By: Roger Thurow
Scholar-in-Residence at Auburn University
Senior Fellow, Center on Global Food and Agriculture, Chicago Council on Global Affairs

A narrow dirt road winds through Ethiopia’s Rift Valley highlands, cutting through fields where there was once nothing but hunger to arrive at a remarkable sight. Behind a fence made of dried corn stalks flourished a veritable Garden of Eden producing a riotous bounty of food.

Beans, peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, barley, teff, cassava, coffee, and maize thrive on a rectangular plot covering one-and-one-half hectares (about 4 acres.) Mango, avocado, papaya, apple, and banana trees embroidered the edges of the field. Carrots, cabbage, beets, and tomatoes flourished in garden patches. A dozen cows grazed on tall grass near a stream at the far end of the farm.

“This land was dead; nothing would grow. And now look!” said farmer Abebe Moliso, opening wide his arms to embrace his thriving fields.

It was a stunning transformation from two decades earlier when Abebe and his family depended on international food aid distributed by the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP). When I first visited this area in 2003, twin disasters striking people and the planet were exploding. Nearly 14 million people across Ethiopia were on the doorstep of starvation, sustained by food aid in the world’s first famine of the twenty-first century. Vast stretches of agricultural land were a moonscape of denuded hills, deep gullies, and eerie sand-and-dirt sculptures shaped by wind and erosion over the years. Forests had vanished, and soils were so degraded by decades of mono-crop farming, slash-and-burn agriculture, relentless cattle grazing, and deforestation for fuel that growing anything had become futile.

Entire ecosystems had dramatically changed. The rain became ever scarcer, and when it did come, very little water was absorbed by the barren, sun-baked soil, rushing away instead with valuable topsoil. Water tables sank, streams dried up. Bushes and grasses withered and died. Temperatures rose, winds faded. Birds flew away, as did the pollinators. Few living things remained.

Eventually, farmers had no choice but to leave the land. The WFP distributed food to help suffering people. Providing food aid to farmers who could no longer squeeze enough food from their depleted soils was not a longterm solution. Under the Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transition (MERET) program, legions of farmers, including Abebe, moved off their land and left the fields to lie fallow for several years. Instead of planting crops, they dug trenches and pans to collect and conserve the rainwater. They constructed terraces and planted grasses and saplings to slow the erosion and naturally return nutrients to the soil. They established community watches to prevent anyone from wandering onto the land for cattle grazing or biofuel harvesting. For their work and vigilance, food began to grow, and families returned to the land.

International development organizations like World Vision and Catholic Relief Services that had also distributed food aid over the decades rallied communities and local governments to create land rehabilitation initiatives. When they moved back, farmers diversified and rotated their corps, planted new tree varieties, and deployed innovative irrigation techniques to ensure water and nutrients stay in the soil and the crops. These landscape restoration efforts spread across the Sahelian countries of Africa and have become an international priority and an ally in transforming the global agriculture system to nourish the planet and preserve the planet. In 2021, the United Nations launched a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration “to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.”

Sixteen years after my first visit, I found that restoration efforts had already revitalized large swathes of land. Forests were expanding, new underground springs bubbled through the surface to form wells and ponds, and butterflies, birds, bees, and animals were back.

And so were the people. A group of farmers at the edge of the Humbo forest showed off the benefits of their restoration efforts. We walked through fields thick with grasses and bushes filling the trenches and terraces. We washed our faces with water flowing from a newly emerged spring. We lingered on the banks of ponds that had formed as the pans filled with the rains.

“See, we have ducks now,” noted one of the farmers, pointing to activity on the pond.

We gathered under the spreading canopy of an acacia tree, below the hanging basket-like nests of weaver birds. “We now have shade,” another farmer said. “And a breeze.” It was mid-day. The sun was bearing down. “A couple of years ago, we wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said. “It would have been too hot.”

