Twenty million Ethiopians eat this crop every day. Almost nobody outside Ethiopia grows it.

There is a crop that feeds more than twenty million people, survives droughts that kill cereals, can be harvested in any month of the year, and is grown as food in exactly one country.

It is called enset. Outside Ethiopia, almost no one has heard of it.

What it is, and what you actually eat

Ensete ventricosum looks like a banana plant and is related to one. It is often called the false banana, which is a slightly unfair name, because the fruit is the one part of it nobody eats.

The food is underground and inside the trunk. The starchy pseudostem and the corm are scraped out, packed into a pit, and fermented — for weeks, sometimes months. What comes out is kocho, a dense flatbread, and bulla, a finer starch used for porridge.

According to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as few as 15 plants can feed one person for a year.

20m+

people in Ethiopia who rely on enset for food

15

plants that can feed one person for a full year

100m+

additional people the modelled range could support over four decades

Why it holds when other crops fail

Most staple crops depend on one season: you plant, the rains come or they do not, and the harvest is whatever the weather allowed.

Enset grows for several years and can be harvested at almost any point in that window. A household with a stand of enset has a store rather than a harvest date.

That is where the nickname comes from. Enset is sometimes called the tree against hunger.

A study published in Plants People Planet in November 2022, by researchers at Kew, the Natural Resources Institute at Greenwich, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, and Hawassa University in Ethiopia, found that Ethiopian smallholders plant more enset in the period directly after a severe drought.

The part that is strange

Enset is present in parts of east and central Africa. It is cultivated as a food crop in Ethiopia and essentially nowhere else.

A study published in Environmental Research Letters modelled where else it could grow. The potential range covered parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda — and the authors estimated it could feed more than 100 million additional people over the next four decades.

That is a modelled figure, not a harvest. Models of crop range are estimates built on climate and soil suitability, and a crop that suits a region agronomically can still fail to arrive there — because nobody grows it, nobody sells the seedlings, nobody knows the fermentation process, and nobody has eaten it before.

The barrier is not agronomic. Most agricultural research money goes to a small number of crops, and enset has never been one of them.