Beans a Mighty Tool in the Fight for Food Security
In the Amhara region of Ethiopia, farmers have given up on one of their staple crops. "Once our village was a major producer of faba bean," says farmer Yeshewalul Tilaye, from the Chichet village of Tarma Ber, "but we lost hope."
Disease and natural resource degradation have plagued the Amhara region, which has a 90 percent poverty rate and is particularly susceptible to both drought and heavy rainfall.
Before the Ethiopian civil war broke out in the 1970s, pulses - the family to which faba beans belong - were the nation's second biggest export crop.
Since then, production has decreased dramatically, partly due to recurrent droughts, prevailing diseases and a lack of investment in research to address these production constraints.
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