Maheder Haileselassie Tadese
SIDAMA, Ethiopia — For Lidya Ashango and 14 million other Ethiopians, the false banana plant widely known as enset is a staple food and, on many occasions, a supplementary source of income. But it’s no longer easy to grow this crop in the southern part of the country, where land is scarce and plant disease is inevitable.
A mother of seven living in this southern town of Sidama, Ashango and her family have been growing, harvesting and processing enset as long as she can remember.
Men plant the crop, but the women do the time-consuming and laborious work of producing food from the crop. By the time a well-tended crop is ready to harvest, three to four years after planting, the woman goes to the farm with a machete and cuts the false stem to scrape and separate it into a starchy pulp and a fiber.
The pulp is covered with enset leaves and left in a pit to ferment for months before being used to make various bread and porridge dishes. Kocho, the fermented product to turn into bread, and bulla, the flour to be cooked into porridge, are among the dishes prepared by the women from the plant. The leaves are used for livestock feed and packaging.
Although enset varieties are known to be found in other countries in Africa such as Uganda, this cultivation and fermentation process is largely known only to Ethiopians with traditional indigenous knowledge. Gurage, Sidama, Gedeo and Hadiya are a few of the ethnic groups that grow and depend on this perennial crop.
Enset’s label as a tree against hunger was adopted in 1984, when the northern part of Ethiopia that’s mainly dependent upon cereals like teff was severely hit by drought and famine. Researchers note that the south, which relies on enset, saw no such tragedy; and also that the tree is relatively resistant to climate change and exists in hundreds of varieties.
Unlike other cereals, it can also be intercropped with coffee or other fruit-bearing trees, still providing a higher yield per unit area.
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