"NPR: Crackdown Turns Deadly In Ethiopia As Government Turns Against Protesters"

The big picture here is that the world’s population is growing and there’s a big push for food and farmland. Something like 60 percent of available arable land is in Africa. And in Ethiopia, the government has been leasing large parcels of land to foreign investors from China and India and the Middle East. The government is legally allowed to do this. It owns all the land in Ethiopia. But critics call it ‘land grabbing’. They say that people are being violently displaced from their ancestral lands. There’s a big ethnic component as well in terms of who is affected.

The spark of the protests was provided last month when a forest was being cleared for development. The protests coalesced in opposition to the government’s so-called “master plan” to expand development of Addis Ababa into surrounding farmland. The government claims that this ‘master plan’ is actually on hold. But since then, the protests have spread to other towns in the Oromia region, and they’re not just about the ‘master plan’ but about a range of issues particular to this group.