ETHIOPIANS LEAVE COFFEE FOR NARCOTIC

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

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.

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," says Muhammed Ali, 39,
Usmani's brother. "But then you fall down."

Ethiopian officials say khat production is hurting the country's economy
because it 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.

According to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, khat also has very serious social
implications. Insomnia and impotence are among the main side effects, he
said, and studies have shown a rise in violence. Then, there's the effect
on the labor force.

"If you're stoned all afternoon, you're not doing much," said Alex Jones,
emergency humanitarian coordinator in West Hararghe for the Atlanta-based
relief agency CARE.

But for men like Usmani Ali, khat is a vital lifeline. He doesn't need
Western food aid. He lives in a house with a corrugated iron sheet roof, a
sign of affluence here. His four children are healthy. And clean clothes
hang from a clothesline.

"I buy grains with the money from khat," he said.

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.