The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  “In our culture, going to a different place is unusual. You get different people and there is quarreling,” he told me, as his children gathered round and grabbed the remaining corn. “We should remain in our own area. We won’t go unless we are forced. God gave us this land.” Another truck rumbled past, spraying dust over the tiny forest community—a community that has found itself ostracized by its own government and under siege from a Saudi billionaire. After the truck had gone, I noticed a large, dead stork in the road. One of the women headed off down the road with a bucket, on a long walk to find water.

  Saudi Star’s farm looked huge, extending for miles along the road. But it was nothing compared to what I saw the next day, driving west on the other road out of town. Here, most of the way to the border with South Sudan, I dropped in unannounced on Karmjeet Sekhon, an Indian agriculturalist recently arrived in Ethiopia. He took a parasol to shade himself from the fierce sun as we met at the gate of his compound, then settled into his air-conditioned mobile cabin.

  Resplendent in his turban and tweaking his long mustache, Sekhon said he could not believe his luck at being in charge of this land. In 2009, the Ethiopian agriculture ministry gave his company, Bangalore-based Karuturi Global, a fifty-year lease on 250,000 acres, either side of the only road through the north of the province. It promised 500,000 acres more if he cleared the first tranche within two years. He was well on the way.

  Sekhon had a long career as a dairy man in India, where the options for expansion are constrained by more than a billion people. But here he had an area twenty times the size of Manhattan to do anything he wanted—with an option on sixty Manhattans. “The soil is excellent. It is virgin land,” he told me. “You can grow anything here; the climate is ideal. We have no land like this in India. There we are lucky to get 1 percent of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5 percent. We don’t even need fertilizer.” All for an annual rent of about $2.50 an acre.

  Outside the cool cabin, Gambella’s dry season was ending, and smoke plumes dotted the horizon. Sekhon’s men were burning the bush to drive out snakes. He said he would soon have put in 400 miles of private roads, more than all the tarred public roads in the province. A South African remote sensing company had mapped every foot of the concession for him. Fifteen huge 475-horsepower John Deere tractors were clearing and leveling 1,200 acres every day. Drainage ditches and irrigation canals were being dug, and irrigation equipment shipped in from Israel and India. He had storage for 13,000 gallons of diesel, mainly to run the pumps.

  Soon, Sekhon would be planting. He had half a million oil-palm seedlings growing in a nursery. Within a year, he intended to be growing 50,000 acres of oil palm, 45,000 acres of sugarcane, 62,000 acres of rice, and 25,000 acres each of corn and sorghum. Contractors would soon be on site building processing works to extract palm oil, crush sugarcane, and mill rice. Then they would start work on the townships, with schools and hospitals, shopping centers, and housing for up to fifty thousand people.

  The company had hired two tugboats to pull barges carrying its harvests from the banks of the Baro River, a tributary of the Nile that ran through the mega-farm, upstream to Uganda and Lake Victoria, and downstream to Khartoum and beyond. The boats would follow the same route that British river traders took a century ago to export to the world Ethiopian coffee that they bought in Gambella town. The echoes of a new imperialism were strong.

  I asked Sekhon whether locals would get jobs. He said most of his technical people would be Indian or Ethiopians from the highlands. He had absorbed the Ethiopian ethos that the local tribespeople from the Gambella lowlands were lazy. “But laborers will be from the villages whose land has been allotted to us. About 85 percent of our drivers are from local tribes,” he assured me. Several dozen women from the nearby village of Iliya, which woke in 2009 to find itself surrounded by the Karuturi concession, now earn a dollar a day tending the oil-palm nursery rather than their own fields. Iliya is the home village of Nyikaw Ochalla, an exile I met in Reading, England. “All the land round Iliya has been taken,” he told me. “People have to work for the Indian company. They have no real choice.”

