Agriculture

Ethiopia lives off the land. Over three-quarters of the population depend on agriculture for their living, and over three-quarters of Ethiopia's export earnings come from agriculture and livestock. Most peasant farmers have to eke a living for their extended family from a plot of land not much larger than a suburban English garden. Only about 13 per cent of the land area can be used for crop production. The rest is forest, mountain, Savannah, and pasture land. Farming in Ethiopia is rather like playing roulette or the stock exchange. the rains, on which most people have to depend for their crops or livestock, often come too little or late-or sometimes too heavily. Only one per cent of land is irrigated. Farmers' only insurance is to hedge their bets by planting a variety of different crops at a variety of different times, and to keep some seed in reserve to sow when the first attempts become dried up or waterlogged. On the highlands and central plateau, teff, barely, wheat, maize, beans, peas, and lentils are grown. At intermediate altitudes, farmers grow sorghum and millet. Teff(eragrostis tef) is the most valued food crop in Ethiopia, but you have to plough the land eight or nine times before planting it - and as many as one third of the subsistence farmers own no traction animals. In the southern highlands the 'false banana' tree(enset) is the main staple crop, with tubers, vegetables, and grains as secondary crops. Livestock husbandry, common as a subsidiary activity in all regions, is almost exclusively the only source of food production in the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralist lowland areas. Farmers' survival strategies are highly sophisticated. The stakes are: children are likely to sicken or die from malnutrition if parents make the wrong decision. They must balance high-yielding crops against drought-resistant types, and quick-maturing crops against slow-maturing crops. It is an art which is taught to the younger members of the family: boys go out ploughing with their fathers, girls look after the chickens, and all learn to watch the warnings signs in nature from an early age.