The
Flood This Time
''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 $15 million ''hit'' from the floods.
He was manifestly puzzled by the intensity of the
calamity: ''This kind of flooding we haven't seen before.
This is a crazy amount of water.''
Karuturi is today the proud owner of ''2,500 sq km
of virgin, fertile land – an area the size of Dorset,
England-'' in Ethiopia. Truth be told, Karuturi did
not ask for this bountiful giveaway, nor did it lay
eyes on it when it was presented with a 50-year ''lease''
on a golden platter by the ruling regime in Ethiopia.
Karuturi was offered the land together with generous
tax breaks and other perks for £150 a week ($USD245).
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 and ''villagizing''
(herding them into official villages) the heck out
of them. 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.
Karuturistan, Ethiopia (formerly
Gambella, Ethiopia)
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
Kauturi 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 ''dikes 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 tons
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?
Through Rose-Colored Lenses
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''. ''When over one-hundred
papers were presented at the International Conference
on Global Land Grabbing in 2011, not one positive
outcome could be found for local communities.''
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?
There is a Better Way
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?
Rainbow Sign After the Flood?
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 moneygrubbing 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 everywhere. 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!
* This article was originally
published in
http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/2011/10/16/karuturistan_ethiopia_the_fire_next_time
October
21, 2011.
|