Good idea for a thread, Anne. There's a good report from Ethiopia in Harper's July issue. The journalist put himself in harm's way asking too many questions about the rice fields in the delta at Gambella.
Letter from Gambella — From the July 2014 issue
The Man Who Stole the Nile
An Ethiopian billionaire’s outrageous land grab
By Frederick Kaufman
"The government owns all the land in Ethiopia. They cannot sell it, but they can lease as much of it as they want. By leasing to the Sheikh, the directorate had given Al Amoudi’s food grab the federal stamp of approval. Though the terms of the deal have never been released, the annual price per hectare has been estimated at no more than seven dollars. In Zambia, by comparison, the average hectare leases for about $1,250 a year."
Egypt has repeatedly stopped Ethiopia from damning the White Nile, as recently as 2011. The Sheik is farming rice in the delta at Gambella to sell to Saudi Arabia. In fact, Kaufman talked to a very frightened, but angry man there who was spreading a rumor that the sheik is simply a stooge of the Saudi royal family.
"Each acre of rice requires a million gallons of water a season, which means the Sheikh’s project could eventually suck more than a trillion gallons from the Nile. From November to February, the farm would extract more than 10 percent of the White Nile’s total flow. In a dry year, even more."
Basically sending Ethiopia's (and Egypt's) water to the Saudis in the form of a food commodity – rice.
