In the weeks running up to Christmas in

1984, amid the familiar din and bustle of

high streets and shopping malls across
the U.S. and U.K., a new holiday song
began wriggling its way in among the
classic carols and cheery pop tunes piped
into every store. “There won’t be snow in
Africa this Christmas time,” a blockbuster
lineup of pop and rock stars — including
U2’s Bono, Boy George, Sting, members
of Duran Duran and George Michael —
sang plaintively, over a track of clanging
bells and Phil Collins’ enthusiastic runs
on the drums. “The greatest gift they’ll
get this year is life / Where nothing ever
grows / No rain nor rivers flow / Do they
know it’s Christmas time at all?”
Band Aid, as the supergroup was known,
was about to top the U.K. charts and
raise millions for what the BBC, earlier
that fall, had called “the closest thing to
hell on earth” — the famine ravaging
Ethiopia. A series of catastrophic
droughts and internal conflicts had
disrupted agricultural cycles for several
years in a row, leaving nearly a fifth of
the population hungry. As shoppers in
some of the world’s wealthiest nations
went about filling their grocery carts
while contemplating Bono’s exhortation
to “tonight thank God it’s them instead
of you,” millions of men, women and
children were suffering catastrophic
hunger. As many as 1.2 million Ethiopians
were estimated to have died between
1983 and 1985.
Band Aid’s promotional campaign relied
on a striking poster: a globe laid out like
a dinner plate, flanked by a fork and
knife, bearing the slogan: “Feed the
World. Buy this record.” The imagery of
richly laden Christmas tables stood in
stark contrast to Ethiopia’s reality.
The song’s portrayal of Africa as a land of
perpetual scarcity — “where nothing
ever grows,” as Boy George sang — was
far from reality, however. Ethiopia itself
had long enjoyed a reputation beyond
Africa for its rich, fecund soil and its lush
green highlands. In 1816, Henry Salt, a
British diplomat and consul in Ethiopia,
described the land as “so rich in water
and pasturage that Europeans could
scarcely imagine its beauty.”

