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Long-Term Sustainability of Ethiopian Landraces at Risk

2001-08-16

Shrinking farmer's fields caused by land redistribution policies and population pressures in the central highlands of Ethiopia are placing the agricultural biodiversity of this region at risk, claims an Ethiopian researcher funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

According to Awegechew Teshome, the project leader and a research scientist working at the University of Ottawa, the wide diversity of crop varieties in Ethiopia underpins the country's agricultural resilience. Even during the peak drought years of the 1980s, the amount of food grown by local farmers dwarfed the amount of food aid provided by humanitarian organizations, according to data he cited from the Food and Agriculture Organization, US AID, and the World Food Programme, during a recent presentation at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in Hull, Quebec.

'Seeds of Survival'

One of the most important crops, from a food security perspective, is sorghum. During the drought years, the Ethiopian Gene Bank, in collaboration with USC Canada, launched the "Seeds of Survival" program to rescue, multiply, and distribute to farmers endangered or threatened genetic materials. Under this program, Dr Teshome conducted research on the factors influencing the maintenance of crop genetic materials in the North Shewa and South Welo regions of Ethiopia in the period 1992-93. He counted a total of 60 distinct varieties (or landraces) of sorghum grown in five different communities.

With funding from IDRC — and in collaboration with Addis Ababa University, the Ethiopian Gene Bank, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa — he and his colleagues returned to the same farmers and fields during the 2000/2001 growing seasons to determine whether the genetic diversity of sorghum was stable, increasing, or decreasing. The good news is there are now 68 landraces grown in the five communities, possibly due to an increase in the average number of "selection criteria" — such as drought resistance, grain yield, threshability, and milling — used by individual farmers. In other words, local farmers are demanding more from the sorghum varieties they plant today than they were in the early '90s. However, Dr Teshome fears that the survival of many crop varieties is in jeopardy because most landraces are being grown on fewer and fewer fields, which are shrinking in size.

Seeds in decline

Only five of the 68 landraces in use today are being grown in all five communities, he explains, while the majority are being grown in only one or two communities, possibly by just a few individuals. What's more, the average field size, in hectares, has decreased in each community by 35-50 % since the early 1990s, and each field is used for planting multiple varieties of multiple crops. As a result, the amount of seeds available for planting the rarest landraces is probably declining from one growing season to the next. "Even though a higher number of varieties are being grown, we are losing genetic materials," stresses Dr Teshome.

So what should be done? Dr Teshome says the current trend on farmers' lack of security over land tenure could be influencing the level of genetic diversity on each field. Over the last decade, many families have seen parts of their fields redistributed, which means they are more reluctant to invest in good agricultural practices, such as soil and water conservation management. He says the government needs to be informed that land tenure has a direct impact on Ethiopia's food security, and recommends the introduction of community gene banking and participatory conservation activities to save Ethiopia's remaining landraces.

John Eberlee is the Managing Editor of IDRC Reports Online.

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