The farmers brought out plates laden with dripping honeycombs, a gift from their newly-arrived bees. The extraordinary biodiversity has brought more food and income opportunities. Beyond the new hives were rows of maize, beans, onions, cassava, cabbage, sorghum, mango, papaya, and avocado trees.

“Our misery started when our cattle starved, and our crops diminished. You couldn’t find a family that hadn’t lost a child,” Yissac, one of the farmers, said. Abdullah, who was 12 when his family left the land, added, “There were too many deaths. You couldn’t even cry anymore. You realized you might be the next. I was delighted when we could come back. It would be our great happiness if this can be replicated elsewhere.”

On his farm, Abebe, now in his mid-40s, explained how he has deployed all he learned while the land healed. He no longer blankets his land with a single crop — maize — but instead plants a patchwork quilt of alternating crops that allows the soil to refresh from season to season. Between plantings, he nurtures cover crops to shield his soil from evaporation and erosion. He developed a composting system and adopted conservation farming techniques that minimized soil disruption. He planted trees that provide shade and fix nutrients in the soil and bushes that have natural pesticides. When a spring reappeared, he shaped it into a small pond and introduced water lilies to limit evaporation. The water and fruit trees attracted bees, which inspired Abebe to construct hives and produce honey.

Abebe was a young man in his 20s when his family moved off the land to begin the healing. Now, he offers it as a teaching model for his neighbors. Local women gather to see the benefits of vegetables and diversified diets. They have formed growing and saving groups, tending kitchen gardens and sheep and goats to improve their income. They marvel at the health benefits; instead of children weakened and dying from malnutrition, they now celebrate high school and college graduations. Abebe and his wife, Tsehainesh, display the diplomas on the walls of their house.

“Now we’ve realized the fruits of our work,” Abebe said. “And we have seen the mistakes of those who have come before us. Our dead land is living again.”

Abebe and a host of other farmers, both small and large, subsistence and commercial, in Africa and around the world, are charting a course that values ecosystem health, crop diversity, and sustainable productivity growth.

“We have learned that it isn’t wise to plant only one type of crop. It’s too risky,” Abebe said. “We have seen how growing single crops deplete the soil, how the plants are more susceptible to disease and pests, how we become dependent on only one price.”

No longer would he plant row after row of maize year after year, as was common practice. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “No, no. No more. Now I have crops coming ripe all year long. If one fails, another succeeds. We have a steady flow of food and income.”

In 1970, American agricultural scientist and crop breeder Norman Borlaug developed new seed varieties of wheat that boosted global production, saving millions from starvation.

He received the Nobel Peace Prize for sparking what came to be known as the Green Revolution. The Nobel committee praised Borlaug for defusing a grave threat to humanity by accelerating the pace of food production ahead of population growth.

“In this intolerable situation, with the menace of doomsday hanging over us, Dr. Borlaug comes onto the stage and cuts the Gordian knot. He has given us a well-founded hope, an alternative of peace and life – the Green Revolution.” Borlaug, the committee said, had “turned pessimism into optimism in the dramatic race between population explosion and our production of food.”

Five decades later, we find ourselves in a new Gordian knot (a complex, seemingly unsolvable problem) hanging over us.

Today, the dramatic race is between two of our most pressing challenges: nourishing the planet and preserving the earth. How can we produce enough food to nourish an ever-growing and ever-more prosperous population properly — and finally conquer global hunger and malnutrition — while at the same time ensuring that our agricultural systems do not strain our environment, biodiversity, and health.

The essence of today’s challenge lies not in how much we grow (the mission of the Green Revolution) but in what we grow and how we grow it. Food preferences are shifting, and billions of people need proteins, vitamins, and minerals crucial for healthy individual and societal development.

The Green Revolution’s primary focus on increasing agricultural yields to conquer the famines in India and Pakistan and elsewhere in Asia, where starvation was immense and unrelenting for decades. The increase in food production was driven by input intensification, increasing the amount of inputs used per hectare of land, especially fertilizer and irrigation.