Ethiopia’s highlands are largely

agricultural. (Marco Simoncelli)
The reductive and contradictory images
long associated with Ethiopia are finally
coming under scrutiny. In 2024, 40 years
after “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” first
aired, several artists — among them Ed
Sheeran, who had earlier expressed
regret for joining the 2014 remake —
denounced the song for perpetuating
outdated stereotypes about Africa. From
Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed added his voice to the
chorus of criticism. “Famine does not
define who we are as a nation or a
continent,” Abiy wrote in a statement,
before making a promise: Ethiopia would
never go hungry again.
After taking office in 2018, agrarian
reform became the centerpiece of Abiy’s
attempts at national transformation —
liberalizing agriculture, linking it to global
markets, and fusing history, pride and
economic strategy into a single narrative:
the rebirth of the “breadbasket of
Africa.” By 2024, he went further,
claiming that Ethiopia had transformed
from a major wheat importer into a self-
sufficient producer, even generating a
surplus for export.
Hashtags like #ProsperousEthiopia and
#WheatRevolution began spreading on X,
congratulating the country’s
representatives. On paper, the claim
seemed plausible: Agriculture still
accounts for roughly a third of gross
domestic product and employs about
two-thirds of the labor force, making it
the backbone of Ethiopia’s economy. But
independent analyses — from the
African Development Bank, U.S.
Department of Agriculture and the U.N.
Food and Agriculture Organization —
estimated the 2022-2023 harvest to be
less than half the government’s reported
figures.
A few months later, officials quietly
clarified that “self-sufficiency” did not
mean a complete end to imports.
Humanitarian agencies, operating in the
country since the days of the famine,
could still bring in wheat according to
operational needs. By then, skepticism
had grown over the government’s
ambitious production targets. Beyond
the statistics and slogans echoing
through the streets of Addis Ababa, the
reality on the ground told a very different
story. New Lines traveled to Ethiopia’s
prime agricultural region of Oromia to
report on how local farmers are coping
with rising input costs, land shortages
and government reforms, as they persist
in the subsistence farming that still
dominates rural life. Their farms, and
their way of life, are far from the large-
scale, mechanized monocultures — vast
single-crop plantations — envisioned by
the state. In the country’s agricultural
heartlands, the government’s narrative
of abundance often sounds as illusory as
the refrain of “Do They Know It’s
Christmas?” — a reassuring fiction that
masks a much harsher reality.
Farmer Roba Bariso, 56, oversees a group
of young workers helping him harvest
teff, a grain native to the Horn of Africa
and a staple of the Ethiopian diet. He
owns a small plot in the village of Elemo,
in Oromia, where his family has farmed
for generations. (Marco Simoncelli)
About 155 miles south of Addis Ababa,
amid a patchwork of fields and small
settlements, the gap between
propaganda and reality takes on a human
face. For Roba Bariso, 56, the story of
vanishing farmland is painfully familiar.
Sitting beneath the toolshed on his plot
in Elemo, a village near Shashamane in
Oromia, he recalls watching his father
work the land as a child. Their family
farm was generous: a mix of maize,
sorghum and enset (the “false banana”)
for home use, interspersed with grazing
areas for cattle. Each month, his father
guided the herds across the fields, rebuilt
the traditional round fences and let the
animals naturally fertilize the soil. “In my
father’s time, agriculture was
sustainable. He didn’t have to pay for
chemical inputs,” Roba says.
Most of the land back then was devoted
to grazing, with only a small portion
cultivated to meet the family’s daily
needs. Life followed the rhythm of the
seasons and the livestock, not the
market. Words like “self-sufficiency” and
“food security,” now central to
government rhetoric, were once simply a
local reality. When Roba was born in the
1970s, Ethiopia was at the beginning of a
massive population surge, from about 28
million to nearly 135 million today. This
explosive growth has placed immense
pressure on small farms, and has
transformed traditional practices and
reshaped rural communities.
“Everyone wanted a piece of land,”
recalls Benura Walde, a retired Ministry
of Environment employee and forestry
expert in Shashamane, who remembers
when cattle herding was the Oromo
people’s primary livelihood. “With
population growth, grazing land has
disappeared and forests have been
cleared, leaving little space for the cattle
that were once central to our way of life.”
Roba prepares pesticides to spray on his
fields. (Marco Simoncelli)
Today, Roba’s field looks very different
from how he remembers it. After his
father’s death, the family estate was
divided among 13 brothers. What was
once a vast, productive farm became a
patchwork of small parcels. Roba’s own
share is only about 5 acres. The
fragmentation of his father’s land mirrors
a nationwide challenge: parcelization.
Walking along the borders of his field,
Roba traces the lines that separate his
plot from his brothers’. “Today, everyone
survives on their own small piece. I am
one of the lucky ones. Some people
around here have only a quarter of a
hectare,” about half an acre. According
to the World Bank, average farm sizes in
Ethiopia have steadily declined and,
today, typically range between 1 and 2
acres.
Family wealth was once counted in
livestock, and fields were measured by
the length of a plough’s furrow. Now, in
Oromia, those traditional units for
measuring fields and livestock have given
way to standardized, market-oriented
measurements. While echoes of the past
remain, the commercialization of
agriculture, championed by Abiy, has
reached even Roba’s rows of cabbages
and potatoes. With the rise of cash
crops, land has become one of the few
reliable sources of income, as farmers
sell vegetables to traders or at local
markets. Combined with rapid
population growth, this shift has created
a web of informal intermediaries who
buy and resell seeds and produce from
smallholder farmers — those who
manage less than 25 acres — tying rural
livelihoods to volatile market forces and
eroding purely subsistence farming.
Debiso Dakebo grows onions on a tiny
plot of land. Parcelization has become a
major inhibitor for a new generation of
farmers. (Marco Simoncelli)
Not far from Roba’s plot, 22-year-old
Debiso Dakebo tends onions under the
sun. His farm is even smaller than his
neighbor’s, measuring just a quarter of
an acre. As part of the younger
generation, his inheritance has shrunk
with each division of family land. “I farm
onions, a good cash crop. I keep a small
portion for my family and sell the rest to
local traders. This is how I survive,” he
explains. A medical student, Debiso
hopes to become a doctor but struggles
to cover living expenses. “I cannot even
afford machines or fertilizers, so I have
had to learn how to make compost.
Without fertilizers, my income is never
secure because productivity is strongly
affected by the weather.” Shorter rainy
seasons have added to his uncertainty. At
the end of each season, Debiso barely
saves 10,000 birr (roughly $65) after
covering the costs of seeds, labor and
land preparation. For many young
farmers like him, such slim margins mean
surviving one harvest at a time.

