The Land That Feeds No One: How Ethiopia's Oromia Became a Battlefield of Hunger

YABELO, ETHIOPIA — The woman's name is Dida Guyo, and she is counting on her fingers the animals she has lost. Two hundred and forty-three cattle. Eighty-seven goats. Eleven camels. She stops counting. The rest of the herd, she says, died too fast to number. She is fifty-two years old and has been a pastoralist all her life, as her mother was, as her grandmother was. Now she sits on a plastic sheet in a displacement site at the edge of Yabelo town, and she owns nothing but the clothes she wears and a jerrycan she carried for forty kilometers.

This is how it looks when a way of life dies. Not suddenly, but in the slow accumulation of loss—one animal, then ten, then a hundred—until there is nothing left to lose. By the time you read this, the camp at Yabelo will have grown again. That is how it works here.

What They Left Behind

Borena zone lies in Ethiopia's southern Oromia region, stretching to the Kenyan border. For centuries, the Borana Oromo people moved their herds across this land according to the ancient gada system, reading the seasons, following the grass. The land was harsh but it sustained them. They had cattle. They had nothing else, and they needed nothing else.

Now they have nothing. Since late 2020, six consecutive rainy seasons have failed. The short rains of October through December, which should replenish water pans and bring fresh grazing, have not come. The long rains of March through May, which should carry the herds through to the next cycle, have not come. The meteorological term is 'precipitation deficit.' What it means in Borena is that 1.5 million livestock have died since 2021, according to the Ethiopian government's National Disaster Risk Management Commission.

Dida Guyo walked here from a village called El Sod, where her family had lived near a crater lake that once held mineral salt. The lake dried up two years ago. The salt trade that sustained the community for generations ended. Her husband died in January of this year—not from hunger directly, but from the chest infection that settled in his lungs after months of malnutrition weakened his body. She does not call it starvation. She calls it what it was: a slow vanishing.

The Fertile Land They Cannot Reach

Forty kilometers north of the displacement camp, this correspondent stood at the edge of a different landscape. Green irrigated fields stretched toward the horizon. Tractors moved between rows of vegetables destined for export. A sign at the entrance read 'Horizon Plantations PLC.' Workers—not Borana pastoralists but migrants from the highlands—walked between greenhouses. The operation covers 20,000 hectares leased from the Ethiopian government.

This is the other story of Borena, the one that does not appear in humanitarian appeals. While pastoralists die of thirst, foreign and domestic agricultural investors hold long-term leases on the region's most fertile and well-watered land. The Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based research organization, documented this pattern across Ethiopia's lowlands: between 2008 and 2020, the government leased more than 3.6 million hectares to commercial agriculture, much of it in pastoralist areas.

The Borana people were never consulted about these leases. Their customary land rights, recognized under Ethiopian law, were not honored. The regional government classified their grazing lands as 'underutilized'—the same bureaucratic language that has dispossessed indigenous communities from the Amazon to the Mekong Delta. The crops grown on these commercial farms—roses, vegetables, sesame—are exported. They do not feed the people of Borena.

The Official Version

In Addis Ababa, government officials speak of the drought as a climate emergency requiring humanitarian response. They are not wrong. The Horn of Africa drought is the worst in forty years, affecting 23 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 4.6 million Ethiopians require emergency food assistance. The government has appealed for international aid.

What the official narrative omits is this: the crisis in Borena is not only a product of climate change. It is a product of policy choices that prioritized commercial agriculture over pastoralist survival, that treated mobile herding as an obstacle to development rather than an adaptation to aridity, that signed land leases without consent and redirected water sources to irrigate export crops.

When asked about land grievances in Borena, a spokesperson for Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture told this correspondent that 'all investments follow legal procedures' and that 'the government is committed to supporting pastoralist communities through the current emergency.' The spokesperson declined to discuss specific lease arrangements or water allocation policies.

What the Data Shows

The numbers tell a story of compounding loss. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which provides the global standard for measuring hunger emergencies, Borena zone has remained at IPC Phase 4—Emergency—for eighteen consecutive months. Some areas have reached Phase 5, the classification for famine conditions.

The displacement figures are equally stark. The International Organization for Migration recorded 800,000 internally displaced persons in Borena zone as of February 2026, a fourfold increase from two years earlier. Most are pastoralists who lost their herds. They have no way to return to their previous lives because there is nothing to return to.

What Nobody Is Saying

The humanitarian response in Borena is underfunded by half. The UN's appeal for Ethiopia remains only 38% funded. But even full funding would not address the structural problem: the pastoralists of Borena are losing not only to drought but to a development model that sees their land as empty and their lives as expendable.

African scholars have documented this pattern for decades. Dr. Abdi Ismail Samatar of the University of Minnesota, himself of Somali pastoralist background, has written extensively about how colonial and post-colonial governments have systematically dispossessed mobile herders under the guise of modernization. 'The narrative of pastoralism as backward serves powerful interests,' he has noted. 'It justifies land seizures that would otherwise be recognized as violations of indigenous rights.'

In Borena, that narrative has deadly consequences. The commercial farms that occupy the best land are not sharing their water or their harvests with displaced pastoralists. The government programs that promise to 'settle' nomadic communities offer them tiny plots unsuitable for farming and no training in agriculture. The aid convoys that arrive in Yabelo distribute emergency rations that sustain life but cannot restore livelihoods.

What Will Happen If Nothing Changes

Dida Guyo does not speak of the future. When asked what she will do when the emergency food distribution ends, she looks away. She has two adult children somewhere in Addis Ababa, working as day laborers. They send money when they can. It is not enough.

The projections from climate scientists offer no comfort. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the regional body for the Horn of Africa, has warned that drought cycles in the region are shortening—what was once a once-in-a-generation disaster is becoming a permanent condition. The World Meteorological Organization projects that parts of southern Ethiopia may become uninhabitable for pastoralism within twenty years.

But the immediate future is shaped by policy, not only climate. If the land leases are not renegotiated, if water is not reallocated, if pastoralist mobility rights are not restored, then the crisis in Borena will not end when the rains return. It will become permanent. The Borana people will join the growing global population of the permanently displaced—people who lost their homes not to a single catastrophe but to the slow grinding of systems that valued their land more than their lives.

In the displacement camp at Yabelo, Dida Guyo finishes her tea. She stands slowly, her joints stiff from sleeping on the ground. She has nothing. She still has nothing. And nobody with the power to change that is listening.