One of the first anthropologists to work in lowland Ethiopia, David Turton drew attention to peoples on the periphery and the effects on them of state and capitalist projects – notably wildlife conservation and the building of large dams. He engaged in public anthropology, feeling a duty to serve as an advocate for people whom he knew first as research participants but whom he later became friends with and whom he viewed as kindred spirits. Just four months before he died, at the age of 83, he travelled back to Ethiopia to renew friendships with people he had known for more than fifty years.

David was born in London in 1940. His father was a shipping agent at the London Docks and his mother a school secretary. At 18, not having the necessary O-Levels to attend university, he undertook preparatory work at a Catholic seminary. He was selected to attend the English College in Rome, where he spent three years completing his Lic. Phil. cum laude at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Unsure of his calling, he returned to England in 1963 having secured a rare agreement to be readmitted should he have a change of heart. He completed his missing O-Levels and went to the London School of Economics in 1964 to do a BSc in sociology, where he met his future wife, Pat. They were assigned as tutor partners for the optional course they both chose in social anthropology.

David went on to complete a PhD in social anthropology at the LSE under the supervision of James Woodburn, a specialist on African hunter-gatherers. Interested in going to Ethiopia, David read the work of the 19^th century explorer Vittorio Bottego and was struck by a description of hunter-gatherers living on the banks of the River Omo. They were the Kwegu, and they lived in close relation to a larger group, the Mursi. In the dry season of 1968, he negotiated with the Mursi to pitch his tent beside the Omo, where they were cultivating sorghum. He stayed by the Omo, slowly learning their language, until the time came for the Mursi to leave for their cattle camps. By this time, he had learned enough of the language and gained sufficient trust to be allowed to join them on the journey to the cattle camps.

Living and traveling with the Mursi helped David see that their way of life was threefold, involving flood-retreat cultivation along the Omo and Mago rivers, cattle herding, and shifting rain-fed cultivation. None of these strategies on its own was sufficient but in combination they provided a livelihood. The Mursi likened these activities to the three hearth-stones that support their cooking pots, all three being vital for their well-being. David’s recognition of these patterns – as described in his 1973 doctoral thesis – led to a deeper appreciation of a culture that most outsiders had hitherto misunderstood and stereotyped as purely pastoralist.

David took up a lectureship at Manchester University in 1971, and continued to carry out fieldwork among the Mursi, initially focusing on political oratory. The Mursi used public debates to reach collective decisions, particularly at times of crisis. Perennial concerns included conflict with neighbouring groups and territorial encroachment by wildlife reserves. As well as the Omo National Park, the Mursi were significantly affected by the establishment of the Mago National Park in 1978, which incorporated the majority of Mursiland. These tensions formed the backdrop to six ethnographic films that David made with director Leslie Woodhead between 1974 and 2001. In 1987, inspired by his friend and former student Dan Marks, David established the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

David and Pat Turton with Ulikoro Komoru in 2023.

Although he strongly identified as an anthropologist, David did not define himself by his job. He was grateful that he had the opportunity to be do what he loved and believed to be meaningful, and to be led by his curiosity. It was in this spirit that he took early retirement from Manchester University in 1990 to have more time to pursue his fieldwork and other interests. He often joked that after his retirement he had “never been busier!”

Through the 1980s and 1990s David served on committees for Oxfam, the Windle Trust, and various professional associations; he also served as editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1983-86) and the journal Disasters (1989-95). In 1996, he became director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, where he had a transformative impact – leading the expansion of its summer school and establishing its Master’s programme.

In the early 2000s David was galvanised into a new phase of activity as plans were announced for the building of the Gibe III dam on the Omo. He scoured reports of engineers and hydrologists to appraise the implications of the dam and associated sugar plantations for the peoples of the region. In an address at SOAS in 2010, he skewered the studies carried out by the dam’s backers and laid out the consequences of disrupting the Omo’s annual flood for the 100,000 people living downstream. Of the three “hearth-stones” on which local people depended, the flood was the most important. If the project proceeded as planned, it would undermine the entire subsistence economy.