Roba’s relatives inspect a sack of grain in

a small storehouse. The overhead costs
of farming are increasing and putting
pressure on smallholders. (Marco
Simoncelli)
Faced with a profound crisis in rural
areas driven by land fragmentation, the
government under Abiy seized the
opportunity to push agricultural
production in a direction that is highly
beneficial to state coffers, but not
necessarily to small subsistence farmers
like Debiso. The prime minister launched
a rural reform aimed at shifting toward a
more export-oriented agricultural model,
with a focus on expanding domestic
wheat production. Abiy revived a vision
of Ethiopia as a major cereal producer —
a homegrown echo of fascist Italy’s old
colonial dream of turning the country
into the breadbasket of Rome. His plan
officially seeks to boost agricultural
productivity, integrate rural populations
into the global economy and reduce
poverty and youth unemployment. Yet
the reform also raises questions that go
beyond how the soil is used, touching on
identity, heritage and the centuries-old
bond between people and their land.
In Oromia — Ethiopia’s cereal belt and a
region historically at odds with the
central government — land reform is
difficult and deeply contentious. In 2018,
land disputes tied to the expansion of
the capital, Addis Ababa, triggered
deadly clashes that claimed at least 23
lives, according to the Ethiopian Human
Rights Commission. “In some areas,
production only resumed after years of
resistance,” recalls a priest in Herero
village in the southeastern highlands of
Oromia, about 125 miles from Addis
Ababa. “Farmers destroyed newly
planted fields, protested or let their
animals graze on them.”
The Ethiopian land system, inherited
from the socialist government that ruled
the country from 1974 to 1991,
historically protected the rural majority
from mass dispossession. Likewise, the
Fascist Italian occupiers failed to realize
their colonial ambition of turning the
country into a vast grain reserve for
Rome. While colonial powers elsewhere
in East Africa — in Kenya, Tanzania and
Uganda — reshaped the land in favor of
monocultures, the Italians’ attempt to
exploit the Ethiopian highlands was
thwarted by their defeat in 1941, after
only five years of occupation. The federal
constitution of the 1990s continues to
restrict private land sales, allowing
farmers to inherit or lease plots but not
sell them outright.

Cluster farming has emerged as one of

Abiy Ahmed’s key agricultural policies,
but not all smallholders are convinced of
the promise of collectivization. (Marco
Simoncelli)
Building on this legacy, Abiy introduced
the idea of “cluster farms,” groups of
smallholders reorganized into large,
mechanized units. By pooling their plots,
farmers gained access to machinery,
fertilizers and pesticides subsidized by
the state. In return, they were required
to adopt the improved seeds provided by
the government, often converting their
traditional crops. Taxes on imported
equipment were waived, irrigation
networks were expanded and new tracts
of land were brought under wheat
cultivation. The policy promoted a shift
from subsistence to commercial farming,
ensuring access to inputs that would
otherwise be out of reach for most
smallholders. Some farmers have seen
their yields and income rise, but for
others the system has been precarious,
deepening dependence on volatile
markets and expensive inputs while
undermining livelihoods once rooted in
family labor and ancestral knowledge.
Although smallholders’ land rights have
historically limited large-scale
commercial investment, Abiy’s reforms
have repurposed state-managed farms
inherited from the socialist era. Around
the village of Herero, open fields and
farmland extend for miles. It is here that
Herero Farm produces enhanced wheat
varieties, such as Mandoyu and Kingbird,
which are gradually replacing traditional
local types. “State seed companies
reproduce these improved varieties,”
explains Driba Tesfaye, coordinator of
Cluster Farming and Seed Multiplication
at Madda Walabu University in Bale.
“Research centers develop and release
them, and cluster farms receive priority
access.”

Abduro Ahimad leads a cooperative

participating in cluster farming in the
village of Ilu Sanbito in Oromia. The
government helps supply seed, fertilizer,
pesticides and equipment for farming
and processing the wheat. (Marco
Simoncelli)
In the plains near Madda Walabu
University, farmers affected by land
fragmentation have formed the first
clusters. Inside a half-empty warehouse
in Ilu Sanbito village, sacks of enhanced,
state-backed wheat varieties are
stamped with the cooperative’s logo. The
crop has steadily displaced traditional
varieties once grown by subsistence
farmers. The cooperative now includes
252 farmers, cultivating plots ranging in
size from just over half an acre to 5 acres,
for a total of roughly 1,186 acres. At the
center of the warehouse stands a
government-funded seed-cleaning
machine. “Our goal is to industrialize
agriculture,” says a technician from the
Bale Zone Agricultural Office. “Farmers
once planted seeds for food. Now, we
plant to fight poverty. In the future, they
will work together to export.”
Inside the warehouse, 52-year-old
cooperative leader Abduro Ahimad
gestures to a production chart illustrating
the growth of wheat output over the
years. Wearing a jacket, tie and orange
headscarf, he points to posters of
pesticides and fertilizers displayed on the
wall, including Glymax, a potent
herbicide. “We received government
training on how to use these chemicals,”
he says, holding up a printed manual that
defines terms such as “maximization”
and “productivity.” To combat the soil
acidity characteristic of this region, which
limits the uptake of chemical nutrients,
the cluster has had to adopt an
agroecological approach, rotating crops
between wheat and peas. The
cooperative also pays farmers according
to each member’s field performance,
aiming to compensate for income lost
due to land fragmentation. Yet amid the
quiet warehouse, the sacks of wheat and
the sharp smell of fertilizer, one question
lingers: Who truly benefits from this
wheat boom?
Abduro in the wheat fields that his
cooperative maintains. (Marco
Simoncelli)
Outside Ilu Sanbito village, tractors
queue for hours, stalled by a national
fuel shortage that hampers mechanized
farming and cuts productivity. These
blockades, common across rural Ethiopia,
underscore why the government is
pushing wheat production: to earn
foreign currency. Exports remain largely
land-based — coffee, seed oil, dried
legumes and cut flowers bring in most
revenue, with gold a minor player. Yet in
2024, Ethiopia faced a $13.6 billion trade
deficit, putting the state finances under
pressure. Wheat has become a symbol of
national revival, a way to turn the
country’s main asset — its land — into
GDP.
Although Ethiopia continues to import
wheat through humanitarian aid and
nutrition programs for marginalized
communities, buyers for potential future
harvests are already lining up. In 2022,
Djibouti, the country’s vital maritime
outlet, announced plans to import
Ethiopian wheat. Addis Ababa also
secured export deals with Kenya and
signed a $2.5 billion agreement with
Nigeria’s Dangote Group to build one of
the world’s largest urea fertilizer plants in
Gode. In September 2021, the Moroccan
group OCP and the Ethiopian
government signed an agreement to
construct an industrial fertilizer complex
in Dire Dawa, a special-status city in
eastern Ethiopia administered directly by
Addis Ababa. The complex will use local
natural gas and Moroccan phosphoric
acid, with a planned production capacity
of more than 2.5 million tons of fertilizer
per year. Officials hail these initiatives as
proof that “Africa has the capacity to
feed itself” and can “achieve a food-
secure future.”

