Ethiopia – country of the silver sickle – offers land dirt cheap to farming giants

Addis Ababa sells vast fertile swaths to international companies in effort to introduce large-scale commercial agriculture

(The Guardian-Xan Rice 15January 2010)

Workers at an 11,000ha farm in Bako, Ethiopia, run by the Indian company Karuturi. The company also runs a 300,000ha farm in the Gambella as part of Ethiopian government effort to promote large-scale agriculture Photograph: Xan Rice

This is a country of the bent back and the silver sickle, where virtually all the crops have felt the calloused fingers of the peasant farmer working his tiny parcel of state-owned land. The ox pulls the plough and the donkey the cart, and fertiliser counts as agricultural technology.

Chugging into this picture on a bright green John Deere tractor came Hanumantha Rao, a former sugarcane farmer from India who is at the forefront of a revolution sweeping through Ethiopian farming. He hurried up to a hilltop on his company’s farm in Bako, four hours’ drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, and swept out an arm to indicate the land he has leased from the government: 11,000 hectares to grow rice, maize and oil palms.