David was not opposed to the dam itself. Rather, his concern was that the costs and benefits of the project were unfairly distributed. No compensation was offered to the Mursi and their neighbours, either for the loss of the flood or for lands seized for plantations. In contrast to the open debates practiced by the Mursi, the government announced its plan as a fait accompli with scant efforts made to consult “project-affected people”. The Mursi referred to the architects of the project as “people who keep their mouths shut”. Refusing to stay quiet himself, David penned op-eds and supported all those calling for justice. Given a choice between gentle backchannel pressure or shouting injustice from the rooftops, David was unequivocal: “I’m with the shouters”.

In practice, David rarely raised his voice. His words were always measured and imbued with sympathy for the marginalised. As a scholar and as a person he was unfailingly generous. David and Pat’s home served as a meeting-place for scholars and practitioners, and many formative conversations were held on their couch and around their dinner table. His legacies include the Omo-Turkana Research Network, an international consortium of social and environmental scientists focused on the region, and Mursi Online, which continues to publicise the challenges faced by the peoples of the Lower Omo Valley.

He is survived by his wife Pat, son Danny, daughter-in-law Lisa, and two grandsons, Zed and Asa.

A version of this obituary was published in Anthropology Today, Vol 40, No 1 (February 2024)

"Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa," the editors note, "are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’."

Five of the book's thirteen chapters focus on the Lower Omo, including Shauna LaTosky on Mun (Mursi) customary land use and FPIC, Lucie Buffavand on the Mela (Bodi) experience of 'the brunt of state power', Fana Gebresenbet on villagization in Ethiopia's lowlands, and Jed Stevenson & Benedikt Kamski on hydropower and irrigation development in the Omo-Turkana basin. An overview chapter by David Turton, 'Breaking every rule in the book', tells the story of river basin development in the Lower Omo Valley.

Other chapters (notably those by Jonah Wedekind on "investment failure and land conflicts on the Oromia-Somali frontier," and by Maknun Ashami & Jean Lydall on the Awash Valley) provide useful counterpoints to events in the region.

The book is available to order from the Berghahn website, where Echi Gabbert's introduction -- "Future-making with pastoralists" is also available as a free download.

Until 28 February 2021, a 50% reduction on the price of the book is available with the code GAB907.

Lands of the future: Anthropological perspectives on pastoralism, land deals, and tropes of modernity in Eastern Africa. Edited by Echi Christina Gabbert, Fana Gebresenbet, John G. Galaty, and Günther Schlee. Oxford: Berghahn (January, 2021)

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/oct/21/the-nobel-peace-prize-can-inspire-abiy-ahmed-to-new-heights-in-ethiopia

News item August 28 2018

Dear friends, colleagues and family members of Kirinomeri,

It is with great sadness that I learned about the death of this great man.

I had the privilege of getting to know Kirinomeri during the course of repeated visits to Makki between 2003 and 2014. He was a gentle, tall and slender man, with several missing teeth. Although I never asked him, I would imagine that some were lost during the many donga (stick duelling) fights of his youth. He was a loved and loving family man with a soft voice and a deep, hearty laugh which will forever bring back fond and  funny memories, in particular of a collective ritual whipping ceremony (koma kodha) that I once attended in 2004 and of which Kirinomeri always loved to remind me. He would laugh out loud whenever he recalled the story and arrived at the part about me screaming while running into the bushes “as only a child would”. I always wondered if he was somehow behind the joke to scare me into believing that the elders would really whip me too. Well, I fell for it - quite literally - as I dove into the bushes, camera and all.

Kirinomeri was the first elder that I met when I arrived in Makki in December 2003. Having worked as a young man with anthropologist David Turton, he was supportive of my wish to work with Mun (Mursi) women and introduced me to Ngatui and her widowed mother Bikalumi and her co-wives, insisting that they take care of me as they would their own daughter. It is thanks to them, but especially to Kirinomeri’s openness and generosity that I was able to participate freely in the daily lives of Mun girls and women in Makki between 2004-2005 and, again, for shorter visits in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. While there were no conditions attached to our oral agreement about doing research on the life stories of women in Makki - other than of course those expectations that any elder would expect after being consulted (e.g. small gifts of tobacco, money, cloth or household items for his wives), he did frequently make one request. It was a request typical of any father in his situation: to visit his son in prison whenever I returned to Jinka (roughly 40 kilometres from Makki). It was out of this common concern for the well-being of his son, the late Bagaha, that our friendship grew.

