Over the past fifteen years the Ethiopian state has greatly increased its investments in the sparsely populated arid and semi-arid pastoral lowlands where land is deemed as ‘unused’ (Lavers 2012). Guided by export-oriented agro-industrial development strategies and a modernist development ideology, the state has embarked on large-scale mechanised schemes to expand commercialised irrigation agriculture. Land investments focus on the large river basins such as the Wabi-Shebelle, Nile, Omo and Awash, all of which are considered to have high irrigation potential. With the construction of large dams and the conversion of prime grazing areas along large rivers into farmland, conflicts with dispossessed and resettled local pastoralists and agro-pastoralists are on the rise (Fratkin 2014). While the Ethiopian government has trumpeted double-digit national economic growth rates, critical perspectives are that pastoral livelihoods have experienced a ‘negative’ structural transformation characterised by widespread impoverishment, increasing social inequality and rising levels of destitution (Rettberg et al. 2017). Most pastoralists are currently excluded from the benefits of large-scale land investments pursued in the name of ‘growth and transformation’.

Land investments and large-scale enclosures in marginal dryland areas are not a new phenomenon in the Ethiopian lowlands. They map onto the historic Ethiopian centre–periphery dynamics between Muslim mobile pastoralists inhabiting the lowland areas and the ruling Christian Orthodox regimes familiar with farming in highland areas. Previous regimes under Emperor Haile Selassie (1930–74) and the socialist military junta of the Derg (1974–91) also pursued investments in large-scale cotton and sugar estates in the lowlands, leaving a legacy of displacement and dispossession in the pastoral frontier (Makki 2012). The state conceives arable land in the lowlands as ‘underutilised’, ‘untapped’ and relatively abundant compared to the densely populated highland areas where land is scarce, as we saw in Fana Gebresenbet’s chapter on South Omo in this book. At the same time, large-scale agricultural investments in Ethiopia have always served as a tool for state-building and the consolidation of power in its periphery, countering the widespread assumption that land grabs undermine state sovereignty (Lavers 2016). An authoritarian high-modernist state mainly concerned with control and appropriation often uses the establishment of large-scale schemes as a way to increase the legibility of frontiers (Scott 1998). Pastoralists uniquely challenge state sovereignity as their mobility undermines the state’s capacity to tax, conscript and otherwise regulate the population.