Ethiopia cultivates seed banks to lay famine ghost to rest #ethiopia

Thirty years after the famine that killed
more than a million people in Ethiopia and shocked the
world into belated action, the country's scientists and
farmers are taking the fight against climate change and food
insecurity down to the ground.
The famine was a product of both natural and human
causes, but scientists at the state-owned national gene
bank for seeds say that even at the time of the crisis they
had identified a lack of multiple seed varieties adapted to
changing weather conditions as a major factor in the failure
of crops.
That conviction has been acted on in the past few years
through the establishment of community-based seed banks
and training centres for farmers. The most recent one was
inaugurated at the beginning of June in the farming locality
of Ejere, in the centre of the Oromia region.
Regassa Feyissa, director of Ethio-Organic Seed Action
(EOSA), an NGO that promotes agricultural biodiversity and
seed security programmes, says a failed planting season
used to be a death sentence for farming communities. The
centralisation of the national gene bank in the 1980s led to
inefficiency and a slow response to the hunger emergency,
he believes.
There are now 18 seed banks spread across Ethiopia's
three most populous states - Oromia, Amhara and Southern
regions. They have been created by EOSA and the Ethiopian
Institute of Biodiversity, which oversees the national gene
bank and is partly funded by Norway. There are plans to
expand into more areas of the country.
"Climate change...is a problem that's complex and
unpredictable," said Feyissa. "We're seeing an increase in
heat, and a growing shift in the pattern of the seasons,
which is confusing farmers."
One of the lessons learned from the famine was that farmers
needed more information and greater variety in the seeds
they sow to cope with the effects of climate change, he
added. For example, different varieties of sorghum can be
planted at different times of the year to lessen the impact of
climate variability.
Local seed banks will eventually enable farmers to boost
their food security by practising sequential cropping rather
than mono-cropping, Feyissa said.
Melaku Worede, who was head of the national gene bank
during the 1984 famine, believes that developing
specialised seed varieties should not just be a matter for
scientists in laboratories.