Bagaha had been falsely accused of homicide during a retaliatory attack by the Mun on an Ari village following the murder of his sister-in-law, Kereramai. She had been sleeping overnight with other Mun on the way back from the market town of Belamer, when a drunk Ari man attacked and killed her (for more on this see the film “Fire Will Eat Us”). According to Mun customary law, compensation must be paid to the family, but with the killers at large and no hope for compensation, Mun men attacked Belamer in retaliation. It should be mentioned here that the general framing of “retaliation” as “crime” was absent for the Mun, but not in Ariland, which had already been incorporated into the legal structure of Ethiopian civil and public law.

It was against this backdrop - i.e. the drama of Bagaha’s case - that I would come to know Kirinomeri and his family. In fact, many people who visited me in Jinka at the South Omo Research Centre between 2004 and 2005, were either related to Bagaha or were there to relay a message to him on behalf of his family. His case reflected the new criminalization mechanisms being introduced in northern Munland and used, as Bagaha would often explain, “as a way to gain control over elders”. Elders like Kirinomeri were often feared by the local authorities as having the power to incite violence, like the retaliatory attack in Belamer market.

It was not only the tragic story of his daughter-in-law and the equally tragic fate of his son (who died of an illness only months after finally being released from prison) that blighted Kirinomeri’s last years, but also the uncertain future of his community as a result of large-scale agro-development and forced villagisation plans that began to unfold in 2010. During one of our last conversations there was an irony in his apparent optimism about government plans to build irrigation ditches and a permanent village in Makki, along the Mago River. As he put it, “They [the government] will come - I guess it’s good. But then they will go again, like all the other times. That’s also good.”

Kirinomeri had made a name for himself, especially at the former SIM mission in Makki, as a somewhat progressive elder, who was open to working with foreigners, and, indeed he was always open to new ideas - from HIV prevention campaigns and community-based tourism, to mother-tongue learning and teacher training in Makki. In hindsight, his openness to foreigners and new ideas is also what likely made him more vulnerable to the suspicion and accusatorial rhetoric of the authorities.

His strength and humility were no doubt, in part, a result of the unimaginable tragedies he faced before and during the time that I knew him. Unfortunately, diabetes was his most difficult struggle in the end.

My heartfelt condolences go out to his family.

Sincerely yours,

Ngamargo

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates food security in the context of development-forced displacement. In southwest Ethiopia a large hydro-electric dam and plantation schemes have forced people to cede communal lands to the state and business speculators and indigenous communities have been targeted for resettlement in  noe, consolidated villages. We carried out a food access survey in new villages and communities not yet subjected to villagization; we complement this with ethnographic research. Survey data suggest that household food insecurity was high in both places, but lower in villagization sites than in communities not subjected to villagization. Ethnography paints a very different picture. Settlers were unable to feed themselves, and depended on food aid. The salient features of villagization were heat, indignity and bodily discomfort. We discuss the contrast between the information generated by the different research methods, and ask how surveys might mistake the precarious  state in which the settlers found themselves for the stable and continuing state implied by food security. We highlight the potential of survey research to mislead and stress the importance of taking local context into account. The impacts of villagization in the Lower Omo cannot be understood apart from wider forces that are changing both the way people live and the landscape around them.

Click here to view the published text

On the one hand, it lists six basic rules of best practice in development-forced displacement and resettlement which DAG officials  must know have not been followed in the past and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the overall tone of the letter is supportive of the government's resettlement programme or, as it is now called, 'Commune Development Programme' .The signatories (Mr Denis Weller, USAID Ethiopia Mission Director and Mr Guang Z. Chen, World Bank Ethiopia Country Director) admit that they have heard reports of human rights abuses, but deny that the reported abuses have been either ‘systematic’ or ‘widespread’.

In the Lower Omo, thousands of agro-pastoralists are being forcibly evicted from their most valuable agricultural land to make way for government-run sugar plantations. No compensation, benefit sharing or livelihood reconstruction schemes have been announced and no feasibility studies or impact assessments have been released for public discussion. DAG officials, who have visited the Lower Omo four times since January 2012, presumably know this.

They must also know that by flouting the lessons learned from over fifty years of research on development-forced displacement and resettlement, the Ethiopian Government is needlessly putting at risk the economic well-being and physical and mental health of the affected population. It is difficult not to see this as a ‘systematic’ and ‘widespread’ abuse of human rights in the name of development and, in the words of Michael Cernea, formerly Senior Advisor for Social Policy at the Word Bank,  a ‘disgracing stain on development itself’ (Cernea, 2008, p. 1).

