Corporate Greed in Africa
by GRAHAM PEEBLES
Ancestral land that for generations has served as home and livelihood for hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in
Ethiopia is being leased out, on 99-year renewable contracts at nominal
sums to foreign corporations. The land giveaway or agrarian reforms as
the government would prefer to present them began in 2008 when the
Ethiopian government, under the brutal suppressive Premiership of Meles
Zenawi invited foreign countries/corporation to take up highly
attractive deals and turn large areas of land over to industrial farming
for the export of crops. India, China and Saudi Arabia were all courted
and along with wealthy Ethiopians have eagerly grabbed large pieces of
land at basement prices; rates vary from $1.10 to $6.05 per hectare
(HA), comparable land in India would set you back $600 per ha.
A
total of 3,619,509 ha, the Oakland Institute (OI), a US based think
tank, estimate has been leased out. Land made available by the forced
re-location of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people under the
government’s universally condemned Villagization progamme, which aims to
forcibly re-locate over 1.5 million people from their homes.
India
corporations have taken the lion’s share, acquiring around 600,000 ha
concentrated in Gambella and Afar, split between 10 investing companies.
The term ‘investing’ implies benefits for Ethiopia, which is
misleading; ‘profiteering’, or ‘exploiting’ sits closer to the truth of
these land deals, as the OI make clear, “taking over land and natural
resources from rural Ethiopians, is resulting in a massive destruction
of livelihoods and making millions of locals [farmers and pastoralist
communities] dependent on food handouts”. With small scale farmers being
evicted from their land, prices of staples such as Teff, used by
millions throughout Ethiopia to make Injera (bread), has rocketed in
price, according to Ethiotribune 22/5/2012, increasing fourfold since
2008.
Corporate expansionism: small change big profits
In
line with its ambitions of diversity and world food dominance –
Karuturi Global, the world’s largest grower of roses, leads the Indian
charge, leasing 311,700 ha in Gambella. Not satisfied with this, GRAIN
(an international NGO, working to support small farmers) report
Mr.Karuturi “wants to set up farming operations [throughout Eastern and
Southern Africa] on more than 1 million [ha]” – too much never enough in
corporate expansionism.
Almost a quarter of
Gambella’s 25 million ha has been earmarked by the federal government
for agricultural ‘development’. Karuturi, whose profits “rose 55.13% to
Rs 1.21 crore [10 million] in the quarter ended June 2012”, took their
chunk without even seeing it, paying only $1.10 per ha. For the Indian
giant it is, John Vidal in ‘Land Grab Ethiopia (LGE)’ says, “the sale of
the century”. ‘Green Gold’ is how Mr. Karuturi in GRAIN (‘Who’s Behind
the Land Deals’), describes his 300,000 ha of Ethiopian soil, “for which
he pays $46 per ha per year including water and labour and expects at
least $660 [per ha] in profit per year”. (Ibid)
In
addition to paddy, Indian farmers are being sub-contracted to grow
maize, cereals, palm oil and sugarcane amongst others. All of which are
destined for export, either to India or Europe, where companies farming
in Ethiopia (and other Sub-Saharan African nations), benefit from lower
import duties applied to developing countries, notwithstanding the fact
that the land is leased to, and the crops produced and sold by, multi
million-rupee rich companies.
Another major Indian company leasing
land in Gambella is the decidedly green sounding BHO Bioproducts.
Following the corporate rhetoric, BHO Chief Operating Officer Sunny
Maker told Bloomberg in 2010 that, they have “plans to invest more than
$120 million in rice and cotton production”, which, by 2017, should
“generate about $135 million a year from sales divided equally between
domestic [Indian] and international markets.” He added that the
“incredibly rich fertile land”, will all be “cleared within the next
three years”. Cleared yes, violently, indiscriminately and totally;
villages, people, forests, woodland, all destroyed, burnt, relocated,
displaced, desecrated. The governments promise to such prized investors
is that the land is handed over stripped of everything and everyone.
Dissent is not allowed and dealt with brutally should it occur, as
Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of OI makes clear. “The repression
of social resistance to land investments is even stipulated in land
lease contracts, [it is the] state’s obligation to ‘deliver and hand
over the vacant possession of leased land free of impediments’ and to
provide free security ‘against any riot, disturbance or any turbulent
time.”
The ‘rich fertile land’, lovingly
cultivated at the hands of the men and women who have farmed it for
generations, is unlikely to be nurtured so carefully by Indian (or
indeed Chinese or Saudi Arabian) corporations with their thirsty ‘GM
seeds’ (Ibid). For as Oxfam in their detailed report ‘Land and Power’
diplomatically point out, “investors short time scales may tempt them
into unsustainable cultivation, undermining agricultural production.”
The devolution of development
Land
is a prime cut asset in the commercialisation of everything,
everywhere, and the “rich fertile land” in Ethiopia is cheap, even by
Sub-Saharan African standards. Along with long-term leases, the
government offers a neat bundle of carrots, including tax incentives and
unrestricted export clauses, incentives that the OI state “deny African
countries economic benefits” from land deals that the Ethiopian regime
wraps up neatly in its complete disregard for the human rights of the
indigenous people. Government indifference encouraging corporate
irresponsibility – and they need little encouragement. Businesses hardly
seem to be grabbing the land, so much as accepting it as a gift,
parceled up and ready to be torn open.