Over time, agricultural research generated innovations that allowed farmers to use their inputs more productively. By the 1980s, almost all global agricultural output growth was driven by agricultural productivity, while cultivated land was removed from production and input use per hectare declined. But the increase in productivity was uneven, with large-scale farmers in high-income countries benefiting most, while millions of small-scale farmers, like Abebe, lived harvest-to-harvest, constantly on the brink of extreme hunger and poverty.

All the while our new Gordian knot was forming. The imperative to produce ever-larger quantities of food led to the creation of a food system that has heavily relied on a small number of crops and supporting agriculture systems. Today, three-quarters of the world’s food is generated from only a dozen plants and five animal species. Monocropping has contributed to increasing outbreaks of pests and diseases, degraded soils. depleted water systems, land conversion from forests and fields to cultivation and grazing, and the overuse or misuse of fertilizer and pesticides.

Farmers of all scales are realizing that things must change for agriculture to be sustainable and resilient in the future. Climate change is already slowing productivity, decreasing the crop nutrients in plants, and altering ecosystems. The innvoations, practices, and knowledge that enable farmers to maintain healthy yields in a sustainable way, need to be affordable and available to farmers regardless of location or scale.

Before the pandemic, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that more than 820 million people were chronically hungry. In addition, micronutrient deficiency, a lack of crucial vitamins and minerals known as “hidden hunger,” afflicts about two billion people. More than 20 percent of children under the age of five are stunted, either physically or mentally, from early childhood malnutrition, leading to a life sentence of underachievement. At the same time, another two billion people are overweight or obese, and their number is rising as well, as is the incidence of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Poor diets are now a leading cause of death globally.

Our planet’s health has also become increasingly imperiled: average global temperatures are rising, polar ice caps and glaciers are melting at a quickening pace. Deforestation in many parts of the world continues unabated.

Cutting our twenty-first-century Gordian knot will require more nuanced, integrated solutions. We need to forge a fresh era of human cooperation, united by a shared concern for agriculture, nutrition, environment, climate and biodiversity and the health of humans, animals, plants, insects, soil, water, and air — as well as fostering a universal concern for justice and equality.

Attempts to construct this new movement — often called Planetary Health or One Health — are gaining urgency and momentum. At a conference hosted by his Center for Global Food Security at Purdue University, Gebisa Ejeta, who won the World Food Prize for his pioneering work on sorghum production, outlined the challenge. The task ahead, he said, is not solely a matter of science and technology but also of equity, for global food insecurity is tightly linked to poverty, gender imbalance, and the unequal distribution of global wealth, resources, and knowledge. Food, he insisted, is a fundamental need of all human society. However, the advances that generated higher food production rates haven’t eliminated hunger and malnutrition from our world.

Part of the solution, the gathering determined, will be attaining essential goals that are currently crucial in the rising economies of the developing world: investing in women farmers as well as men; enhancing agriculturalbased businesses for gainful employment, particularly for the rural youth; equitably deploying research and scientific advances in the field; and, increasing the efficiency of production, processing, distribution and utilization of nutritious food. All this, as well as nurturing healthy soils, preserving water, and broadening crop diversity.

Success will also require creating an even greater appreciation and respect for nature, local ecologies, and social values — where farmers and conservationists are no longer bitter foes but allies, heroes in each other’s eyes rather than villains.

“Human society in the past has shown that it can achieve extraordinary feats and solve big societal problems when it builds sufficient common resolve and will,” Gebisa said. “Can it now build one such global resolve as a lastditch effort to eradicate hunger from the face of the earth? And save the planet at the same time?”

This is where the dirt road in the Ethiopian highlands leads, in Gebisa’s homeland, to Abebe’s farm. Abebe is one farmer taking a swipe at our new Gordian knot as he seeks to nourish his family and preserve his land. “God gave me an open mind to learn,” he said. “And I hope I can open the minds of others.”