GRAIN | "Against the grain" | 2010 | "Saudi investors are already acquiring farmland and starting to put the Kingdom's policies into operation. One of their main targets is West Africa's rice lands. New information obtained by GRAIN shows that the Kingdom
Care petition against land grab Saudi Arabia "Resistance doesn't help when you are relocated, often being met with threats, violence and arrest, according to Human Rights Watch. The thousands already moved are just the beginning; the Ethiopian government plans to relocate 1.5 million people by next year. "
Guardian Povertu matters blog 25.2.2013: " It was to challenge this form of south-south co-operation that the Oakland Institute, in partnership with Indian civil society groups the Indian Social Action Forum (Insaf), Kalpavriksh and Peace, organised an Indian-Ethiopian summit on land investments in New Delhi in February. Obang Metho of the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia and Nyikaw Ochalla from the Anywaa Survival Organisation, members of the Anuak community of Gambela, Ethiopia, travelled to India with shocking testimonies of how their community has been dispossessed of livelihoods, ill-treated and subjected to misery while the Ethiopian government leases land to Indian corporations at giveaway prices."
Over the past decade and a half, foreign companies have signed over 60 deals covering nearly 4 million hectares in central and western Africa for the development of oil palm plantations. The land grabs are already generating violent conflicts in several African countries.
A wide range of activists, both African and European, is furious about the New Alliance(6). But the ONE campaign, co-founded by Bono, stepped up to defend it(7). The article it wrote last week was remarkable in several respects: in its elision of the interests of African leaders and those of their people, in its exaggeration of the role of small African companies, but above all in failing even to mention the injustice at the heart of the New Alliance – its promotion of a new wave of land grabbing.