"Kidnapping, Torture, and Stolen Land: The Brutal Reality of Ethiopia's New Sugar Wars"

...In 2005, when Jonathan first arrived in Mursi-land, the tribe was still essentially living as they had for thousands of years. The Mursi had been dependent on the floodwaters of the Omo River to irrigate and fertilize their crops, supplemented by cattle and goat herding, as well as hunting. Everything changed in 2015 when a government-backed Italian firm completed the Gibe III hydroelectric dam upriver. All seasonal flooding ceased for the first time in millennia, according to the Mursi, rendering vast tracts of tribal land unfarmable. Famine ensued. Simultaneously, water was diverted for a government scheme to establish industrial sugarcane plantations throughout the Omo Valley. The new irrigation features soon became breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes...

Chinese corporations have also established a strong presence here. In the wake of domestic corruption scandals, sugar plantations that were originally run by the Ethiopian military have been bought out by Chinese businesses, which have also received permission to build additional facilities in the Omo Valley. A 2017 article in the state-run China Daily titled “Life is sweet for sugar industry in Ethiopia” referred to 10 such plants being under construction at the time, on what it called “barren” land. In each case, territory had been forcibly seized from local tribes by the Ethiopian military without compensation...

As the plantations and sugar refineries multiply, local tribespeople have increasingly been fighting back, staging raids against both machinery and workers. The presence of foreign investment has increased pressure on the Ethiopian government to stabilize the region, which has led to the ongoing military initiative to confiscate all tribal firearms.