At Robe’s market, in Oromia, hundreds of

transporters wait to take buyers, sellers
and their goods back to the countryside
after the weekly trading day. (Marco
Simoncelli)
Yet on the ground, smallholders still
struggle with fragmented plots, costly
inputs and unpredictable rains, casting
doubt on the long-term sustainability of
Ethiopia’s wheat ambitions. The
government’s drive to balance exports
and imports, promoted as a path toward
food security and global integration,
often puts pressure on the very
communities it aims to support, eroding
local food sovereignty. “Cultivating enset
in your own field is an ancestral tradition
that ensures families always have
something to eat. Plant two or three in
your garden, and you won’t face hunger.
Every part of the plant is edible, and you
can even make bread from it,” explains
Benura Walde in Shashamane,
highlighting the value of local knowledge
of the land. Yet these traditional crops
now risk being displaced by
monocultures, leaving farmers
dependent on commercial crops and
exposing soils to degradation.
According to academics working with the
government program, cluster farms were
introduced to counter land
fragmentation and improve efficiency.
“This is an undeniable advantage,”
acknowledges Dejene Mengistu, a
researcher at the International Livestock
Research Institute. “However, from a
diversification standpoint, it has
drawbacks. Farmers plant the same
variety and crop. If that variety is hit by
pests or disease, the entire cluster can be
wiped out.” Researchers therefore urged
the government to adapt production to
local climates through crop rotation,
avoiding the exclusive planting of wheat.
“The government now tries to replicate
the cluster model while aligning crops
with regional agroecologies,” Tesfaye
says. The program currently targets 10
key commodities, including barley, teff,
sesame and avocado.
Nutritional concerns remain largely
overlooked. “The main goal is increasing
production. Once we reach food
sufficiency, then we’ll address nutritional
sufficiency,” Tesfaye explains. Mengistu
adds, “Cluster farming isn’t nutrition-
sensitive. The aim is the system’s self-
sufficiency, not people’s. Cereals become
commodities: Export them, earn dollars,
then import other foods to ensure
diversity and expand market access.”

As the system seeks to become self-

sufficient, smallholders are still trying to
find a way to keep their families and
farms afloat. (Marco Simoncelli)
The people, however, are still the ones
managing Ethiopia’s fields today. For
nearly 60% of the rural population,
farming remains the only source of
livelihood. Moving away from
subsistence agriculture risks leaving
behind a vast workforce and would
require a complete overhaul of the
country’s industrial base. Although Abiy
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
2019 for resolving the long-standing
border conflict with Eritrea, the country
remains far from calm, which has
affected both local and foreign
investment. Efforts to expand textiles and
agrifood processing were further
derailed by the war between federal
forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation
Front in Tigray from 2020 to 2022.
Conflict continues to cast a long shadow:
Fighting in Amhara, simmering tensions
in Oromia and renewed hostilities in
Tigray make a stable national agricultural
cycle a distant hope.
Meanwhile, traditional farming systems,
seed diversity and centuries of local
knowledge persist in Oromia’s fields,
where 6.8 million farmers share 28.7
million acres of agricultural land. Yet for
these communities, the government’s
cluster program and impressive
macroeconomic figures remain little
more than a hollow refrain, one that
does nothing to ease their daily struggle.