Increasing crop yields in Ethiopia
Located in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is the continent’s second most populous country. Enhancing agricultural productivity to contribute to sustainable food security is the country’s major focus - areas that climate change and population growth look set to impact in the coming years.
Despite this bleak forecast, there is a certain crop that provides year-round food for approximately 20 million Ethiopians, and in addition to sustaining the country’s social fabric, provides shade and cattle feed, as well as indispensable building and packaging materials.
Enset (False Banana): A multipurpose crop
Enset, or false banana, is fundamentally important to Ethiopia. It's a banana-like plant, and whilst it doesn’t produce edible fruit, it yields a large starchy corn. Enset is highly drought tolerant and can survive for more than a year without water. It is prized as a year-round food source, while traditional crops like maize, wheat and millet require precious water resources to stay alive.
Enset provides year round food to 20% of Ethiopia’s population, especially in the south. The domesticated form of the plant is only cultivated in Ethiopia.
However, enset is virtually impossible to breed. It takes seven years or more for the starchy corm to mature, and flowering can takes at least another year, depending on the environment and landrace type. Unfortunately, the flowers are generally sterile and most seeds are not viable. This makes enset breeding challenging.
So what if there was a way of improving the crop through science? The answer may lie in comparative genomics – a type of biology that looks at the structure, function, evolution and mapping of whole genomes – the organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. This may identify important genes associated with the crop's traits.
Enset is a traditional staple in the densely populated southern part of the country
Increasing crop yields and improving disease tolerance
Professor Murray Grant from the University of Warwick led a research project designed to understand which parts of the enset genome play a role in making a better crop. These parts can then be selected by molecular techniques. These studies will contribute to increasing yields, and improving tolerance to disease and drought, which is crucial in order to make the country more self-sufficient and help alleviate hunger.
Professor Grant explains: “Food self-sufficiency is Ethiopia’s national priority. The country is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Enset already plays a major role in Ethiopian farming systems and is a highly important crop, providing year-round food, which is critical during periods of food shortage and droughts. However, local production of enset is still entirely dependent on unimproved varieties, or “landraces,” that are maintained by local farmers.”
Ten thousand years of domestication and hundreds of years of farmer selection has resulted in regional varieties. As the crop cannot be bred, selecting important traits using genomic approaches may provide the answer. “Our pioneering whole genome sequencing showed significant genetic diversity in enset – which highlighted the enormous potential to accelerate selection programmes using molecular markers” Professor Grant explains.
Collaborative research
L-R: Sadik Muzemil - Enset Geneticist at SARI, Dr Ana Dominguez Ferreras - Senior Post Doctoral Research Associate at Warwick, Dr Zerihun Yemataw - Senior Enset Breeder at SARI, Prof Murray Grant, Taddel Kassaye - Areka Enset Research Farm
The research project was undertaken with the Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI) in the Ethiopian city of Hawassa, which hosts the world’s only collection of unique locally adapted landraces of enset, and in collaboration with Professor David Studholme at Exeter University. The researchers identified genomic sequence variations that can be used to help improve conventional selection programmes and improve enset farming.
This project cemented an eight-year collaboration with SARI and established an important new collaboration with the Ethiopian Biotechnology Institute. “By specifically focusing on resources to enable improvement of enset, our collaboration with SARI played a major part in helping to address Ethiopia’s national priorities for food self-sufficiency” explains Professor Grant.
“We have helped add a completely new dimension to approaches currently used to characterise enset landrace diversity and their use in different agricultural systems. The project has provided the foundation for marker assisted enset selection through the generation of a gold standard enset genome that provides the template for developing molecular markers. These can be used for improving ongoing conventional enset selection programmes, support conservation efforts and explore the genetic basis of enset domestication.”
Training local research staff
Also important to the project was the training provided to SARI staff in molecular biology and bioinformatics – a field of study combining biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to understand biological data.
Through the team’s research, they have implemented novel molecular approaches to contribute to improving the livelihood for thousands of Ethiopians.
As one of the world’s poorest nations, this research will help contribute to supporting one of Ethiopia’s key objectives - improving the agricultural sector for sustainable food security, through enhancing the resilience of enset farming.
An enset plantation in southern Ethiopia.
This project links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals of Zero Hunger, No Poverty, Good Health and Well-Being and Gender Equality.
