By Sophie Jago, James Borrell and Wendawek Abebe (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and Addis Ababa University)
Ethiopia is spectacularly diverse, brimming with culture, biodiversity and breathtaking landscapes. Yet for many it is most familiar as a country besieged by famine, as a result of the devastating food insecurity of the 1970s and 80s.
This is unfortunate, because Ethiopia is incredibly rich in agrobiodiversity – the diversity of plants we eat and use – and is the origin for more crops than perhaps any other country in Africa.
If you enjoyed a coffee today, for example, then you have generations of Ethiopian farmers to thank for domesticating wild coffee plants. This richness of useful plants is a key ingredient for Ethiopia’s future prosperity and development.
Globally, the picture is very different. As humans we now obtain more than half of our calories from just three species – rice, wheat and maize. In a recent survey in south western Ethiopia, researchers from Ethiopian and UK research organisations recorded 83 different crops, with some farmers cultivating up to 29 species on a single farm.
This might sound wonderful and idyllic, but it has a purpose. Diversity brings resilience – to climate uncertainty, pests and diseases or a volatile market for cash crops. It spreads your risks.
The resilience of enset
One indigenous Ethiopian crop that exemplifies resilience is enset. Whereas most crops have relatively rigid planting and harvesting times, enset is flexible. As a perennial, enset grows larger each year until harvested, meaning you can leave it to continue growing if it is not needed. As well as being drought tolerant, rapidly clonally propagated and highly productive in a small area of land, processed enset is also highly storable.
However, enset is only grown in south western Ethiopia, where despite being the staple of 20 million people it is relatively easy to overlook globally. For this reason it has lacked international research attention, until recently.
Supporting farmers and crop diversity
At RBG Kew we have been working on a project to conserve the diversity of enset in communities living around Kafa Biosphere Reserve in South West Ethiopia. We also recently visited a project run by Ripple Effect in the Dawuro Zone that supports enset cultivation as part of their whole-farm systems approach.
These communities rely on enset as a staple food and often grow a wide range of different landraces (varieties) that have different properties. Some differ in taste, others are used for fibre, or grow particularly large.
Certain landraces are especially drought- or disease-tolerant and a few are believed to have medicinal values. Through maintaining many different varieties of enset on their farms, farmers are increasing their resilience, whilst also providing an important conservation service.
This diversity increases their capacity to adapt to changing conditions in the future, ensuring that enset can continue to be relied upon as the ‘tree against hunger’. But despite the efforts of these farmers to maintain enset, diversity is still being lost over time.
Research into rare enset varieties
Our research in Kafa region has identified 57 varieties considered to be locally rare – sometimes maintained by just one farmer - and in need of conservation effort. Farmers want to help conserve these varieties, along with traditional knowledge about how best to grow and process them, but they often struggle to find the rare varieties to add to their farms.
RGB Kew, in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, are helping farmers to access these rare varieties and are compensating them for the conservation service they are providing by growing and maintaining these plants.
Often the rarer varieties are not the most useful or best-adapted in present day conditions so farmers growing them experience an ‘opportunity cost’ for the benefits forgone by not growing a more common, useful, better-adapted variety in place of the rarer one. It is important that these farmers are adequately compensated for these costs so that they can continue to provide this important conservation service without being burdened by it.
Supporting farmers in maintaining diversity
During the RBG Kew project the farmers decided which of the rare enset landraces they wanted to add to their farms and themselves determined appropriate compensation based on their specific opportunity costs.
The high interest in the project from local farmers also suggests the approach has the potential to be scaled up as well as applied to other crops and deliver outputs that contribute to maintaining food security, traditional land management practices and reducing poverty.
This is just one of a growing number of projects seeking to support enset-based agriculture in Ethiopia in a variety of ways, including those run by Ripple Effect.
Ethiopia as a pioneer for global challenges
Globally we face a growing challenge of producing enough food for more people, with a higher standard of living. We must do this, whilst also tackling a global biodiversity crisis, and the harmful effects of climate change.
Nowhere is the synergy between these challenges more acute than in Ethiopia. But here also, with its diverse cultures and thousands of years of agriculture, are many of the solutions. Working together we can learn from these solutions – like enset – to help Ethiopia meet these challenges.
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