Twenty years on it is possible to look back on Ethiopia’s food catastrophes of the 1980s and derive some interesting lessons that could not have been apparent to Vavilov. The next few posts will do so.
All of Dr Melaku’s previous work had perfectly positioned him to deal with the impact of the 1984-85 famine, which seriously threatened Ethiopia’s remaining reserves of farmers’ varieties of traditional seeds. A number of development agencies and multinational corporations used the drought and famine as apertures through which they introduced packages of high-yielding hybrid varieties, herbicides, and other technologies to replace local varieties requiring fewer inputs. For example, the Sasakawa Global 2000 development agency of Japan introduced hybrid maize varieties in a package with water-conserving mulches and the herbicides Lasso and Roundup. Unfortunately, that effort has been plagued with many of the same problems that caused the failure of earlier agricultural development efforts. As Seth Shames of Ecoagriculture Partners has demonstrated, few of the Ethiopian farmers offered the package could afford the added costs of the hybrid seed and the herbicides, which negated the additional income derived from modest increases in their corn yields. The dilemma posed by farmers lured into trying such packages during drought years is that by the time they realize that a high-yielding variety might cost them more than it is worth, they have abandoned the time-tried seeds of their local varieties.
As the famine triggered by drought, war, and politics began to ring the death knell for tens of thousands of Ethiopians, the Dergue government, which had replaced Haile Selassie, realized that its native crop resources were under great stress. It encouraged its Plant Genetic Resources Institute to collaborate with Seeds of Survival to conserve what they could of Ethiopia’s unique food diversity. Rather than simply locking away rescued seeds in the institute’s gene bank for later use, the collaborative effort invested in on-farm conservation and improvement of indigenous crops by the rural communities themselves. As Dr Melaku affirmed to me and David, “We realized that we should do more conservation through on-farm use of these crop resources. But first we had to identify the values that guided the selection of seeds by farmers. … Farmers are very smart, they know what they want. … We just had to understand their logic, their traditional means of community-based seed saving and exchange.”
Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.