Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2023 in the subject Economics - Economic Cycle and Growth, , course: Development Policy Making Process and Implementation Strategies, language: English, abstract: This paper analyzes Tom Lavers' 2012 article titled "Land grab' as strategy? The political economy of agricultural investment in Ethiopia", which explores the relationship between agricultural investment and land acquisition in Ethiopia. The paper argues that foreign investment in agricultural land has become a key strategy for the Ethiopian government to transform the country's economy and agriculture sector. The article critically examines this strategy by focusing on the political economy of large-scale agricultural investment, highlighting the key actors involved in the process, and the implications of such strategy for small farmers and the broader Ethiopian society. The paper also highlights the various critiques and controversies surrounding large-scale agricultural investment in Ethiopia, including issues related to land acquisition, land tenure, environmental degradation, and social displacement.

Since the 2008 world food crisis a surge of land grabbing swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America. Investors have uprooted rural communities for massive agricultural, biofuels, mining, industrial and urbanisation projects. ‘Water grabbing’ and ‘green grabbing’ have further exacerbated social tensions. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, the biofuels boom and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. The contributors to this volume advance the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the historical antecedents of today’s land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. Readers of this collection will learn about the impacts of land and water grabbing; the relevance of key theorists, including Marx, Polanyi and Harvey; the realities of China’s involvement in Africa; how contemporary land grabbing differs from earlier plantation agriculture; and how social movements—and rural people in general—are responding to this new threat. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Located in central Ethiopia, the Arssi region is one of the most productive in Ethiopia yet it has so far been neglected by scholars. This book scrutinizes the rural development of Arssi by focusing on the Swedish supported experimental venture known as the Chilalo Agricultural Development Unit (CADU) and later as the Arssi Rural Development Unit (ARDU). Ketebo Abdiyo Ensene investigates how effectively this strategy empowered the peasantry to change their farming techniques and produce beyond subsistence level. He also examines the accumulation of alienated land by the northern Ethiopian nobility through land grants, fake purchases, and other futile means of land grabs and the impact that this had on the native population. Finally, the book reassess the importance of the rural land reform of 1975 that followed the collapses of the imperial regime and argues that this was the most significant event in the history of agricultural development in Ethiopia. The assessment of the book in fact goes into the post-1991 period in relation with agrarian development. The Political Economy of Land and Agrarian Development in Ethiopia will be of interest to scholars of Ethiopia, African Studies, economic history, political economy, development and agriculture.

Observing the current wave of large scale land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa, many have found it easy to call the situation land grab, the new form of neo colonialism in Africa. In Ethiopia, few underlining socio-economic and political currents have shaped the leasing of its arable land to both national and international investors in recent years. The Agricultural Development Led Industrialization strategy the country adopted in the early 1990s, followed with consecutive short-term strategic plans focused primarily on agriculture as the driver for the nation's economic growth and structural transformation, have acted as the main underpinnings in the commercialization of its agricultural sector. These plans, though national in their making, have also been constructed in the context of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which put the deadline of 2015 to cut poverty in half of signee countries, of which Ethiopia is one. The Food Crisis of 2007/08, coupled with the global financial crisis of 2008, has meant that foreign direct investment in farmland has become the new phenomenon for long-term investment with speculation of substantial returns in the current uncertainty of food security and financial climate. There is a new food world order under way, one in which feeding one's own population doesn't necessarily mean it has to be cultivated at home. For a country like Ethiopia, one of the most food insecure and poorest country on earth, gambling on development based on foreign use of its most needed natural assets, both land and water, should not be looked over so passively.

This book focuses on profiling, from both literature-based and primary research points of orientation, instances of land grabs and/or acquisitions with a focus on the implications of land grabs for trade, investment and development policy in Africa under the global green economy transition agenda. In many instances, case studies and examples paint a picture that could be of use to policy-makers. Overall, the book advocates a 'satisfy-satisfy' orientation when land deals are made, as well as total transparency from key actors, building grassroots negotiation capacity and awareness. To illustrate some of the emerging issues in terms of land-grabs, acquisition and their implications for trade, investment and development policies, the sixth Trade Policy Training Centre in Africa (trapca) conference took place in Arusha, Tanzania on 24 and 25 November 2011. The conference had two objectives: (1) to come up with concrete policy interventions and recommendations that would harness foreign investment in land on the continent; and (2) to publish this edited book of selected papers presented at the conference that met the rigorous specifications laid down by the editors and publishers. One of the major revelations to emerge from the Conference was that 'there is no vacant land in Africa'. In addition, participants took the view that land deals in Africa needed to be done on a 'satisfy-satisfy-satisfy' rather than a 'win-win-win' basis. This book is jointly published by trapca and the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA).

The sign that ‘Africa is on Sale’ has been appearing with regular frequency in major newspaper accounts across the world, indicating that large amounts/expanses of Africa’s rich farmlands are being sold to transnational investors, usually on long-term leases, at a rate not seen in decades – indeed not since the colonial period. Transnational and national economic actors from various business sectors (oil and auto, mining and forestry, food and chemical, bioenergy, etc.) are eagerly acquiring, or declaring their intention to acquire large areas of land on which to build, maintain or extend large-scale extractive and agro-industrial enterprises to help secure their own food and energy needs into the future. This book provides a critical appraisal of the growing phenomenon of land grabbing in Africa. Far from being a technical issue associated "good governance", the problem of land grabbing by transnational corporation and states is a serious threat for the food security of millions of Africans and is undoubtedly one of the great challenges of our time for development on the continent. The case studies illustrate that African states are also complicit in the massive land grabbing by actively participating in isolated development while excluding the local communities. The case studies reveal key features that characterize how the global land grab plays out in specific localities in Africa. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities.