ETHIOPIAN FARMERS TURN TO DRUG CROP

BEDESA, Ethiopia - Usmani Ali has given up on coffee and turned to
growing something more profitable: drugs.

Faced once again with massive food shortages, Ethiopian farmers like
Ali are uprooting their coffee trees and replacing them with khat, a
leafy narcotic that is this region's version of moonshine.

During previous droughts like the one now gripping the country, the
global coffee market helped Ali, 28, stave off starvation. He sold his
prized crop to traders, who paid him decent prices and sold his coffee
to American and European companies, which stocked it on grocery
shelves and cafes from Stockholm to Miami.

But today there's too much coffee in the world, and prices are at
30-year lows. While premium Ethiopian coffees fetch up to $12 a pound
in the United States, Ethiopia's farmers get only 15 cents for it.

That's not enough to cover Ali's costs. So he's turned to khat, a
leafy cash crop that is chewed legally by millions of people in the
Horn of Africa and Middle East. In the United States and Britain,
where it is illegal, khat fetches as much as $200 a pound.

``Khat is much better than coffee,'' said Ali, standing next to his
family's last patch of coffee trees. The red coffee berries are
rotting from a drought-related pest because Ali can no longer afford
pesticide.

Down the hill are rows of green khat bushes glistening in the sun. The
narcotic is drought- and pest-resistant. It can grow on less water and
in less time than coffee. And when chewed for a long time, khat has
another powerful draw: It makes people feel less hungry.

``A person can stay for two days without eating,'' said Muhammad Ali,
39, Usmani's brother. ``But then you fall down.''

Ethiopian officials say khat production is hurting the country's
economy because it is part of the underground economy and is not
taxed. By contrast, coffee was Ethiopia's prime source of hard currency.

Hard currency will be needed to pay for imported food next year when
aid workers are predicting that as many as 11 million Ethiopians could
face starvation.

An estimated 75 percent of all coffee farmers in the highlands of
Hararghe, home to the aromatic Harar coffee, have either uprooted
coffee trees to plant khat or are growing both, said Tadesse Meskela,
general manager of the Oromiya Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in the
capital, Addis Ababa.

Farmers like Ali could never grow large quantities of food, given
drought-prone conditions; nor, as the World Bank suggests, can they
grow cash crops, such as cotton and sugar, for export. They can't
compete with more efficient, government-subsidized U.S. and European
farmers. Rapid population growth also has shrunk farm sizes with each
generation.