by Alemayehu G. Mariam
“Karuturi's First Corn Crop in Ethiopia Destroyed,” announced the headline.
Karuturi Global Ltd., is the Indian multinational agro
company that has been gobbling up large chunks of Ethiopia
over the past few years. This time, Mother Nature gobbled up Karuturi. The
company reported last week that its 30,000 acre corn crop in Gambella in
western Ethopia was wiped out when the Baro and Alwero rivers overflowed their
banks and overwhelmed Karuturi’s 80km long system of
protective dikes.
Head honcho Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi said his company took a
$15 million ‘hit’ from the floods. He was manifestly puzzled by the intensity of
the calamity: “This kind of flooding we haven?t seen before. This is a crazy amount
of water.”
Karuturi is today the proud owner of ?2,500 sq km of virgin,
fertile land ? an area the size of Dorset, England-?
in Ethiopia.
Truth be told, Karuturi did not ask for this bountiful giveaway, nor did it lay
eyes on it when it was presented with a 50-year ‘lease’ on a golden platter by the
ruling regime in Ethiopia.
Karuturi was offered the land together
with generous tax breaks and other perks for £150 a week (US$245).
Karuturi Project Manager in Ethiopia,
Karmjeet Sekhon, giggled euphorically as he told Guardian reporter John Vidal
the amazing story of how his company became the beneficiary of one of the
largest free land giveaways in post-colonial African history:
“We never saw the land. They gave it to us and we took it.
Seriously, we did. We did not even see the land. (Triumphantly cackling
laughter.) They offered it. That’s all. It’s very good land. It’s quite cheap.
In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India.
There [India] you
are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more
than 5%. We don?t need fertiliser or herbicides. There is
absolutely nothing that will not grow on it.
To start with there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm,
15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils and
maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs,
dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. This is phase one. In
three years time we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000
workers. We could feed a nation here.
The ruling regime in Ethiopia
claims that it “leased’ uninhabited wilderness to Karuturi. It denies forcing
the local people out of their land. But the evidence is incontrovertible. The
leased land is not only the ancestral home of the people of Gambella but also
the basis of their entire livelihood and survival as a tiny minority in the Ethiopian
family. For Gambellans who live as pastoralist and subsistence farmers, massive
dispossession and auctioning off their land for pennies will inevitably destroy
the very fabric of their society and way of life and threaten them with
extinction.
It is said that in Ethiopia
‘land is owned by the government.’ If the government is the largest land owner,
Karuturi must be the largest plantation owner and second largest land owner in
that impoverished country. Indeed, it would be most appropriate to rename
Gambella ‘Karuturistan’ in the interest of full disclosure and accurate description
of what is happening on the ground.
Karuturi says it has all kinds of plans for its vast land
holdings. It will ‘build taller dikes’
to enclose the plantations ‘with no connection with outside
water except through manually operated devices.’ Karuturi is ‘aggressively
rolling out an agriculture business venture in Ethiopia’
and plans to ‘outsource 20,000 hectares of farm land in the African nation to
Indian farmers on a revenue-sharing basis,’a senior Karuturi official told India’s leading business newspaper, the Business Standard.
“We have got a decent response. We intend to give land and
the necessary infrastructure to farmers who have the expertise in specific crop
cultivation and get into a revenue share (65%:35%) with them. We hope to have
agreements reached for around 20,000 hectares in the near future as part of the
first phase.” Karuturi is actively negotiating with farmers from Punjab,
India to launch its
outsourcing venture.
Karuturi’s business model is simple: “Ask not what Karuturi
can do for Ethiopia,
but what Ethiopians can do for Karuturi.”
Karuturi is in Ethiopia
for only one thing: Profit and more profits. Just as it has built dykes to
enclose its plantations from flood water, it also maintains a social,
psychological and security enclosure to insulate itself from the local Gambella
community. Karuturi maintains a virtual agricultural treasure island in
Gambella. While foreign farmers are
brought in as modern sharecroppers and given partnership
interest, Gambella’s farmers are offered or given nothing. Why not offer Gambella
farmers (the real owners of the land) a 35 percent share just like the Punjabi
farmers?
Karuturi says it intends to give part of its vast
landholdings to Indian farmers with "expertise." The people of
Gambella have their own time-tested agricultural expertise, but Karuturi does
not want it and will not even make a symbolic gesture to help them acquire
expertise by giving them training and education in new agricultural methods and
techniques.
Karuturi says it will export its corn and other commodities to
“South Sudan and other East African markets” using “two
tug boats with the capacity to carry 600 tonnes each?”
Yet millions of Ethiopians are starving and dependent on
foreign food aid for their daily bread. Some 7.5 million Ethiopians are kept
alive daily by international food handouts.
Last week USAID chief Raj Shah announced in Ethiopia
that the US
will provide $110m for famine relief. Karuturi says its commodities exports
will “bring foreign exchange to the National Bank of Ethiopia.”
What will Karuturi bring to the people of Ethiopia?
The people of Gambella? More poverty, exploitation, environmental degradation?