  Karuturi Global is owned by Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, an Indian engineer in his forties. Starting from scratch, he has become the world’s largest owner of greenhouses, many of them in Ethiopia. Under glass roofs, he has created the world’s largest rose-growing business, selling 650 million stems a year. This is a stunning 10 percent of the global market. He employs ten thousand people in Africa alone. But Karuturi reckons he cannot sell any more roses. The market is sated. So he is moving into mainstream agriculture. “I want to be among the top four or five integrated agri-product companies in the world. And I will implement this vision out of Africa,” he says. He plans on having two and a half million acres of land under his plows in Africa—a third of them in Ethiopia and, he suggested in late 2011, another third in Tanzania.

  Karuturi promises to invest a billion dollars in the virgin fields of Gambella alone. Flash floods from the River Baro obliterated thousands of acres of the first corn harvest in late 2011, but his response was to bring in Dutch consultants to prevent a repetition. He means business. His investment should see handsome returns both for him and for his U.S. private equity investors, including Bethesda-based Monsoon Capital and Boston-based Sandstone Capital. The investment seems set to create Africa’s largest privately owned farm, and make Karuturi one of the world’s largest producers of a range of foodstuffs, able to take on long-standing U.S. and European commodity giants like Cargill, ADM, and Dreyfus.

  But will promise become reality? Sekhon and his Indian lieutenants are a long way from home. They have little experience of Africa or Africans, and know little of the people whose land they are now tilling. Nor, it seemed, did they know about the anger caused by the land grab: the tales of government intimidation, of massacres, of vanishing livelihoods and wildlife, and the mutterings I heard in huts and clearings across the province about arming the tribal youth to reclaim their land.

  Most of the millions of acres of land being bought up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of southeast Asia, the forests of South America, and the steppes of Russia is ostensibly sold or leased as undeveloped land without owners. But in reality very little land in the world today is unclaimed or unused. When men like Karuturi and Al Amoudi call the land they are occupying “empty” and “virgin,” they are as misguided as the colonial adventurers who came this way a century before. To the locals, every inch of the land is owned.

  The biggest prize is known to geographers as the Guinea Savannah Zone: a great expanse of grasslands half the size of the United States, occupying a huge arc of twenty-five countries between the rain forest and the deserts—through West Africa to Sudan, then south through Kenya and Ethiopia to Zambia and Mozambique in the south. The World Bank calls these one and a half million square miles “the world’s last large reserves of underused land.” Yet, these lands are also the home of 600 million African peasant farmers and herders, approaching a tenth of the world’s population. They are among the world’s poorest people. They badly need economic development. The question is whether the new colonialists are there to develop Africa or ransack its resources. Will they feed the world—or just the bottom line?

  For the moment, Africa’s leaders seem convinced that foreign investment in mechanized big farming is the way forward. If they can turn their bush into American-style prairie, they will. The ambition of Karuturi and Al Amoudi in Gambella is matched by that of Ethiopian prime minister Zenawi. He has now been in office for sixteen years. In that time his political philosophy has shifted from Marxism to capitalism. Under his rule, his country has not suffered a repeat of famines on the scale that blighted it in the 1970s and 1980s. But he has grown exasperated by its failure to energize smallholders to feed Ethiopia’s fast-growing population.

  Zenawi is now offering outsiders the chance to invest in its soil.
The government’s current five-year plan promises to lease 7.5 million acres for large-scale mechanized agriculture by 2015, much of it in the rebellious tribal borderlands of Gambella. Ironically, it is only because of Ethiopia’s socialist past, in which all land was nationalized, that the foreign capitalists will be able to move in.

  In Gambella, as in much of rural Africa, traditional customary land rights are still recognized by the people. But Ethiopian governments have a long history of moving people around, from state to state and into villages where none existed before. Gambella is scattered with communities of Zenawi’s compatriot Tigrayans who were given land here after the great famine in the 1980s. Near the village of Abobo, I saw one Tigrayan-owned farm growing 10,000 acres of cotton. Along the road were power lines—a rare sight in Gambella. Other highlanders have come too, setting up businesses and taking land. In all, highlanders now make up nearly half of the 300,000 inhabitants of Gambella province. They are much resented, by the Anuak in particular.

