[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yGkJsR7-HY]

The Guardian’s John Vidal reports from Ethiopia’s remote Gambella region where in the last 10 years “1.1 million hectares, nearly a quarter of its best farmland” have been sold or leased to foreign companies by the Ethiopian government. The Ethiopian government says 36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land there. The World Bank estimates that at least 35 million hectares of land has been bought or leased on the continent as a whole. Vidal reports that 896 companies-including the “Saudi billionaire Al Amoudi, who is constructing a 20-mile canal to irrigate 10,000 hectares to grow rice”–have come to the region in the last three years. Poor, rural people are convinced by Ethiopia’s government “to leave their farmland to make way for foreign owned companies growing profit crops for export.” The companies hire the locals to work on the farms and pay them an average wage of one US dollar a day. As usual the Ethiopian government spokesman–the government receives tons of food aid while they sell off land–acts like nothing is going on.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.