Crop Cultivation at Wartime – Plight and Resilience of Tigray’s Agrarian Society (North Ethiopia)

Abstract

During the 2021 conflict in Tigray (north Ethiopia), crop cultivation has been hampered by warfare. Oxen have been looted and killed, farm inputs and tools destroyed by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Farmers felt vulnerable out in the open with their oxen. To produce, farmers evaluated risks involved with ploughing and organised lookouts. Overall, a large part of the land had been tilled in difficult conditions, and crops sown that require minimal management, without fertiliser, what led to low yields. True Colour Composite images, produced from Sentinel satellite imagery show that smallholder irrigation schemes were operational. There was a shift from commercial crops to cereals. The situation in western Tigray was particular, as there has been ethnic cleansing of the population and often the 2020 rainfed crops had even not been harvested. Overall, our findings show that the Tigrayan smallholder farming system is resilient, thanks to community self-organisation, combining common strategies of agrarian societies in wartime: spatio-temporal shift in agricultural activities to avoid the proximity with soldiers and shifts in crop types. Rather unique is the relying on communal aid, while the blockade of the Tigray region made that outmigration and off-farm income were no options for the farmers.

Challenges and resilience of an indigenous farming system during wartime (Tigray, North Ethiopia)

“…The CHIRPS 2.0 dataset (Funk et al 2015) covering January 1981-August 2021 was used for this. In the spring months February-April of 2021, rainfall conditions were mostly normal, though extremely dry in southern Tigray (Nyssen et al 2022). In this period, March 2021, however, was overall abnormally dry with a probability of only 23% for a March being even drier, based on the CHIRPS dataset.…”

“…In Tigray, however, the greatest fears raised, when it was observed, in early May 2021, that many farm parcels had not been tilled. By the end of June, an interpretation of Sentinelbased True Color Composite images indicated that there had been good plowing progress in most of the region (except for Western Tigray) with often more land plowed than in 2020 (Nyssen et al 2022). However, in most areas, it was reported that war conditions made crop cultivation very difficult: oxen had been looted or killed, and farm inputs and tools had been destroyed (World Peace Foundation 2021; Tghat 2021b; WeForest 2021).…”

“…Furthermore, farmers who wanted to till their land felt vulnerable; in many places, Eritrean soldiers prevented the farmers from plowing (AFP 2021; Addis Standard 2021). While trying to produce in February-June 2021, farmers evaluated whether plowing was risky or not and organized watch posts to verify the absence of soldiers (Nyssen et al 2022).…”

“…By the end of June, based on remote sensing data and interviews (yet without formal ground truthing), it was anticipated that the land would have been partly sown (Nyssen et al 2022), without using fertilizer, although that is necessary on reactive fields (Nyssen et al 2017;Tittonell and Giller 2013). Late sowing was assumed to have led the farmers to plant crop varieties with a short growing cycle, similar to drought years, particularly fast-maturing wheat landraces as well as the local barley cultivar called sa'isa'a (all terms in local Tigrinya language are in italics), obviously with a lower yield (Frankl et al 2013).…”

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Growth and Quality as Influenced by Inorganic Fertilizer Rates in Northwestern Ethiopia

“…Potassium is a deserted nutrient, while nitrogen and phosphorus (NP) are applied in the usual trend of random soil testing approaches [19]. In northern Ethiopia of the Tigray region, 76% of vertisols are lacking in potassium [20]. A soil fertility map developed by the Ethiopian Soil Information System (Ethio-SIS) in the Tigray region of the Atlas area identified a deficiency of potassium nutrients [21].…”