potentially available land (FDRE 2011b; World Bank 2011). The government is particularly targeting areas with low densities and peripheral areas, popularly referred to by policy-makers as 'emergent' regions. This includes 1,317,268 hectares in Oromiya; 1,099,893 hectares in Gambella; 981,852 hectares in Benshangul Gumuz; 409,678 hectares in Afar; and 180,625 hectares in SNNPR (FDRE 2011b). The other four regions are still to be fully surveyed.
In addition to the promotion of private agriculture investment, the federal government has reinstated the government-owned Sugar Corporation, which is charged with increasing Ethiopia's sugar output sevenfold (Africa Report 2011). The largest Sugar Corporation project, at 245,000 hectares, is located in the South Omo Zone of SNNPR. The AISD has no direct involvement in these state-owned agricultural projects.
Methodology
Ten sites were selected for field research across three eco-regions: four in SNNPR, three in Gambella and three in Oromiya, and in such a way as to adequately capture ecological and socio-economic variations. SNNPR and Gambella were of particular interest owing to their lowland location and the comparatively high density of agricultural investments. Although our focus was on assessing processes in the lowlands, we included the three highland sites in Oromiya in order to capture variations in the project development process between the lowlands and highlands.
In assessing the manner in which local social, economic and environmental considerations are incorporated into the investment planning process, four key sequential phases of the process were analysed, namely (1) land identification and allocation, (2) pre-implementation incorporation and accommodation of land users, (3) impact mitigation and community development, and (4) dispute resolution (see Table 1.2 for a description of each phase).
We engaged three main stakeholder groups (the government, the private sector and local land users) to identify how these groups interact during this process to address potential risks and opportunities. A total of forty-three semi-structured interviews were held with government representatives from different levels of government (federal, regional and district level). These interviews covered sectoral agencies responsible for investment promotion, land administration and environmental protection and various administrative institutions. Since a number of investors were unwilling to engage researchers on this topic, representatives were interviewed from only six out of the ten investments.
At each project, at least three focus group discussions were held with local land users: two with households from communities neighbouring the plantations and one with local plantation workers. The focus group discussions followed a predefined format for establishing the characteristics of local livelihood systems, the nature and magnitude of impacts, processes of collective action, and personal perceptions.
Overview of case studies
In Oromiya, recent investments have tended to focus on comparatively sparsely populated agro-pastoral areas of the Bale and Hararghe zones, former state-owned farms and flood plains (FDRE 2011b). One of the case studies, Serofta Modern Farming, is located in an area of the Arsi Zone that since the 1970s has been dominated by six large state-owned wheat farms (see Table 1.3 for an overview of case studies). Under a recent government initiative to privatize these farms, the government of Djibouti acquired two of the farms for the production of wheat for Djibouti consumption. The other two case studies, investments from Pakistan's Al-Habasha (HSM) and India's Karuturi, are both located within major river basins, which owing to their clay-rich soils and extensive waterlogging are generally not used by the local population for permanent cultivation. These areas are sparsely vegetated and swampy. As in much of Oromiya, a large proportion of the population in these three sites are sedentary subsistence farmers, many of whom possess land certificates for permanently cultivated land. In the mid-2000s, almost 95 per cent of rural households in Oromiya received land certificates that provide lifelong usufruct rights (though not the right to sell or mortgage land) (Crewett and Korf 2008).
The three case studies in Gambella are spread across five of Gambella's thirteen districts. Gambella's largest investment project, developed by Karuturi, stretches for approximately eighty kilometres along the southern banks of the Baro river, the district's largest waterway. The grassland areas towards the west of the Karuturi concession are dominated by various agro-pastoralist Nuer groups, while the forest lands towards the east of the concession are dominated by the comparatively sedentary ethnic group of the Anuak. The two other projects, the Ethiopian-owned Basen Agriculture and Saudi Star, owned by the Saudi Midroc Group, are located south-east of the Karuturi concession within Gambella's high tropical forest, in proximity to the Alwero Dam, which was constructed with Soviet support in the 1980s.
The case studies in SNNPR focused on the arid, sparsely vegetated lowland areas of the South Omo Zone. Of the 125,831 hectares of land allocated in the South Omo Zone to private agricultural investors, 82.9 per cent is located in the districts of Dassanech and Ngangatom, dominated by two agro-pastoralist ethnic groups that are its namesake. With the exception of the Italian renewable energy company Fri-el Green, all private investors in the study area were cultivating cotton. Expansion plans by the Sugar Corporation have also targeted South Omo, with road and canal development activities having to date focused on the Dassanech, Ngangatom and Selamago districts. The Omo river, which empties into Lake Turkana, is the primary source of water for most districts in South Omo. Agricultural investments, many of which require irrigation owing to the region's high rainfall variability, are therefore all concentrated around its riverbanks, as are most seasonal subsistence farming activities. Unlike in Oromiya, there have been no land certification initiatives in lowland SNNPR and Gambella.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from
The Global Land Grab
by
Mayke Kaag, Annelies Zoomers
. Copyright © 2014 Mayke Kaag and Annelies Zoomers. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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