Enset Plant

Enset Plant

            Enset/ensete is commonly referred to as Ethiopian banana, false banana, Abyssinian banana, or Ensete Ventricosum. The plant resembles a banana plant, although the banana plant belongs to the genus of Musa. Enset is an edible flowering plant with its root being edible and fruits being inedible with hard, black rounded seeds. Enset is a gigantic non-woody herb plant with it large banana-like leafs. The leaves are 1 m wide and 5 m tall with a salmon-pink midrib. At the end of the plant life, flowers occur once from the center, and after flowering, it dies. The plant is cut before flowering deriving food, and the most common food is Kocho. The leaf midribs are scraped, and its pulp taken through the fermentation process for 10-15 days and then steamed and baked to flat bread. The plant provides staple food to around 20 million people in Ethiopia.

Cultivated Enset

Tradition enset cultivation is based on gender role cultivation, which is highly essential. The men generally do cultivation,  transplanting, and propagation of the enset while women work on the landrace selection, hand-weeding, thinning, and manuring. The processing activities of the enset plant to final products such as fibers and food are done by women, which is tedious work. To ensure the processing activities are completed, women gather together and work as a group. Women decide which plant to be harvested, which quantity sufficient for family food, and which quantity to sell.

There are two types of enset based on their status, cultivated and wild enset. Wild enset occurs naturally in swamps, riverbanks, near streams in highlands, and gullies in the landraces of Wolaita.  The Wolaita refer all the wild enset with the same name, talahe uutta meaning “the enset of the devil.” Enset cultivation is a home garden crop that is done near the dwellings (darkuwa).  The enset crops are also disguised by their gender, eco-geographic adaptability, and use-value.  Farmer set two landraces, one for the male enset (attuma uutta) and the other one for female enset (macca uutta). The male and female enset are based on biological reproduction. Early maturing, edible corns define the macca uutta, and weak and thin Pseudostems while attuma utta with late-maturing fibrous, corns of poor cooking qualities. Both female and male ensets can be used for food and non-food uses where communities have every enset with it particular purpose.

The enset plant provides and outdoes most of the plants in the world to what it produces to the people. The plant provides greens, some parts of the enset can be boiled like cabbage when the plant is succulent and young. The immature leaf stalks are cut into small sizes, boiled, and finally tasting like cooked celery. Also, the immature pitch is extracted from inside the stem and boiled as vegetables. A mature enset plant provides flour. The inner tissues of the leaves are laboriously scraped to finally obtained milky-white pulp, commonly known as bula. The white pulp is taken in the form of an acidic porridge. A concentrated bula can be dried to form pourwed, which is the flour used to make dumplings, enjera, and porridge. The corns from the young enset are cut up and prepared as cassava or potato or even grinded to make flour. The enset leaves are known to be longer than the banana leaves, because of this reason they are applied as natural wrappers for meat and grains. The dried leaves from enset are pulped to produce diapers, baby cushions, brushed, and cleaning rugs. The leaves are also woven into mats, hats, baskets, clothes, and construction materials. Lastly, the plant is used to shelter animals from sun and wind, and also, the enset gives Ethiopia an attractive landscape from a distance.

Enset leaves harvested for various purposes, such as wrapping food and woven to baskets.

Fibre separated from the pulp in the leaf sheaths.

Enset plants experience varying degrees and length of summer annually depending on whether they have been planted in low or middle altitudes areas. Prolonged drought significantly affects the growth parameters of the enset plant. The drought causes the plant to reduce the leaf area and the assimilation rate, which correlates the changes in the plant growth rate. In the drought period, the photosynthesis rate, stomatal conductance, and transpiration decline. Despite the profound changes to the plant, the leaf water status only proves a small change as the drought condition increases, dry matters from the plant increases on the ground. The enset plant increases the harvest index of the corm during the dry seasons. Although, the enset plant produces dry matters in both dry season and rainy seasons. The dry season considerably affects and reduces the enset growth rate and yield production. The increase in corm yield can be applied in dry areas proving some enset clones can grow and survive in drought-prone regions. In Ethiopia, the plant is found within an altitude of (500 m-) 1000-1600 m (-2400 m), and in cultivation, the plant grows between 1800 m and 2450 m.

Dry matters increase on the ground during dry seasons.

The enset plant was first domesticated 6000 years BCE; the plant is native to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the plant takes part in economic growth. The enset plant was grown in far areas in Ethiopia until the colonial influence where the plant cultivation decreased. The plant is mainly cultivated in Southern Highlands, Central, and Northern Highlands around the Semien Mountain, Lake Tana, and in Southern Eritrea and far North as Adigrat. Outside the Ethiopia Country, the enset plant was a source of emergency food to Vietnam during the Second World War. The plant is indigenous throughout tropical Africa, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to westward of Ethiopia and southward from Ethiopia to South Africa. The plant naturally grows in streams, gullies, riverine, and montane forests. In Ethiopia, food security is based on the Enset plant rather than cereal-based.