Posted by David Turton, 25 June 2014

More information

The DAG letter

The Ethiopian Government’s reply

Reference

Cernea, Michael, (2008)  ‘Reforming the foundations of involuntary resettlement: Introduction’ in Michael M. Cernea and Hari Mohan Mathur (eds.), Can compensation prevent impoverishment? Reforming resettlement through investment and benefit-sharing, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

What these agencies mean by ‘human rights abuses’, when they make these claims, is not always specified, but they probably have in mind reports of rapes, beatings and arbitrary arrests by military personnel and police. Such events have almost certainly occurred (as the aid agencies seem tacitly to acknowledge) but they may or may not have been part of a ‘systematic’ policy of intimidation.

What cannot be denied is that thousands of agro-pastoralists in the lower Omo have been and are being evicted, without consultation or compensation, from their best agricultural land along the banks of the Omo to make way for commercial irrigation schemes. This is a clear-cut abuse of the human rights of the affected people and a systematic and on-going feature of government development policy in the Lower Omo.

The US Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2014, which became public law on 17 January 2014, recognises this situation by specifically prohibiting US assistance from being used to support any activities in the Lower Omo and Gambella regions of Ethiopia which ‘directly or indirectly involve forced evictions’. It goes on to require US executive directors of international financial institutions to oppose the funding of such activities. The full wording of the relevant section is as follows:

Funds appropriated by this Act under the headings ‘‘Development Assistance’’ and ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ that are available for assistance in the lower Omo and Gambella regions of Ethiopia shall—

(A) not be used to support activities that directly or indirectly involve forced evictions;

(B) support initiatives of local communities to improve their livelihoods; and

(C) be subject to prior consultation with affected populations.

The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director of each international financial institution to oppose financing for any activities that directly or indirectly involve forced evictions in Ethiopia.

(Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 (H. R. 3547. Division K, Title VII, General Provisions, Africa, Section 7042, Ethiopia, paragraphs 3-4, p. 524)

Ethiopia receives more British development aid than any other country and the UK is the largest state contributor to the World Bank’s ‘Promoting Basic Services’ (PBS) programme in Ethiopia. This provides budget support to local government for road construction and for agricultural, educational and health services. Resettlement activities in the Lower Omo are the responsibility of the local administration. It would not be surprising, therefore, if PBS funds were being used to support activities there which are 'directly or indirectly' involved in the forced eviction and resettlement of local people. Indeed this must be considered highly probable, in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary.

More Information

• Full text of Act (PDF)
• 'Ignoring abuses in Ethiopia: DFID and USAID in the Lower Omo Valley', Oakland Institute, 2013.
• 'Aiding and abetting:UK and US Complicity in Ethiopia's Mass Displacement', David Turton, Think Africa Press, 4 November 2013.

• International Rivers: 'New hope for environmental justice in IFI projects'
• South Omo Zone Villagization Plan
• Survival International: Letter to Sir Malcolm Bruce, Chairman of the Select Committee on International Development, U.K. House of Commons.

The Gibe III Dam, now being built in the middle basin of the Omo, will make possible large-scale commercial irrigation schemes in the lower basin. One of these schemes, now being implemented by the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation, will equal in extent the current irrigated area of Kenya. This will require a huge rate of water abstraction from the Omo, a transboundary river and the source of 90 per cent of Lake Turkana’s freshwater and accompanying nutrient inflow.

The actual irrigation water demand will depend not only on the crop area to be irrigated but also on the overall efficiency of the irrigation system. Making the optimistic assumption of an overall irrigation efficiency of 60 per cent, the paper predicts that the sugar scheme alone will require well over 30 per cent of the Omo flow. This rises to almost 40 per cent if the remaining area already allocated to irrigation development in the Lower Omo is included. If the efficiency assumption is reduced to 45 per cent (the figure used by the Omo-Gibe Master Plan of 1996) the total water demand for projected irrigation development in the Lower Omo reaches over 50 per cent.

This would lead to a drop in lake level of over 20 metres (its average depth is roughly 30 metres), a more than 50 per cent reduction in its volume and biomass (total mass of living organisms) and a drastic fall in the productivity of its fisheries. Ultimately, the lake could reduce to two small lakes, one fed by the Omo and the other by the Kerio and Turkwel rivers. The picture that emerges from these predictions bears a striking resemblance to the recent disastrous history of the Aral Sea, a non-outlet lake in Central Asia which was once the world’s fourth largest inland water body.

