Fashion retailer has instructed its suppliers to ensure they do not use cotton from the Omo Valley, where there is an increased risk of land-grabbing - but admits it cannot provide an absolute guarantee.

The arrangement will provide a government-to-government framework to encourage commercial partnerships between New Zealand and Ethiopian agricultural interests.

The Ethiopian military responded to an attack on a farm in Gambella region owned by Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc with arbitrary arrests, rape, and other abuses against scores of local villagers, says Human Rights Watch.

Karuturi in a statement said the floods had affected its maize crop in over 12,000 hectares of land that has been leased to them.

Government spokesman Simon Bereket calls the group’s accusations “baseless.”

Karuturi Global Ltd. may receive an additional 200,000 hectares (494,211 acres) of land from the Ethiopian government if its current 100,000-hectare concession is developed within two years, the Agriculture Ministry said.

Africa, where one in three people is malnourished, is now growing tomatoes and butter lettuce for export.

Ethiopian security forces have undertaken major operations to disarm two local tribes in Lower Omo Valley—the Mursi and the Bodi—because of incidents related to the sugarcane plantations.

According to the Kerala press, Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, managing director Karuturi Global Ltd, has been arrested for fraud.

Karuturi Global Ltd., an Indian flower grower, demanded compensation from the Ethiopian government for a series of failed land deals as it prepares to exit the Horn of Africa nation.

Report exposes how authoritarian development schemes have perpetuated cycles of poverty, food insecurity, and marginalized the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Unrest flared in Oromiya for several months until early this year over plans to allocate farmland surrounding the regional capital for development.

Several investors with large agricultural leases are being investigated for illegal activities, including corruption, environmental destruction, and failure to uphold the terms of their contracts

The flooding that breached specially built barriers near Karuturi’s plantations couldn’t have been predicted, Karuturi claims.

"The government has verified and delineated 1.6 million hectares of virgin land suitable for large-scale commercial farming in different parts of the country," Esayas Kebede, Director of the recently formed Agricultural Investment Support told Reuters.

With attention centered on the civil war in the country over the last two years, the hunger and health crisis in the Omo Valley caused by the Gibe III Dam and the Kuraz Sugar Development Project has gone ignored.

Giant dam and irrigated sugar plantations mean people in lower Omo valley face starvation and conflict, says US thinktank

Opponents of the Ethiopian government’s policies have faced violence, but the EU has continued to provide funding for its commercial land deal projects.

Indigenous Peoples are being forced to become dependent on aid handouts having lost their land and their ability to produce their own food.

The army's attack on indigenous communities is suspected to be directly related to a land grab in the area by the Turkish company Tekron Group.

A government map leaked to International Rivers delineates sugar plantations with a total area of 2,450 square kilometers – almost the size of Luxembourg – that the Ethiopian government is seeking to develop in the sensitive ecosystems of the Lower Omo Valley.

Locals move out as international contractors seize opportunities offered by government to lease farmland at knockdown rates

An Ethiopian state body that has been involved in leasing tracts of land for commercial farming has suspended the issuance of new licences until it completes a review because of scant progress in developing areas leased so far, an official said.

Hamar pastoralists are being evicted to roadside villages without their consent, and their ancestral grazing lands are being sold off to investors for commercial plantations.

Ethiopian Sugar Corp. is tapping loans from Development Bank of China to build six sugar-processing factories and plant 150,000 hectares of sugar cane in the region bordering Kenya. This may exacerbate conflict in the ethnically diverse region.

The Pakistani company MCG Consulting, which had been working with Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc on a rice farm in the Gambella Regional State, has pulled out of the project.

Al-Amoudi’s Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc, which is primarily growing rice to export to Saudi Arabia, has leased 10,000 hectares in Gambella region and is in the “process of leasing an additional 290,000 hectares”.

One of the problems with so-called ‘land grabs’ is secrecy. Most of the contracts that seal such deals are hidden from public scrutiny, which makes it very hard to establish what is really going on.

In a recent letter to the Ministry of Agriculture, Girma urges the Ministry to stop giving land to an Indian company, warning that such a deal would damage Meles Zenawi’s “good reputation” on the campaign against global warming.

The Addis government shows scant regard for the potential local impact of massive Indian investment in floriculture and biofuels.