Ethiopia's Gibe III dam ended the lower Omo River's annual flood and left almost the entire Nyangatom population dependent on food aid, journalist Tom Gardner reported in The Atlantic in August 2019.
The Omo River seen from the Karo village of Doose in southern Ethiopia, November 20, 2012. (Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) [file photo]
More than half a million people depend on the lower Omo and on Kenya's Lake Turkana, into which it flows. For millennia the valley's inhabitants relied on the annual flood, which brought fish upstream and left fertile soil for sorghum and maize and pasture for cattle, Gardner wrote.
The government began building Gibe III, which the magazine called Africa's tallest dam, in 2006 with the help of a Chinese loan. The dam can raise national power output by 85 percent and regulates the river to feed the Kuraz Sugar Development Project, a state irrigation scheme almost as large as Kenya's total irrigated land.
Residents of Nyangatom call 2015 the “Year of China,” when a bridge, a highway and the beginnings of a sugar factory appeared. “We don't know why the water stopped,” Lokubal, who lives in a village near the Kenyan border, told Gardner. “We've heard the Omo has been blocked somehow. But we don't know why; nobody told us.”
Lopiding, chief administrator of Kajamikin village, compared the river to a bank. “Omo is our bank. We could have everything from Omo,” he said. Claudia Carr, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said people in Dasenech, who rely almost entirely on flood-retreat farming, were being pushed toward a drying delta and that conflict over resources was intensifying.
In 2010 then–Prime Minister Meles Zenawi accused critics of wanting South Omo to remain “undeveloped and backward to serve their tourists as a museum.” Fana Gebresenbet of Addis Ababa University's Institute for Peace and Security Studies told the magazine the valley's peoples could disappear as cultural groups within about 20 years if trends continued.
Benedikt Kamski, a researcher at Freiburg's Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute, called the sugar project a “white elephant” after a fall in world sugar prices. “The river is dead, and nothing will bring back the flood,” he said, suggesting measures such as sharing plantation profits with local communities.
Sources: The Atlantic (Tom Gardner), The Atlantic (Wayback Machine archive)