Enset and the value of crop diversity
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.
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