EthiopiaCoffee is a high-value crop with markets at home and abroad, work at every stage from nursery to roasting, and, grown under shade trees, benefits for soil and climate. Why coffee is spreading in Bandarban, Rangamati and Khagrachhari, what it could earn, and where caution is needed.
EthiopiaA temperature of 18 to 24 °C, shade and an altitude of 600 to 1,200 metres. The whole coffee-growing process from seed to nursery to harvest, the world's leading producers from Brazil to Vietnam, and why the hills of Bangladesh could become coffee country.
An Ethiopian smallholder who planted oats for seed on 0.25 hectares sold his first crop for ETB 45,000 and expanded the next year, part of an ILRI effort to turn forage seed into a business for farmers.
CropsWriting before the Global Rice Policy Dialogue in Addis Ababa on 15-16 October, IRRI's Africa director Sofia Tesfazion points to Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya and a new $500 million West Africa Rice Investment Facility.
CropsEthiopia's coffee regions lie in the south and south-west, far from the renewed conflict in the north, and the export route through Djibouti looks protected, so analysts at Expana and Rabobank expect little or no effect on supply or prices.
CropsFAO marked the first International Coffee Day, designated by the UN General Assembly in March, pointing to the up to 25 million farmers, mostly smallholders, who grow a crop traded at more than $34 billion a year.
OpinionEthiopia's former deputy prime minister argues that nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life should be built into the way the UN measures development, using survey data countries already collect.
CropsA multi-year study at more than 600 sites across Ethiopia's wheat belts found the zinc-efficient variety Melka, combined with targeted fertiliser, improves the odds of high yields and high grain zinc even on zinc-poor soils.
CropsJohn Innes Centre and Ethiopian scientists have field-trialled a LAMP test that detects the wheat blast fungus on simple equipment, a tool aimed at countries such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Zambia.
Consultations in Addis Ababa and Jimma identified forest coffee, beekeeping, spices, bamboo and timber plantations as the most promising ways to reward communities in southwest Ethiopia for protecting intact forest.
Twenty-eight Ethiopian researchers, ministry staff and NGO workers spent four days in Arba Minch learning landscape-based natural resource management from ICAR and ICRISAT scientists, combining classroom work with a visit to a GIZ-supported micro-watershed.
IWMI and Ethiopian ministries have co-developed the country's first public-private partnership strategy for small-scale irrigation, built on seven business models and pilot schemes in Sidama and Central Ethiopia.
The fourth phase of the West Africa Food System Resilience Program, granted to ICIPE, will scale drought-tolerant rice and maize, digital climate advice and solar irrigation in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal and Zambia.
