TPLF land grab in Ethiopia –
The case of Dr Teame Hadgu



The land grab in Ethiopia is not limited to “investors” from China, India, and Saudi Arabia. In fact, TPLF members are grabbing more fertile land in southern and western Ethiopia than China, India and Saudi combined, according to Ethiopian Review sources.

In investigating land grab by the TPLF members, Ethiopian Review Intelligence Unit has stumbled upon a particular evidence that shows how a person named Dr Te’ame Hadgu Embaye took over a land almost half the size of Washington DC for a monthly rent of about $8 per square kilometers, the first payment to be paid after 3 years of signing the contract. (Click here to read the agreement ) http://www.ethiopianreview.com/2012/tpl ... hiopia.pdf

The massive land was given to Dr Teame Hadgu Embaye, who resides in Minneapolis (USA), to grow cotton and peanut for export to the Middle East. Because of the heavy use of chemical fertilizers, the land will be rendered useless within a few years, i.e., before Dr Teame starts paying rent for the land. The people of South Omo, whose land Dr Teame is profiting from, will receive little or no benefit. They will be left with a destroyed, barren land.

While we focus on land grab by China and Saudi Arabia, we seem to have ignored the equally devastating land grab by the TPLF mafia that is displacing local farmers and residents.
It is also important to note that TPLF members heavily invest in companies such as Karturi, the king of Indian land grabbers, but their names are kept off the books.

http://hornofafrica.de/tplf-land-grab-i ... ame-hadgu/

Belaynesh the land-grabber from Adwa,
How many hectares of land did you steal from the indigenous people in Gambella region ?

akele wedi Abay Tigray,
how big is the land you own in the Gambella region ?

Awash,
what happened to the natives you forcibly expelled from the Ogaden region in order to steal their ancestral land ?

In woyannie occupied Ethiopia is impossible to get hire for office, to get lone from government banks, to start business, to get married, to eat and party. You need to be part the junta party member even to breath oxygen. Otherwise you will be thrown by public toilet area to raised your children while your all family breathing not oxygen but ammonia. This era is the era too bad to be Ethiopian.

A woyane woman -- a constant fixture at the Paltalk woyane rooms -- traveled to Ethiopia late last year, and upon her return from the trip she told her woyane audience about her visit to the Southern region of Ethiopia where she claims to own vast tracts of the best agricultural land in the Gambella region that the TPLF regime has been awarding to its ardent Diaspora supporters free of charge.

She said she purchased farm tractors from the Middle-east and imported the machines into Ethiopia duty free. She now employs several hundred natives to cultivate "her" land in a government sponsored "work for food" program. She did her very best to justify the land-grab in purely humanitarian terms, but as the saying goes "...a guilty conscience needs no accuser."

During the question and answer session that followed, an individual asked the woman why she needed government issued bodyguards to accompany her on the trip to Southern Ethiopia if the region is safe to investors as she claimed it was?

Can you guess what her reply was ?

Investigators from New York-based Human Rights Watch paid a visit to a Karuturi lease area in Gambela in May 2011 where they found that maize, sorghum, and groundnut crops planted by local Anuak farmers had been cleared without consent and residents moved off their land.

Thorny Business: Ethiopian Rose Exports To Europe

by Pratap Chatterjee
March 5th, 2012

Delivering Ethiopian roses to European consumers on Valentine’s day has earned an Indian businessman the title of honorary consul for the East African country. Sai Ram Karuturi of Karuturi Global was appointed to his post last week at a formal ceremony conducted by Muktar Kedir, the Ethiopian cabinet affairs minister in Bangalore.


Photo: Ethiopian Roses. Planète à Vendre (used under Creative Commons license)


Karuturi, a former cable shop operator from Bangalore, gained favor with the administration of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi by taking advantage of the five-year tax holidays, duty-free imports of machinery, easy bank loans and land offered by the government, which is eager to emulate the lucrative agricultural export industry in neighboring Kenya. Over the last seven years Karuturi Global has acquired rights to 311,700 hectares of land in Gambela and Bako region in Ethiopia for the purpose of agricultural development.

But Karuturi’s practices in Ethiopia has also attracted less welcome attention from human rights activists. Investigators from New York-based Human Rights Watch paid a visit to a Karuturi lease area in Gambela in May 2011 where they found that maize, sorghum, and groundnut crops planted by local Anuak farmers had been cleared without consent and residents moved off their land. (Details can be found in the report ‘Waiting Here for Death’: Forced Displacement and ‘Villagization’ published this past January. The report also profiles another company – Saudi Star – which set up rice farms in Gambela)

The “villagization” program of the Ethiopian government gives farmers displaced by these land deals access to replacement land and also claims to provide them with better access to clean education, health and water. Many local people say the program is insufficient: “They told us … that we would find plenty of corn and other food in the new place we were moving,” one woman told a PBS documentary crew. “But they don’t give you enough food to fill you up. They give you food in a small container but it can’t even feed a family for a day.”

Karuturi Global claims that “villagization” does not even exist. “This is a completely jaundiced western vision. They assume anything in Africa has to be done by the whites and the Chinese and Indians should have businesses only in their own countries,” Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, told Mint, an Indian newspaper. “What they are saying about the Ethiopian government is complete hogwash. But I take respite in the fact that people decide to take potshots at you only if you are successful.”

One of his employees offered a more revealing explanation. “We exploit the economic opportunities which came about after the food price shock of 2007. The land is offered to us by the government, who is its legitimate owner. We don’t pay much rent but we create jobs,” Birinder Singh, the manager of Karuturi Agro Products told the BBC.

Human rights groups have not given high marks to Karuturi’s partners in the Ethiopian government either. Meles Zenawi’s administration, which has been in power for some two decades, has been heavily criticized recently for crushing political opposition using “anti-terrorism” legislation. Local media and opposition politicians have been jailed and an Amnesty International delegation was expelled from the country last August.

Karuturi Global and Saudi Star’s export-driven business model is part of a growing trend in the multi-billion dollar global agri-export trade that dispatch Third World produce to markets in the West. Until relatively recently, these exporters often bought agricultural products directly from local farmers albeit at low prices. But in recent years, many governments around the world have introduced new laws that allow multinational companies to lease land directly, displacing traditional farmers and their subsistence crops completely, sometimes even importing foreign labor to till the land.

A new report from GRAIN has compiled a list of 36 million hectares, a land mass equivalent to the country of Germany, has been leased by such companies around the world.

http://transformingethiopia.wordpress.com/

Worthless shabia pigs are vomiting with envy...............sorry, you are left looking out the window.

"ዱባይ ዉስጥ ያለ 5-ስታር ሆቴል በሙሉ የሚጠቀመው የኢትዮጵያ አትክልት ነው" (ሼክ መሃመድ ኣላሙዲ)