A Wonder plant

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Have you ever heard of Enset (Ensete Ventrisocum), aka False Banana or Ethiopian Banana? No, nor had I until recently, but now that I have heard about it I am surprised that it is not more widely known and more widely grown.

This resilient plant (which is effectively a tree when mature – after 4 or 5 years) seems to have so many things going for it. It used to be very widely cultivated in eastern Africa, particularly Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and northern Kenya, where it used to be seen as a sort of “insurance policy” crop, to fall back on when shorter-lived but more accessible crops like sorghum, maize and millet failed, but it has fallen into decline during the last century. Climate change has contributed markedly to this decline, because crop failures due to lack of rainfall have sometimes induced farmers to harvest their enset too early, before it is fully mature, in order to stave off starvation. So the effect is that of “The Law of Diminishing Returns”.

Enset is a prolific source of food. Fruits, roots and heart are all edible, though I see that the fruit is alleged to be “insipid”, unlike the true banana which we all know can be very tasty. Apparently a single root from this plant can yield up to 40 kilograms of food! Read this…(from Wikipedia)

The young and tender tissues in the centre or heart of the plant (the growing point) are cooked and eaten, being tasty and nutritious and very like the core of palms and cycads. In Ethiopia, more than 150 000 ha are cultivated for the starchy staple food prepared from the pulverised trunk and inflorescence stalk. Fermenting these pulverised parts results in a food called kocho. Bulla is made from the liquid squeezed out of the mixture and sometimes eaten as a porridge, while the remaining solids are suitable for consumption after a settling period of some days. Mixed kocho and bulla can be kneaded into dough, then flattened and baked over a fire. Kocho is in places regarded as a delicacy, suitable for serving at feasts and ceremonies such as weddings, when wheat flour is added. The fresh corm is cooked like potatoes before eating. Dry kocho and bulla are energy-rich and produce from 1400 to 2000kJ per 100g.

Apart from being used for food, its wide leaves can be used for roofing material, made into string, used as a packaging material, or used as feed for livestock. It even has medicinal properties which can promote the healing of wounds.

The enset is relatively drought-resistant too, and will prosper where other plants like corn / maize will succumb. I read that it is often inter-planted with sorghum or with coffee, to maximise the use of ground-space. I also see that the plant can be raised from off-shoots from a mature plant, and that up to 400 new plants can be grown from one mature parent.

And in addition to all this, the plant has huge cultural significance, and is used in religious and social ceremonies in some parts of the world.

I know that I have no expertise in this matter, but it seems to me that if governments in Eastern Africa could persuade people to plant more enset, and rely less on imported food supplies (often handouts from Aid Agencies) this could be very beneficial. Although obtaining food from enset sounds like hard work, its yield is more than twice that which can be obtained from growing corn in the same piece of ground, so growing it really does make sense.

In the “civilised” world we rely primarily on mass-produced easy-to-prepare foodstuffs, but we sometimes forget that parts of the world are not like this, and subsistence farming still exists. Would it not be better for Foreign Aid money to be spent on establishing or re-establishing more sustainable small-scale farming methods, so that people could feed themselves without shipping food all round the world? Instead of (or as well as) a bag of maize that will last a month, maybe an Eritrean family in need of help should be given 400 enset offshoots and access to a small patch of land on which to grow them??? This is a relevant variation on the theme of the ancient proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day: teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I know this is a controversial subject, but what do YOU think? And what other food crops do you know that offer similar benefits?

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