Tigray

A picture of the countryside on the third day of trekking in Tigray. We were coming down a steep hill. From the bottom of the valley, you would not have been able to pick out the trail up to the top of the cliffs.

You can see that every square inch of available land is used for crops. Even steep hillsides are terraced. It's harvest time, so you can see stacks of either harvested wheat, or of straw, from which the grain has been removed. It seems like families had to pretty much store up enough for a year, because not much, except one kind of bean, grows in the dry season. There is no farm machinery. I don't know for sure that farmers couldn't sell the crops for cash and then buy food once they had eaten the food that they had grown, but I doubt it.

There were farm animals: cattle, goats, and chickens, but they wouldn't have fed too many people for long. We were told that eating meat was reserved for special occasions.