To download the paper click here.

Since the Omo supplies 90 per cent of the water entering Lake Turkana, the regulation of the Omo flows and the abstraction of Omo water for large-scale irrigation will alter the hydrological inflow patterns to Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake. The consequences of large irrigation abstractions were not mentioned in any of the environmental impact assessments commissioned by the Gibe III dam builders. In a report submitted to the African Development Bank in 2010, however, Dr Sean Avery, a Nairobi-based consultant hydrologist and civil engineer,  estimated that the level of the lake could drop by up to 20 meters, causing a significant reduction in the productivity of its fisheries.

A few months after this report was submitted, the full extent of planned irrigation development in the lower Omo became clear, with the announcement that the state-run Ethiopian Sugar Corporation would soon begin developing 150,000 hectares of irrigated sugar plantations. This was in addition to land which had already been allocated to, or earmarked for development by, private investors. It appeared that the lower Omo was set to become by far the largest irrigation complex in Ethiopia. The African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford therefore asked Dr Avery to undertake a second study to update and consolidate his earlier findings. His final report is now available. It provides the most up to date, detailed and authoritative assessment yet made of the likely impact of river basin development in the Omo Valley on the Lake Turkana Basin.

Click here to download the report.

But five years is a long time in the history of the web - in 2007, for example, YouTube did not exist, nor did social media such as Facebook and Twitter and nor was it necessary for websites to work on mobile devices. Some months ago, therefore, we began an extensive redevelopment of the site, to bring it up to date with current standards in website technology and management and to improve its design, content and functionality. We are now pleased to be launching a ‘new look’ Mursi Online, which represents the first  results of this process. Much remains to be done, and we ask visitors to bear with us as we add new content over the next few months. Our hope is that the overall result will be to increase the website’s effectiveness in meeting its original objectives at a time when state-sponsored development, principally in the shape of large-scale commercial irrigation and resettlement schemes, is putting unprecedented pressure on the people and environment of the Lower Omo.

It happened that his period as Komoru was also a period during which three successive Ethiopian governments made concerted efforts to extend their political control over the Lower Omo Valley, an area which had been only nominally incorporated into the Ethiopian state at the end of the nineteenth century. The creation of the Omo National Park in 1966, soon after his installation, represented the most significant incursion of state power into the Lower Omo since the military campaigns of the Emperor Menelik II in the 1890s. The Omo and later the Mago National Park (established in 1975) permanently deprived the Mursi and their neighbours of valuable pastoral, agricultural and hunting resources and made their subsistence economies more vulnerable to drought and famine. In the early 1970s three years of poor rainfall led to a period of hunger in which death by starvation occurred in Mursiland for the first time in living memory. At the end of the decade, Komorakora led a successful migration of Mursi to higher, better watered land in the Mago Valley where a large population subsequently settled and a protestant missionary organisation, SIM, established a clinic (in 1987) and later a school.

The extension of state power into the southwest accelerated under the system of ethnic federalism introduced by the EPRDF in 1995. The increasingly beleaguered position which the Mursi now saw themselves occupying was summed up as follows by Komorakora in a public meeting at Gorobura in 2001.

Ba te nguchui

Our land has shrunk.

Ko huli nyu bwe eleheni ninge

If we wanted to run, there would be nowhere for us to go.

Ba tanunu lom kuchumba kip!

On that side, the land is full of kuchumba [highlanders]

Tana lo kuchumba kip!

On this side the land is full of kuchumba.

Na age kel bwe tini gure ko nganga.

All we are left with is this tiny bit of land here.

Koi ori?

Where shall we go?

He lived long enough to see the beginnings of the final stage in this process of state incorporation and land alienation. Under plans now being implemented by the government, in conjunction with the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation, the Mursi will be expected to give up their land and herds, move into resettlement villages, take up sedentary irrigated agriculture and work as wage labourers on commercial sugar cane plantations.

Komorakora died in the SIM clinic at Makki, in the Mago Valley, on 22 January 2012. He was buried at Kolai in the Elma Valley and nineteen oxen were sacrificed at his funeral. His successor, Ulijeholi Konyonomora (Komorajehola), a member of the Geleba age set, was installed shortly afterwards by popular consent.

