(Source: Mint, New Delhi)
By Anupama, Mint, New Delhi
Sept. 05--When R.S. Mohamed Saleem, a 37-year-old high school dropout from Coimbatore, sought to untangle his knotted cotton trade--a two-decade-long struggle during which he shrank from being a first-generation cotton farmer to a broker--he ventured out 3,000km west to Ethiopia.
Saleem, who has never owned more than 50 acres of land in India, is poised to plough in $6.4 million (nearly '30 crore) to grow cotton on 25,000 acres of land in a fertile valley in southern Ethiopia close to the perennial Omo river.
"Ethiopia offers an investor-friendly climate for companies, with incentives such as a three-year tax holiday," Saleem, founder and chief executive of Sara Cotton Fibers Pvt. Ltd, said in an email response from Ethiopia. "The Ethiopian government has also announced cotton as a priority sector for the country."
Indian companies are making a beeline to grow agricultural commodities and sell seeds, fertilizers and agriculture equipment in the Horn of Africa thanks to the availability of cheap labour and a dole-out of vast fertile land chunks by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi through the last decade.
But allegations of forcible possession of plots by the Ethiopian government to create land banks, and environmental damage from projects such as a proposed dam on the Omo river continue to cast a shadow on such ventures.
"If the government dams the Omo Valley tribes' water and parcels off their land to outsiders, these peoples may not survive," said Stephen Corry, director of London-based Survival International--a global advocacy for tribal rights--via email. "The government is pushing industrialization at the ultimate expense of the country's most vulnerable people."
The Ethiopian government denies that the policy is putting its people at a disadvantage. "Most Ethiopians live on highlands; what we are giving on lease is low, barren land," said Metasebia Tadesse, minister counsellor at the Ethiopian embassy in New Delhi. "Foreign farmers have to dig metres into the ground to get water. Local farmers don't have the technology to do that. This is completely uninhabited land. There is no evacuation or dislocation of people."
With Zenawi--Ethiopia's prime minister of nearly 20 years accused by human rights watchers of curbing press and civilian freedom--and Indian businessmen betting on cash crops such as sugarcane, tea and cotton, it's unclear whether one of the world's poorest countries' food security issue is being tackled.