Politics of Development and Resettlement in Ethiopia: is it Villagization or Land Grabbing? the Case of Gambella Regional State
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Date
2014-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The years 2010 and 2011 were ever unique for Gambella, because it was the first historical
and memorable time when Gambella has received tremendous reactions from national and
international medias, activists and scholars, fromgovernment and non-government actors. This
was, due to the parallel episode of two globally and nationally sensitive issues of giving out
virgin and fertile land for local and foreign investors and planning of resettling geographically
scattered 45,000 people together through villagization program.
Therefore, this study was conducted with the general objective of addressing the conflicting
perspectives over the programs pertaining to villagization and land grabbing. To this end,
interview, personal observation, focus group discussion have been used intensively with all
concerned government officials, investors and local people. And the study revealed that the
government provoked only the independence and non-correlational nature of villagization and
land leasing programs, while the fact is thatthereis implicitlyplanned long term means-ends
correlation in between the programs in the future. But, for now both are going on in the region
concomitantly.
Moreover, the Michael Carnea's resettlement based model and, Borras and Franco's land
ownership and land usage change model were used by the study. Accordingly, the programs
resulted in multi-faceted problems and the shift of usage of land from forest and governmentally
called idle and marginal land to food and non-food productions and, shift of ownership of land
from the ownership of indigenous people to the ownership of land by the "elites" of politics and
economy is visible in the region. Therefore, it is the call of this paper for policy formulators’
toredesign and re consider the programs in a way it can make indigenous people the beneficiary
of the land leasing and other land related projects going on in the region.
Keywords: villagization, resettlement, land grabbing, development
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Keywords
Villagization, Resettlement, Land grabbing, Development