"The great land rush: Ethiopia: The billionaire’s farm"

Saudi Star’s proprietor, a Saudi-Ethiopian tycoon named Mohammed al-Amoudi, has spent more than $200m turning a swath of bush into a farm the size of 20,000 soccer pitches. That puts the sheikh, as he is known, in the vanguard of the global land rush...Saudi Star’s was one of the most high-profile projects of an investment drive in which Ethiopia’s government leased 2.5m hectares, an area slightly smaller than Belgium...

...[On] April 28 2012, when decades of lowlander grievances were unleashed on the sheikh’s farm...[a] group of gunmen, widely held to have been Anuak militants, opened fire at the company’s compound. They killed at least five employees before fleeing. Reprisals followed. According to Human Rights Watch, the military rounded up villagers, beating the men and raping the women. The attack was a lesson for the new lords of the land..They can come with the promise of jobs, technology and progress. But land is like the lion that prowls near Saudi Star’s farm: hard to tame...

Jemal Ahmed...the chief executive of Saudi Star...flatly denied such claims [of displacement of locals to pave way for agribusiness] “No one was living in this area,” he said of Saudi Star's plot...“All the indigenous groups have had a rough time,” he said. “They need more investment. And better governance. And civilisation.”