Saudi Arabia Has Carved Out a Slice of Ethiopia for Itself

In the heart of Ethiopia, a silent war wages – a battle not fought with guns or bombs, but with leases and contracts, with promises and betrayals. This war is about land, and it is tearing at the very fabric of communities that have lived on and with the land for centuries. For those who watch the world through the lenses of Wall Street, the London Stock Exchange, or the opulent halls of Saudi Arabia, land is an asset, a commodity to be traded, bought, and sold. But for the people of rural Ethiopia, land is something far more profound –it is the bedrock of their identity, the source of their sustenance, the soil in which their histories and futures are planted.

Large-scale land acquisition – what some call land grabbing – has become the buzzword of the day in Ethiopia and across Africa. On one side of this polarized issue, the Ethiopian government and foreign investors hail these deals as keys to development, to the transfer of technology, and the supposed awakening of ‘idle’ lands. But local communities, these same deals are seen as nothing more than a modern-day scramble for Africa, a neocolonial land rush that echoes the violent dispossessions of the past.

Several years ago, the Ethiopian government, eager to attract foreign investment, revealed that it had placed over 3.3 million hectares of land into a ‘land bank,’ ready for investment. Of this, 2.3 million hectares had already been allocated to over 86 national and foreign companies. But what these contracts omit is the people who have lived on this land, people who have cultivated it, worshipped on it, buried their ancestors in it.

Take the case of Saudi Star, a company that is a microcosm of the broader tragedy unfolding across Ethiopia. In 2009, this Saudi Arabian enterprise, with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family, signed a fifty-year lease for 14,000 hectares of prime land in Gambella, a fertile region in western Ethiopia. They started planting rice on the land, for export to Saudi Arabia. This land had sustained the indigenous Anuak and Nuer tribes for generations. The ink on the contract was barely dry when thousands of these people were displaced, their homes and lives uprooted to make way for the expansive rice fields that Saudi Star envisioned.

Saudi Star’s mission, on paper, sounds noble: to secure food for the people of Saudi Arabia and provide jobs for local people, not to mention foreign exchange revenue for Ethiopia. But beneath this veneer lies a harsh reality. Saudi Arabia’s oil rich land isn’t fertile, leaving the country at the mercy of food imports. That’s why it has resorted to appropriating the land of others, lands where the voices of the displaced ring hollow in the corridors of power. The Ethiopian government, complicit in this grand scheme, has already leased out at least 2.5 million hectares – a swath of land nearly the size of Belgium – to foreign investors like Saudi Star and Karuturi Global of Bangalore from India. The stated goal was to bring modern farming techniques to Ethiopia, to generate exports that would supposedly lift the country out of poverty. Yet, in the scramble to sign these deals, the government forgot one crucial thing: the people.

Ethiopia’s agricultural landscape is not one of sprawling, mechanized farms, but rather of smallholder farmers that rely on their hands, simple tools, and the unpredictable rains to coax life from the soil. These farmers make up 85 percent of the country’s workforce, producing 95 percent of its agricultural output. But the crops they grow are not for export; they are for survival. Eighty percent of what they produce is consumed by their own households. Only a meager 5 percent of Ethiopia’s agricultural output comes from large commercial farms, yet these farms have become the linchpin of the government’s strategy for ‘development.’ The math doesn’t add up.

The allure of foreign capital has led Ethiopia’s leaders to open the doors wide to investors from India, Turkey, Pakistan, China and, of course, Saudi Arabia. The deals are sweet for the investors: annual rents as low as $3 per hectare, tax holidays, and access to guaranteed credit. But these low rents and favorable terms come at a high cost to the people who once called this land home. Displaced from their ancestral lands, they are left to grapple with promises of compensation that rarely materialize, with violence and human rights violations that are all too real, and with an environment that is increasingly degraded by the demands of commercial agriculture.

Even those investors who secured these lucrative leases have found the reality of farming in Ethiopia to be far more challenging than they anticipated. Of the land leased, only 35 percent has been developed, stymied by the logistical nightmare of bringing machinery and skilled labor to remote, landlocked regions. Some companies, like the Indian firm Karuturi Global, have failed spectacularly. Karuturi’s 300,000-hectare lease was reduced to 100,000 hectares after the company struggled with flooding and debt, and eventually had its lease terminated for failing to bring the land into cultivation.

The Ethiopian government has its own narrative of progress and development. It speaks of ‘villagisation,’ a program designed to consolidate scattered communities into larger settlements where basic services can be more easily delivered. But for the Anuak and other indigenous groups, villagisation is a euphemism for forced relocation. They tell of soldiers who beat and raped those who resisted, of communities that once thrived independently now reduced to dependency on food aid. What irony! These were people who were self-sufficient before they were displaced, people who cultivated their own food in a land that is, by all accounts, bountiful. Many ended up as refugees in Kenya.

Saudi Star and other foreign investors might argue that their projects will eventually benefit Ethiopia, that the rice they produce will cut down on the country’s import bills and even generate precious foreign currency through exports. But the Anuak and the Nuer, the people who have paid the price for these grand plans, would tell a different story. They would say that no amount of foreign currency can buy back what they have lost – their homes, their way of life, their connection to the land.

Land might be seen as an asset class by a fund manager, but for the rural people of Ethiopia, it is a foundation for social identity and food security. The pressures on this land are mounting, driven by global demographic growth, climate change, and the insatiable demand for food and energy security. In the name of progress, Ethiopia has made itself an attractive destination for land investment, but at what cost? The story of Saudi Star is just one chapter in a much larger narrative of land grabbing, a narrative that is playing out across Ethiopia and the wider African continent.

As we look forward, there is a clear demand that must be made: all land leases that have displaced local people in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and across Africa must be renegotiated. And in cases where local communities agree to lease their land, they must be made majority shareholders in the companies that seek to profit from their ancestral soil. The future of these lands should not be determined in boardrooms in New York, Riyadh, London or Dubai. It should be determined by the people who have lived there for centuries, who have cultivated the land with their own hands, who have fed their families from its bounty.

This is not just about land – it is about identity, survival, flourish and justice. Local community roots run deep, and they must not be severed.

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