As the shadows lengthen over the village of Tuli Guleed in the Somali region of southern Ethiopia, Halemu Hassan Ali and her husband, Elias Abdi Abdullahi, move methodically through row after row of knee-high wheat. Pulling up weeds that encroach on their precious crop is physically demanding. Both of them hunch low but move swiftly, their easy chatter belies the seriousness of this task.
For in Ethiopia, a country repeatedly wracked by hunger — where more than 20 million citizens rely on some form of food assistance — crop yields for the couple's family are more than a matter of mere metrics. They could ultimately mean the difference between life and death. Bolstering their homegrown food supply could both wean them from costly food assistance and strengthen their long-term economic well-being.
For the past five years, the Somali region has endured a devastating series of droughts that have damaged crops and destroyed vast herds of livestock, a consequence of climate change that has been catastrophic for the handful of nations in the Horn of Africa. Added to that, almost a decade of violence among ethnic groups close to their village forced Halimu, Elias, their young children and most of their community to abandon their farms and fields and fend for themselves elsewhere. Today, the United Nations reports there are about 4.
5 million internally displaced Ethiopians across the country’s nine national regions, with more than a million of them in the Somali region alone. �.