‘Land to the foreigners’: economic, legal, and socio-cultural aspects of new land acquisition schemes in Ethiopia

Abstract

The Ethiopian government is an active partner in the general trend in Africa to hand out large tracts of land to foreign companies and governments for big commercial farming in order to enhance national development and growing energy needs. Projected enclave enterprises take off on lands of low density and use but often inhabited or used by a variety of local peoples that have no legal title to their land, despite their customary and usufruct rights, because all land in Ethiopia is state property (since 1975). The economic impact of these enterprises (export crop farms, biofuel enterprises) is expected to be mainly on the national level (land lease fee income, export product growth), and to a lesser extent on that of the regional governments. While there are precedents to these land deals in Ethiopia, doling out local lands without much consultation of local inhabitants or land users (e.g. in the large-scale resettlement schemes and state farms), this time the controversy is augmented by insecurity about long-term ecological and food security effects and the generation of friction and counter-discourses that will make the schemes foci of conflict. National territory – ‘the motherland’ – and culturally significant locations are also being leased out, threatening social systems and cultural identities of local groups. Apart from the issue of food insecurity effects, economic dependency on foreign sources may increase. Nationalist issues thus may mingle with social, economic, and cultural heritage issues in emerging concerns on the large-scale leases. Critical discourse and protest on this topic is discouraged by the authorities. The paper will discuss a number of arguments in this debate, comment on some incipient large-scale land acquisition projects, and sketch a research agenda, focusing on the legal and social issues.