  Now the government is moving the locals too—out of the bush and their tiny settlements and into larger centralized villages. The federal affairs minister, Shiferaw Teklemariam, announced in late 2010 that the “villagization” program would resettle 180,000 people in forty-nine villages between 2011 and 2013. That is more than half of the entire population of Gambella, and will include the great majority of those living outside Gambella town.

  Villagization had just begun when I visited. It seemed to be a rush job, done with little or no local consultation, and certainly no regard for the wishes of those being moved off their traditional lands. One foreign aid worker I spoke to remembered being called, not long before, to a meeting with the Gambella president Omod Obong “at which he suddenly said that he’d drawn up a villagization plan for the province. It was the first time we had heard about the plan. Yet he said he had done all the awareness raising with the people. Now he was ready to go ahead, and he wanted the aid agencies to pay for it. It was crazy.” They refused to help, but he went ahead anyway.

  The publicly declared purpose of the villagization seems contradictory. Officials say it is to allow the provision of basic facilities such as wells, clinics, and primary schools in centralized places in a region where flooding cuts off many people during the long wet season. The plan promises nineteen schools, twenty-five clinics, eighteen veterinary clinics, forty-one flour mills, and 120 miles of new rural roads. Yet communities that do not suffer floods, and which already have facilities like wells and schools and clinics and roads, are also being moved.

  Locals have no doubt that the real purpose is to reduce their freedom, to take their land, and to give it to land grabbers. The government insists it is “a coincidence” that the mass removals are happening at the same time as the arrival of foreign mega-farmers. And it says that nobody is forced to move. But aid workers and villagers I met said that, while not forced, many had been put under strong pressure to move, with threats of crop burnings, the shutting of schools, and the like.

  I might have found such stories of intimidation hard to believe if I hadn’t read the concessions contracts that the government signed with the foreign companies. The Karuturi contract, for instance, stipulates that the land must be provided with “vacant possession,” and that the government “shall ensure during the period of the lease, the lessee [Karuturi] shall enjoy peaceful and trouble-free possession of the premises [with] adequate security free of cost . . . against any riot, disturbance or other turbulent time as and when requested by the lessee.”

  I visited several of the new villages, picking up and decanting hitchhikers as I went. I began to realize that the people we were carrying were often trying to farm their old land while satisfying the government by living in the new villages. I heard mixed reactions to the villagization. The Nuer, traditionally seminomadic pastoralists who migrate across the plains between Ethiopia and Sudan, seemed more at ease than the Anuak. A large crowd of Nuer assembled at a brand-new village called Bildak, close to the western boundary of the Karuturi farm, the men with their ornamental parallel scars carved across their foreheads, the children with braided hair, and the women in their long brightly colored slip dresses, smoking long slender white-stemmed pipes.

  The new village’s ranks of identical round Nuer-style straw huts with their distinctive conical roofs contained an estimated thousand people. More were arriving all the time. The government had promised to give each household “up to” 10 acres near the new village, and to provide grain and cooking oil for up to eight months. But the villagers grumbled that there were only three wells, and no electricity generator, grain store, or school. The Nuer claimed, as they assembled for a picture, that “we are all happy”—though that might have been because the village was also home to some thirty policemen, who were taking an interest in our conversation. I also noticed small padlocks on the doors to their new houses, something I only saw in Gambella in the new government settlements. Surely that was a sign of a new insecurity.

  The Anuak were more forthright in their opposition than the Nuer. As farmers and fishers, they are much more territorial. Villagization and land grabbing threaten their identity. “This land is owned by our kings and chiefs, through whom all the community have user rights,” said Oman Agwa Udola, an Anuak working in Gambella for a Swiss evangelical humanitarian NGO named Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirchen Schweiz. “The government talks about developing empty land, but there is no land that is empty in our culture. If you go anywhere, the people will tell you who owns any bit of land. The land is our supermarket and our game reserve.” This is not just rhetoric. Much of what Karuturi calls virgin land is simply fallow, part of the cycle of shifting cultivation traditionally practiced by the Anuak. The high quality of the soils is testimony to their farming skill.

