If you want to understand the impact between hunger and development, look no further than the lower Omo valley in Ethiopia.

A large-scale, state-owned sugar plantation project is underway there, which is supposed to create jobs and address Ethiopia’s sugar shortfall. Instead, like many other large-scale projects around the world, the plantation is undermining food security for the 200,000 indigenous agro-pastoralists who call the valley home.

Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, a home to 200,000 indigenous people is being turned into an industrial powerhouse.

These communities are being relocated and losing their grazing land, which will be completely cleared for the plantation. That means less grazing land for their cattle herds, which are their economic mainstay, and less land to plant sorghum and other subsistence crops. The authorities are coercing them, often with promises of food aid, to move into new government villages, often in deplorable conditions, where they are encouraged to work on the new sugar plantations as laborers. These communities are unlikely to see benefits from the plantations and instead may face great hardships to feed themselves.

Sadly, this isn’t an unusual circumstance. Human Rights Watch’s research has found that even when governments are working to end hunger and achieve food security nationally – Sustainable Development Goal 2 – when they do so without assessing the human rights impact of projects and consulting with affected communities, they can end up making food security for these communities worse and trigger large-scale rights violations.

The Ethiopian government typically promotes large-scale development projects, often at the expense of local communities that get little say, much less a chance to voice concerns or criticism of the government’s development policy. The country’s repressive laws prevent nongovernmental organizations from operating freely; there’s little independent media permitted; and those who speak out and seen as anti-development or anti-government are often punished severely. Local community members may be passive bystanders while their livelihoods are destroyed, or be arrested or harassed by security forces if they try to speak out.

Ensuring that local communities have a voice in development and in evaluating progress is vital to ensure meaningful progress towards the elimination of hunger and malnutrition

A development approach like that used in Omo can actually lead to a worsening of food security for local communities. Most Omo groups have two main sources of food: their cattle and crops grown along the Omo River. The government will reap the financial benefits of the conversion of these grazing and crop-producing lands to sugar. But local communities, having lost access to the land that sustain their food sources will now either be reliant on government food aid or forced to find other means to eat.

Ensuring that local communities have a voice in development and in evaluating progress is vital to ensure meaningful progress towards the elimination of hunger and malnutrition. Governments committed to poverty reduction should commit to open, participatory and transparent development, robust monitoring procedures, and a meaningful role for civil society.

As one Omo pastoralist said to Human Rights Watch, “What is development? Whenever ‘development’ comes, it means we become hungry.”