One of the decisions made by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee at its 35th session in June 2011 concerned threats posed by the Gibe III Dam to Kenya’s Lake Turkana World Heritage Site. The decision was based principally on information contained in a letter of concern from the NGOs International Rivers and Friends of Lake Turkana and in a report commissioned by the African Development Bank on the hydrological impacts of the Omo Basin on Lake Turkana water levels and fisheries.

The committee concluded that the dam is likely to ‘significantly alter Lake Turkana’s fragile hydrological regime’. It expressed its concerns about the potential cumulative impacts of large-scale irrigation in the Lower Omo Valley and of the Gibe IV and Gibe V dams, which are still at the planning stage. It urged the Ethiopian government to ‘immediately halt’ construction of the Gibe III dam and asked both the Ethiopian and Kenyan Governments to report back to it by 1 February 2012.

Comments on the Ethiopian response

In its response, the Ethiopian Government dismissed all the committee’s concerns. Even the statement that the lake ‘draws almost 90 per cent of its inflow’ from the Omo was described as ‘difficult to establish’, on the grounds that ‘there is no information about the Kenyan part of the Basin’ (p. 5). It has long been the established scientific consensus, however, that over 80 per cent of the inflow to the lake comes from the Omo-Gibe basin. This is indicated by the following quotation from Karl Butzer’s classic 1971 study of changes in the level of Lake Turkana (then known as Rudolf).

..most of the water of Lake Rudolf – in the order of 80 to 90% - appears to be derived from the Omo River. The Turkwell and Kerio [in Kenya], the only other affluents of any significance, are dry in their lower courses for most of the year...Consequently the seasonal and longer-term fluctuations of Rudolf must in large part be controlled by the duration and intensity of the rainy season in highland Ethiopia. (Recent History of an Ethiopian delta: the Omo River and the level of Lake Rudolf (University of Chicago Dept. of Geography, 1971, p. 37).

The Ethiopian government also accused the committee of failing to recognise the contribution of the proposed ‘controlled flood’ to (a) maintaining the lake level (p. 6), (b) boosting the nutrient needs of the lake (p. 8) and (c) providing a ‘reliable and timely water supply for recession agriculture’ (p. 10). These points would have been worth making, if the controlled flood were indeed to become the major ‘mitigating measure’ it was described as in the 2009 Economic and Social Impact Assessment, commissioned by the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation. It now seems clear, however, that this was never the intention.

In the first place, a press release issued by the dam builder, Salini Costruttori, in March 2010 revealed that the controlled flood was intended as a temporary measure only, which would ‘enable the local people to have a transitory period of a suitable duration when it is deemed opportune to switch from flood-retreat agriculture to more modern forms of agriculture.’ In the second place, the large-scale irrigation development in the lower basin which was announced by the Prime Minister in January 2011 will rule out a controlled flood of any kind, whether temporary or not.

This leads to the most baffling aspect of the Ethiopian government’s response to the WHC, namely the way it seeks to dismiss the committee’s concerns about the impact on Lake Turkana of irrigation development in the lower Omo.

The Omo Basin has long been seen as offering substantial opportunities for large scale irrigation, provided the highly seasonal flow of the Omo could be regulated. This will now be achieved, for the first time, by the Gibe III dam. As a result, the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation has already been allocated 245,000 ha. in the lower basin, of which 150,000 ha will be devoted to irrigated sugar cane production. At least another 150,000 ha have been leased to private investors for a variety of other irrigated crops. According to the AFDB study, ‘with the potential abstractions that might be implemented [through irrigation development in the lower basin] the lake could drop up to 20 metres’ (Executive Summary, para. 33, p. 5).

Despite this, the government claims in its response to the WHC that irrigation development is not relevant to the committee's concerns, because it is 'not part of the Ghibe III Dam' (p. 9). On page 7 of the response, the following passage is quoted from the AFDB study.(1)

Development within the Omo-Basin, which removes water for consumptive use especially through irrigation abstraction, will impact the lake through reduced inflows and a reduction in lake levers [sic], [and] associated with this, there will be a reduction in the water table. Since irrigation is not part of the Ghibe III Dam, the assumed reduction will not happen [emphasis added]. However, the extent and effect of the reduced flows have not been fully assessed, and they are to some extent offset by increasing runoff due to catchment change.

