Marginal land and the global land rush: A spatial exploration of contested lands and state-directed development in contemporary Ethiopia

Abstract The ‘global land rush’ or ‘global land grabbing’ phenomena has prompted concerns over the potential of large-scale land acquisitions to displace rural populations and impact food security in lesser-developed countries. State actors often assert that lands being leased to investors are ‘marginal’, ‘wasteland’, ‘barren’, or ‘unused’ without explicitly stating the criteria that are used to classify those spaces. Using Ethiopia as a case study, this paper synthesizes semi-structured interviews and geospatial land-use data to unpack the federal government’s notion of ‘marginal land’ to investigate how land qualifies for deposition into a federal land bank set aside for future investment and the agro-ecological characteristics and human-environment interactions endemic to these areas. We find that government officials conceive land bank areas to be generally fertile but currently ‘unused’. In reality, we find land bank areas: (1) are used by pastoralists or rural people practicing land extensive forms of cultivation that are only loosely integrated into the Ethiopian state, (2) overlap with protected areas such as National Parks, and (3) are located in places that have surface water resources the government intends to use for large-scale development such as irrigation or hydropower projects. We argue that the intended land uses of banked lands serve not only to fulfill larger development objectives but also increase state-accessible product produced in these areas strengthening the link between ‘othering’ labels, development, and state-making in the context of the global land rush.