Ethiopia is one of the main targets in the current global farmland grab. The government has stated publicly that it wants to provide 3 million hectares of farmland in the country to foreign investors and around 1 million hectares have apparently already been signed away. Much of the land that these investors have acquired is in the province of Gambella, a fertile area that is home to the Anuak Nation.

Many tribal people in the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia are starving as the region is in the grip of a drought and the river’s annual flood has failed. The Kwegu, a small hunter-gatherer tribe, have been badly hit. Survival has received reports that two Kwegu children and four adults died from hunger in November.

Ethiopia is the site of a scandalous trade in child trafficking, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam, in which agencies and the Ethiopian authorities conspire to permit the 'harvesting' of local children for adoption abroad. The Ethiopian government must honour its commitments under international law, Mariam stresses, and put the protection of its children first.

Ethiopia is building a 240-metre high dam on the Omo River that is intended to end the country's electricity shortage and supply power to neighbouring countries. Not everyone's happy.

Britain and Ethiopia will head a new United Nations panel that aims to secure $100 billion every year by 2020 to help developing nations cut emissions and adapt to climate change, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said.

Deeply unimpressed with embassies' inclination towards silence, Alemayehu G. Mariam implores foreign officials to speak out in the face of the Ethiopian government's human rights abuses. Suspicious of the 'veil of diplomatic anonymity', Mariam argues that remaining silent while activists like Birtukan Midekssa are kept locked up simply amounts to complicity.

An Ethiopian judge sentenced a journalist to prison on Friday in connection with a January 2008 column that criticized Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s statements about religious affairs in Ethiopia, according to local journalists.

An estimated 5.23 million people will require emergency food assistance up to December 2010 with the net food requirement including TSF needs being 290,271 MT estimated to cost around USD 231.3 million according to the Joint Government and Humanitarian Partners' Humanitarian Requirement Document released on 2 February 2010

Employees of the African Union (AU) have demanded that the new AU Chairperson should address outstanding demands for benefit and security. The staff urged the new AU Chair, Malawian President Bingu Wa Mutharika, who would be presiding over the 53-member continental organization for the next 12 months, to make sure that they would be beneficiaries of attractive benefit packages.

Ethiopia’s recent history is punctuated by famine. Severe droughts, on-going conflicts and stagnating agricultural growth have been reproducing widespread food insecurities for decades. Compounded by cereal prices doubling over the last year, many people are struggling to meet even their most basic food needs. Concurrently the World Food Programme has had to reduce emergency food rations due to the high global food prices.

Ethiopian judge sentenced a journalist to prison on Friday in connection with a January 2008 column that criticized Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's statements about religious affairs in Ethiopia, according to local journalists. Federal High Court Judge Mohammed Omar sentenced Editor Ezedin Mohamed of the Muslim-oriented newspaper Al-Quds to one year in prison.

In the wake of the Ethiopian government's objections to the conclusions of the

Gender based violence, sexual orientation, gender equality and sexuality of people living with HIV/AIDS will be issues discussed at the upcoming Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights, 8-12 February in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This fourth conference is expected to open up discourse about sexuality in Africa and to source possible insights of reducing the spread of HIV and Aids in Africa.

Ethiopia has become a market for owners of high bandwidth fibre optic cable systems; at least four foreign companies are aiming to get all or a slice of this vast potential market, reliable sources disclosed.

The West is ignoring a jailed Ethiopian opposition leader to keep the Horn of Africa stable despite her being this week named on a United Nations list of arbitrary detainees, her party said on Friday. Birtukan Mideksa, leader of the Unity for Democracy and Justice party (UDJ), was first jailed with other opposition leaders when the 2005 election turned violent. She was pardoned in 2007 but re-arrested last year accused of violating that pardon.

A team of researchers combine maps, satellite images and participatory mapping techniques to develop an accurate picture of land use among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia.

Ethiopian politics needs to reinvent itself if it is to offer the country a coherent and convincing alternative to the current culture of oppression and corruption, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. ‘Reinvention’, argues Mariam, is ‘a multi-step process whose ultimate aim is to cultivate a true democratic civic culture shared by all Ethiopians.’

Ethiopia's first and biggest hydroelectric power generating plant that does not have its own dam was inaugurated by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and a senior official from the project financier, Italy. The 281 million euro (US$ 407 million) plant, Gilgel-Gibe II (GII), uses water from another dam constructed more than 26 kilometres from GII for an earlier comm i ssioned power plant, called Gilgel-Gibe I (GI), has an installed capacity of 420

Addis Ababa is selling vast fertile swaths to international companies in effort to introduce large-scale commercial agriculture.

As famine and hunger envelop Ethiopia, Alemayehu G. Mariam asks why the alarm is not being sounded. Instead, with Ethiopia’s leaders flatly denying the existence of famine and the international community hiding behind the jargon of ‘food insecurity’, Mariam sees a predictable pattern to Ethiopia’s history of responses over the last four decades: ‘Always too little, too late’.