Enset has acquired extravagant nicknames, including “the tree against hunger,” the “banana on steroids” and the “wonder crop.” Yet outside Ethiopia, the plant remains obscure despite feeding more than 20 million people across the East African country.

The contrast is striking because more than half of the world’s calories come from rice, wheat and maize. Enset, meanwhile, is largely cultivated in Ethiopia’s southwestern highlands, even though wild varieties are native to countries from Sudan to Mozambique.

James Borrell, a conservation biologist based in the United Kingdom, encountered enset after beginning work at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, West London, in 2017. “In terms of being generalist and adaptable, it’s amazing,” he told CNN.

Enset belongs to the banana family of flowering plants and can grow 10 meters, or 33 feet, tall. Farmers cultivate it between 1,500 and 3,000 meters above sea level, tending plants with leaves reaching 5 meters in length.

Despite its towering appearance, enset is not a tree. It is a giant herb whose apparent trunk is a pseudostem formed from tightly overlapping leaf shafts, while a fleshy underground corm resembles an enormous tuber.

Farmers pulverize the pseudostem and corm, combine the material with yeast and ferment it in underground pits. After three months to two years, the mixture becomes kocho, a bread like Ethiopian staple.

The process also produces bulla, a liquid squeezed from the starchy pulp. It can be concentrated into white powder and later rehydrated to make porridge and dumplings.

Enset’s yellow or orange colored fruits are not eaten because they contain hard black seeds rather than substantial flesh. That feature explains another of the plant’s names, the “false banana,” despite its resemblance to its famous relative.

The crop’s practical benefits are substantial. Enset produces high yields, tolerates drought and disease, and can sustain a family of five for one year with only 60 plants.

It is also a perennial crop that can live and be cultivated for longer than two years without replanting. By comparison, the life cycles of major crops such as rice, wheat and maize are completed within one growing season.

A 2021 range modelling study coauthored by Borrell found that enset could be cultivated across broad areas of southern and eastern Africa. Expanding its current cultivation range 12 fold could feed as many as 111.5 million additional people across sub Saharan Africa, the study said.

Its adaptability was also demonstrated at Kew Gardens. In April 2023, an enset plant flowered for the first time inside the gardens’ Temperate House after arriving four years earlier at just 30 centimeters, or 1 foot, tall.

Still, the crop’s limited spread continues to puzzle Borrell. Ethiopian farmers grow it throughout a 300 kilometer, or 186 mile, region, yet people in nearby Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda may not know the plant can be eaten.

Cultural and historical obstacles may help explain its isolation. Ethiopia strictly controls international transfers of plant material amid concerns about biopiracy, and Borrell said the country would need to receive benefits from sharing the crop.

Kew received permission to import two plants in 2019, provided that all material was destroyed after the work finished. The gardens benefited from a 40 year relationship with Ethiopian researchers, and similar trust with other institutions may require time.

Harvesting presents another hurdle because the work is “backbreaking” and is mostly performed by female farmers, Borrell said. Mechanized approaches are being developed at several Ethiopian universities but have not been introduced at scale.

Preparing enset also depends on specialist knowledge and methods developed by local communities over centuries. Although Borrell has enjoyed enset in flatbread and dishes resembling couscous, he said kocho can be “hit and miss.”

Climate pressures have increased interest in crops that tolerate a broad range of conditions. At the same time, reliance on a narrow group of crops leaves agriculture more vulnerable to pests, diseases and changing environmental conditions.

A 2025 study by Kew and Addis Ababa University partners interviewed more than 400 farmers in southwestern Ethiopia. Roughly 60% said their enset farmland had decreased in recent decades, while many reported a pronounced decline in household consumption.

Kew has supported projects compensating Ethiopian farmers for maintaining endangered enset varieties. Borrell framed that work as a celebration of a uniquely valuable resource: “This is really cool, and you guys are the only people in the world that have it. Let’s celebrate it.”