ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia's leasing of vast swathes of arable land to foreign and state-owned firms risks adding to the millions of people already requiring food aid in the drought-struck region, a US based think-tank warned on Friday.
Some 200,000 people are at risk of being displaced from land-grabbing, with at least 350,000 hectares of land leased since 2008 in south-west Ethiopia alone, according to the Oakland Institute.
"The impact is going to be terrible, because we can't expect this kind of development to benefit the local population," said Oakland's policy director Frederic Mousseau.
An additional 90,000 hectares are marketed as "available" in the federal land bank, Mousseau said.
"They will be losing their livelihood, and just join the millions of people that are relying on food aid in Ethiopia," he said....READ MORE
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