Africa Is a Country

The Land Question

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The Land Question

By
Sean Jacobs

[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

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.