In exchange
for such attractive deals, the Ethiopian government has been extended,
the OI reports “a $640 million line of credit… over five years to boost
sugar production in the country’s Lower Omo region”. Not a philanthropic
gesture, more a sales trap by India’s EXIM (export and import) Bank,
who stipulate, “Ethiopia must import 75% of the value of the credit line
in the form of Indian goods and services.”
The
government-owned sugar plantations in the Lower Omo are themselves
attracting a great deal of concern and criticism from human rights
groups, who highlight the environmental and human damage being
perpetrated. Government acts of violence and abuse, in the various land
deal regions, are justified under the overused and misleading title of
‘development’; a term appropriated by the international monetary machine
– the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) primarily –
misunderstood and distorted by government development agencies, acting
in line with foreign affairs policies by promoting national self
interest and perverted by the corrupt ideologically-blinkered
governments of developing nations.
An undeveloped ideological trinity whose actions have drained the 21st
century sacred cow and its stable mate ‘growth’ – dry of any true and
relevant meaning. Far from supporting human and or social development
the “unfair terms and near give-away prices [of land deals]… are
hindering development…. Foreign corporations and the World Bank are
pressuring African leaders to give them exemptions from taxes, import
and export duties, and local labor laws – not to mention water and
mineral rights that could be worth billions”, the OI confirm.
More
concerned with sitting at the top table and cultivating the right
international allies than with doing their constitutional duty and
serving the needs of the people, the Ethiopian government is in danger
of giving away, and for peanuts, it’s ‘rich and fertile’ land to
overseas companies who have no interest in Ethiopia, it’s environment,
its culture and even less in its people.
Increasing hunger
Hunger
and poverty stalk the land of both Ethiopia and India. 12 – 15 million
people survive on food aid in Ethiopia, which ranks bottom of the World
Hunger Index at 76. India, with the highest rate of malnourished
children in the world, where 25% (around 270 million) of the world’s
hungry live, despite the fact that, according to the World Food
Programme (WFP), “the country grows enough food for its people”, it
comes in 65th of the hungriest nations, below Niger and the
Sudan – neither of which, to my knowledge, boast 61 billionaires and
200,000 dollar millionaires unlike India. And whereas “most countries
have made consistent progress in reducing hunger, India has seen hunger
rise over the last decade compared with the late 1990s.”(Ibid) This
so-called economic miracle nation refuses to feed it’s own people.
Food
insecurity, the WFP makes clear is caused not by lack of produce, but
by an unwillingness to share the Earths bounty equitably. The states in
India with the greatest numbers suffering from hunger and malnutrition,
WFP records “include Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand,
Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh”; these are the states where the
poorest (Adivasi – indigenous and Dalit) people in the country and quite
possibly in the World happen to live. The poor are dying of hunger not
because India cannot feeed everyone, as the United Nations report on
regional cooperation makes crystal clear, “the root cause of hunger
across the sub-region and the world today is not a lack of food. It is
the economic and social distribution of that food which leaves
populations undernourished and hungry.”
Men women and children living in dire poverty starve to death, in India, Ethiopia and throughout the world. They starve and die for want of the food that is rotting in warehouses, food served up to rats or destroyed by the Indian government, because it is cheaper to burn it than to distribute it to those in need. As Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (26/01/13) said, “globally, a third of all food produced is wasted, and… if one could avoid this waste it would be possible to feed all the hungry people [in the world] and have food to spare.” Food to spare!Such is the inhumane ethos that underpins market fundamentalism, that allows men women and children, young and old to starve – simply because the do not have the financial means to feed themselves. Shame on governments Indian and the rest, that allow such inhumane injustice to prevail, as a wise teacher said, “throughout the world there are men, women and little children who have not even the essentials to stay alive; they crowd the cities of many of the poorest countries in the world… My brothers, how can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men”.
The
commercialization of the countryside in India and Ethiopia, which is
displacing large numbers of small-scale farmers and concentrating crop
production in the hands of multi-nationals, is intensifying existing
levels of hunger. Substantive agricultural reform and real development
would see the army of skilled small scale producers, with generations of
local knowledge and love of the land, supported with the needed capital
and technology, given access to markets that corporations bring. Such
an agrarian revolution, ethically founded, environmentally healthy and
socially sustained, would build long-term food security and feed the
hungry.
Soft targets easy profits
India
as the WFP makes clear, has no domestic need for food produced by the
overseas industrial farms that are causing such far-reaching damage, to
the hundreds of thousands of displaced people of Ethiopia as well as the
natural environment. The movement in Ethiopia mirrors what is taking
place to a much greater degree in India. The government has shifted all
support away from Indian farmers and is supporting the transfer of land
from the rural poor to large companies – wealthy government benefactors,
causing the displacement of millions (60 million to date, according to
Arundhati Roy) of indigenous people.
Corporations
are targeting countries Oxfam 7/02/2013 makes clear, with “poor
governance”, that “allow investors to secure land quickly and cheaply….
[They] “Seem to be cherry picking countries with weak rules and
regulations”. Needy nations like hungry people make easy targets for
multi-national man, whose pockets governments are desperate to nestle
inside. The driving force behind such destructive land developments,
undertaken by corporations obsessed by an insatiable desire for growth
and world leading economic development, is, as Oxfam suggests, profit
and profit alone.
Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: graham@thecreatetrust.org
No comments:
Post a Comment