A Decolonial World-Ecological Reading of the Global Land Grab: Gambella, the River, and the Fall of Karuturi

Abstract

This chapter tackles the recent spike in global agricultural land acquisitions, referred to as the global land grab, in the post-crisis liberal imperium from a decolonial world-ecology perspective. It focuses on the developmental implications of growing South-South dimensions in the areas of agricultural investments, specifically, on the involvement of the Indian state and capital in the commercialization and industrialization of agriculture in Africa. It considers the epistemological and world-ecological implications of the racialist construction of Africa as “the last frontier” of capitalist modernity. Its empirical site is the Gambella province of Ethiopia and the epistemological questions surrounding the rise and fall of the Indian multinational agribusiness firm Karuturi’s efforts to become a leading global supplier of food through the initiation of large-scale industrial agricultural production in the Gambella province of Ethiopia. The chapter challenges the structural bias of IR by revealing how the socio-ecological knowledge and practice of the peoples and lands of “peripheral” spaces such as Gambella are constitutive sites of global power and demonstrates the significance of “race,” “nature,” and “coloniality” in the constitution of the international.