  Driving across the province with the Anuak, I heard about their often violent cultural landscape. I was told of killing fields where they had shed blood in battles with Nuer pastoralists, Tigrayan farmers, and government troops; of the clearing, draining, and occupation of their land by foreign farmers; of the sacred hill in Gambella town where highlanders had built an Orthodox church; and an ancestral cemetery near Iliya that had been plowed up by Karuturi. But what almost any Anuak wants to talk about most urgently is their experience of “the massacre.”

  On December 13, 2003, highlanders and government troops went hunting Anuak. Literally. They targeted and killed teachers, government officials, and church pastors—many of them easily identifiable by the Anuak tradition of removing their front lower teeth. Human Rights Watch estimates some 420 people were killed that day, and many homes destroyed. Those running for their lives often took shelter in the grounds of the Bethel Synod church in Gambella town. By the time they dared to come out, the military had buried many of their fellows in mass graves.

  The killings were provoked; armed Anuak had attacked highlanders working for a relief agency looking for land to house refugees from the Sudan civil war. But Human Rights Watch accused the Ethiopian military of engaging in collective summary punishment of the entire Anuak community for the actions of a few.

  The massacre has shattered the Anuak community. Many subsequently left for Addis, for refugee camps in Sudan, or to join tribal elders in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. The fear continues. One local told me during my visit to Gambella: “Just on Friday we heard that my cousin was going to be arrested on Monday. So we put him on a bus to a distant border village, from where he went into Sudan on a bike. He is now living in a refugee camp at Pochalla.” My informant continued: “I am staying behind. If we leave we have surrendered. We will never be able to return.” (Later, I met Anuak in England who refused to come to London because they feared being spotted by government agents.)

  The Anuak believe they are the victims of slow genocide. But the fear is in danger of becoming self-fulfilling. One aid worker told me: “In recent years they have forgotten how to farm. They used to grow tomatoes and
okra and sell them in the markets. Now most of the food in the markets is imported from the highlands.” Efforts to stimulate business through microfinance have faltered. “They are not greedy. The opposite really. They tend to share the money out and not to invest.”

  A UNICEF study in 2005 concluded that even before the foreign land grabs and villagization program, Gambella was characterized by a “climate of fear” in which “the deracination of indigenous people in rural areas of Gambella is extreme. It is very likely that Anuak culture will completely disappear in the not-so-distant future.” I saw much evidence that the bleak prognosis was being accelerated by the land grabs.

  South of the Saudi Star farm, we went in search of several isolated groups in the woods, but all had disappeared. We moved to the base of another land grabber: Ruchi Soya is a billion-dollar edible-oils giant from India that sells its products across Asia. It has a 60,000-acre foothold in the virgin soils of Gambella. But there wasn’t much to see yet. Two managers told me that the first test harvest of soybeans was completed. They were guarded by a man with a flower protruding from the barrel of a rifle. Other Indian companies nibbling at Gambella include the tea grower Verdanta Harvests, which has a fifty-year lease on 7,500 acres of forest claimed by the Majangir people, and Sannati Agro Farm Enterprise, which has 25,000 acres in the far south of the province to grow rice for export to the United States.

  My next destination was a new village called Gok Pipach. We drove past a World Food Programme food store and a refugee camp, through denser bush where there were signs of shifting cultivation still being practiced. But the settlement itself was a product of the recent villagization process. The people here had been moved from land now needed by the land grabbers. Before they moved, they had been “a big community,” said one of the elders, wearing an American baseball shirt as we drank tea in the shade of a huge mango tree. “We had our own grinding mill and a savings account that we used to help the poor and send students to seminary school.” But they had been much diminished: “Before the massacre there were a thousand of us. Now there are about three hundred.”