Karuturi Ltd., is the world’s largest producer of roses. Its
slogan is said to be “Let millions of roses bloom.” Roses are beautiful, but looking
through rose-colored lenses one gets a rosy outlook on reality.
Karuturi could easily mistake the vast tract of free land
that was dropped on its lap, all of the tax breaks it receives, the duty free imports
of machines and equipment it enjoys and all of the other preferential treatment
it gets as proof of its arrival in Nirvana, not
Ethiopia.
Take the rosy lenses off and Karuturi shall behold an Ethiopia
that ranks at the bottom of every international economic and political index:
It is among the countries in the world with the lowest per capita incomes and
highest inflation and unemployment rates. The ruling regime has been classified
as one of the worst violators of human rights in the
world. Karuturi looking through its rosy lenses may be
unable to see the grinding poverty of the people of Gambella and the
destruction of their way of life when they were forced to give up so much of
their ancestral lands.
The most troubling aspect of Karuturi’s “investment” in
Ethiopia is not only that it has created an island of wealth and prosperity in
a sea of poverty in Gambella, but that its large-scale commercial farming operations
and practices are manifestly unsustainable and likely to have a severely
negative impact on the land and the way of life of the people.
Numerous experts continue to warn that large-scale
commercial farming operations and practices by land-grabbing multinational companies
that use forest burning to clear the land, channel rivers and introduce exotic
crop species cause permanent and irreversible
environmental damage and ecological imbalance. The
capital-intensive technologies of the multinationals displace local farmers and
render them irrelevant necessitating outsourcing and importation of foreign farmers
with “expertise.”
In Gambella, the people complain that despite millions of
dollars in investments by Karuturi, they have seen few jobs, schools, clinics
or clean water facilities for their use. At the end of the day, the people of
Gambella will be the ones suffering the long-term effects of deforestation
(land clearance by burning), reduction of ecological
diversity, loss of local species, and environmental
contamination caused by herbicides and pesticides used in large-scale
commercial farming. When fertile Gambella becomes a virtual desert, the
multinationals will move to another oasis in Africa.
Karuturi needs to take off its rosy lenses and ask itself a
few questions: How could it create jobs and business opportunities for local Ethiopians
when it is outsourcing its landholdings to Indian farmers? How could it improve
the agricultural expertise of those Ethiopians in the local area when it is
bringing in foreign “experts?”
How could Ethiopia
ever achieve food security and feed its explosively growing and
food aid-dependent population when it is shipping out
agricultural commodities on 600-ton tugboats under cover of darkness to feed
the people of other nations? What will Karuturi do in the face of Ethiopia’s
spreading hunger, famine and uncontrolled population growth?
Will it build larger dikes, walls, fences and levees to keep
the people out of its corn filelds? Will the regime send its soldiers to
protect Karuturi from the hungry and starving hordes of Ethiopians begging for
a few ears of corn at Karuturi’s gates?
Karuturi has the option of doing the right thing: Dump the
current land acquisition and ownership deal and replace it with contract
farming and deal directly with the farmers of Gambella, not Punjabi farmers.
Karuturi (and other foreign investors) could provide the
technology and capital, and the Ethiopians will be obligated to provide the
land and labor. Karuturi could provide training to farmers in Gambella and enhance
their “expertise” to make them more productive.
Karuturi could supply grains and other agricultural
commodities for the Ethiopian
market profitably and over the long term maintain a
sustainable and ecologically balanced agricultural venture. Is this too radical
an idea or is it too old fashioned?
It has been argued that regimes that seek out or fall prey
to the big multinational land grabbers are dictatorships that exist on international
charity and handouts and are thoroughly mired in corruption and debt. There is
much talk these days about a ‘second
generation colonialism’ spearheaded by profit-hungry land
grabbing multinationals.
Some even talk about a ‘green gold rush’ for fertile African
land sold at fire sale prices by African dictators eager to line their pockets.
These shameless money grabbing dictators will even agree to a deal that will
export grain out of their countries as their
population starves and they are panhandling the world for
food handouts.
Truth be told, no one except a few of the top leaders of the
ruling regime know the real deal in the land giveaway to Karuturi. Very little useful
information is evident in the ”agreement” made public with Karuturi.
That “agreement” offers nothing more than the usual boilerplate
full of meaningless legal mumbo jumbo routinely used for such ‘leases’ by
multinational land grabbers verywhere. For instance, the agreement alludes to
environmental safety but provides no specific
environmental standards to be followed. It talks about jobs,
infrastructures and the rest but provides no specifics or details on the timetable
for implementation or the scope of Karuturi's obligations.
Over a century and a half ago, far, far away from
Karuturistan, a prophesy was told in the lyrics of a song of African slaves
toiling on vast cotton and tobacco plantations in America.
"God gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water. The
fire next time!"
God has given the people of Ethiopia
the rainbow sign: Unite and come together as one
rainbow nation. For those who divide and misrule and sell
and buy pieces of Ethiopia,
the sign says: No more water!
