Highlands of Ethiopia

Most of Ethiopia's arable and fertile lands are located on top of high plateaus. For this reason, these parts of the country are highly populated and the land is overused by thousands of years of subsistence farming which mostly depends on rain coming from the two rainy seasons each year. The short rainy season which starts at the end of March and ends in April and the long which starts in June and ends in around the second week of September, any disruption to the rain pattern causes huge difficulty for farmers and the farming economy were more than 80% of the population is directly dependent on. Overpopulation deforestation and global climate change are making these disruptions a regular occurrence. Population growth without an economic growth matching it is the biggest challenge that the country faces now. Farming had been hiding a very high unemployment rate of the youth for 4 decades but it is now at a point which it can no longer do so. Subsistence farming alone can no longer absorb the highly unemployed youth of the country for a simple reason, lack of land and natural resources. The hidden unemployment had surfaced causing conflicts and tensions between communities who struggle to take control of the limited resources that can be claimed. 

The government of Ethiopia is trying to tackle at least one of the problems by planting millions of trees to reverse deforestation. Ethiopia has now about only 4% of its land covered by forests which were 35% at the beginning of the century. In a state-sponsored tree planting campaign, millions of trees are being planted throughout the country during this rainy season.  Consistency, caring, and protection for the new trees is another issue that the government has to address soon to make the campaign a success and to see the desired results in the coming decades.  Another unresolved issue is how to manage the new forests and find alternative fuel sources for the community which still gets its fuel from firewood. Deforestation for firewood had been a major problem for hundreds of years in Ethiopia even resulting in the near abandonment of Addis Ababa at the turn of the century. The city was saved by importing eucalyptus trees from Australia which saved the city but totally dominated its new land. Its deep roots and thirst for water dried springs and wells disrupting the indigenous flora and fauna. This time the tree-planting campaign is planting indigenous trees which are resilient to the climate conditions of the country. Even though Ethiopia is located in the tropics just 14degrees north of the equator the climate is much different than a typical tropical climate. The countries climate is determined more on elevation rather than longitude. The lowlands are considered as deserts and in some cases, tropical and the highlands and highland plateaus have a temperate climate. In between the highlands and the deserts, you have semi temperate climate which is ideal for farming and living in general. 

The highlands and semi highlands and plateaus had been a center of the country’s economy, civilization, and political power for centuries. For the above reasons and for many more reasons most of the population lives in the highlands making most Ethiopians highlanders which have unique culture preserved in living in semi-isolation for centuries.