No page reference is given for this quotation but it is nearly identical to a passage on p. 4-2 of the final version of the AFDB study in which, however, the  sentence shown above in bold does not occur.(2) Wherever this sentence came from, it is clearly meaningless. It could be made meaningful, however, by adding the words ‘......as a direct result of the operation of the dam’. Any reduction in lake level due to large-scale irrigation development, in other words, will be an indirect, rather than direct result of the dam, since without the regulated flow sequence created by the dam, large-scale irrigation in the lower basin would not be feasible. The puzzling position of the Ethiopian government, then, appears to be that large-scale irrigation in the lower Omo should not be considered a danger to the Lake Turkana World Heritage Site, because it will be an indirect rather than a direct result of Gibe III.

The Ethiopian government’s response to international criticism of the Gibe III Dam project has, from the start, been highly defensive. Critics tend to be portrayed as enemies of Ethiopia who want to hold back economic development in the country and keep its citizens in a state of ‘backwardness and poverty.’(3) In the present document, the Ethiopian government not only describes the decision of the WHC as ‘one sided and highly biased’ but confesses itself unable to understand the reasons behind it, thereby hinting at ulterior motives (p. 10). This mode of response makes it difficult for a constructive dialogue to take place between the government and its critics and often makes it appear (as in this case) that government spokespersons are wilfully out of touch with reality.

The 36th Session of the World Heritage Committee.

Between 14 and 22 March 2012, a joint monitoring mission from the World Heritage Centre and the IUCN visited the Lake Turkana World Heritage Site, at the invitation of the Government of Kenya. The mission had meetings with various ‘stakeholders’, including the Prime Minister. Based on the mission’s report, a draft decision has been included in the provisional agenda for the 36th session of the WHC, which would add the Lake Turkana World Heritage Site to the ‘List of World Heritage in Danger’.

The draft decision repeats the committee’s concern about the ‘potential and ascertained cumulative impacts’ on Lake Turkana of the Gibe III dam and ‘related on-going and planned irrigation projects’; asks the Governments of Ethiopia and Kenya to carry out a ‘Strategic Environmental Assessment’ (SEA) to assess the ‘cumulative impacts of all development projects impacting on the Lake Turkana Basin’; and once again urges the Ethiopian government ‘to immediately halt all construction on the Gibe III dam and related irrigation projects until the SEA has been completed’ (Item 7B of the Provisional Agenda: State of conservation of World Heritage properties, WHC-12/36.COM/7B.ADD, pp. 10-16).

The 36th session of the committee will be held in Saint Petersburg between 24 June and 6 July 2012.

Notes

Related documents

This will be made possible by the completion of the Gibe III hydroelectric dam, which is expected to begin operations in September 2013 and which will eliminate the annual flood. The reservoir is due to start filling in June 2012.

The announcement was made during the 13th Annual Pastoralists' Day Celebrations, organised by the Ministry of Federal Affairs, the Pastoral Affairs Standing Committee of the House of Peoples' Representatives, the Southern Regional Government and the Pastoralist Forum of Ethiopia. The motto chosen for the celebrations was 'We will bring Ethiopia's renaissance to an irreversable point by realising the Growth and Transformation Plan in pastoral areas'.

Human rights organisations have expressed concerns that the Gibe 3 dam could have a devastating impact on the livelihoods of over half a million people, in both Ethiopia and Kenya, who depend on the Omo flood and on Lake Turkana for cultivation, pastoralism and fishing. It has also been predicted that the level of the Lake, which receives most of its water from the Omo, could be drastically reduced by large-scale irrigation schemes in the lower valley.

In his speech, the Prime Minister dismissed such concerns, saying they came from ‘the friends of poverty and backwardness’ who wanted to keep pastoralists as ‘a case study of ancient living’ for the benefit of tourists, scientists and researchers.

More information

The Prime Minister's speech in English

The downstream impact (David Turton)

The impact on Lake Turkana (Sean Avery)

USAID Ethiopia trip report (Leslie Johnston)

USAID Kenya trip report (Leslie Johnston)

Achieving sustainable conservation without sacrificing social justice has been a long standing challenge. Poorly designed or badly managed conservation work can damage people's legitimate interests and involve human rights’ violations. For more information and to learn how to take part in the network, go to: www.facebook.com/JustConservation