Cotton has been White Gold since the 19th century. Wheat is the King of Cereals. By that measure the crop has earned its billing — the tree against hunger, the banana on steroids, the wonder crop. It is called enset, it feeds more than 20 million people, and outside Ethiopia almost no one has heard of it.
The oversight bothers James Borrell, a UK-based conservation biologist. When he began work at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew in 2017 — 320 acres, nearly 17,000 species — he had never heard of the plant. “In terms of being generalist and adaptable, it’s amazing,” he told CNN. “I sound like I’m the poster boy for just how cool enset is, and I sort of am.”
Wild enset runs from Sudan down to Mozambique, but as a crop it lives almost entirely in Ethiopia’s southwestern highlands, between 1,500 and 3,000 meters (4,921 and 9,843 feet) above sea level. It can reach 10 meters (33 feet), with leaves up to 5 meters (16 feet) long, yet it is not a tree at all but a giant herb. Its trunk is a pseudostem of packed leaf shafts which, with the fleshy underground corm, is pulverized, mixed with yeast and fermented in large pits for anywhere from three months to two years. The result becomes kocho, a bread-like staple; a liquid byproduct, bulla, concentrates into a white powder for dumplings and porridge. The yellow-orange fruits, all hard black seed and no flesh, are inedible — hence its other name, the false banana.
The virtues are not theoretical. High-yielding, tolerant of drought and disease, perennial, needing no replanting: 60 plants can sustain a family of five for a year. Rice, wheat and maize — the big three, which supply more than half the world’s calories — complete their lives in a single season.
A 2021 range-modelling study Borrell co-authored found enset could grow across large swaths of southern and eastern Africa, its current cultivation expanded 12-fold, feeding as many as 111.5 million more people across sub-Saharan Africa — a region where food and nutritional insecurity is rising even as global production grows.
The plant has already traveled farther than that, once. In April 2023 enset flowered for the first time inside Kew’s Temperate House, a 4,800-square-meter (5,741-square-yard) glasshouse, grown from a 30-cm (1-foot) plant that arrived four years earlier. “There’s lots of examples in history of crops arriving in new places and being dominant,” Borrell said. “So there’s absolutely no reason why it (enset) couldn’t be important somewhere else.”
Which leaves the question the record cannot quite answer: why it hasn’t. “When a crop is as successful as enset, in a small area, it spreads around the world — maize, rice, potatoes,” Borrell said. “I can’t think of another crop that is so ubiquitous in the place it comes from, where every farmer grows it in this 300-kilometer (186-mile) region, but you go to Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda and say, ‘Did you know you can eat that?’ and people just look at you with a blank expression. It is really strange.”
The theories are cultural and historical. Ethiopia strictly regulates the export of plant material against biopiracy — the 2019 dispute over Dutch patents on teff, the native grain behind the flatbread injera, played at home as a custody battle over a national asset. Wild varieties elsewhere in Africa would be “quite useless” for food next to the domesticated crop. Kew was permitted to import two plants in 2019 on condition the material be destroyed when the work ended, an exception extended on the strength of a 40-year relationship with Ethiopian researchers. “Ethiopia’s got plant diversity, and so they’re very protective of it,” Borrell said. “We tried to say, ‘Look, this is the potential,’ but of course, it’s basically up to Ethiopia, and they would need to derive some benefit from sharing it.” CNN sought comment from the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute.
Then there is the labor. Harvest is “backbreaking” and falls mostly to female farmers; mechanized solutions are in development at several Ethiopian universities but not yet rolled out at scale. Turning enset into food takes specialist knowledge refined over centuries. And it is an acquired taste — Borrell has relished it in flatbread and couscous-like dishes, but kocho, he concedes, can be “hit and miss.”
The stakes are the climate’s. Reliance on a narrow set of crops leaves agriculture exposed to pests, disease and shifting conditions, at precisely the moment the margins are shrinking. “We want to make more food, with less impact, under a less predictable climate than has ever been. That’s three things that are hard, all together,” Borrell said.
And in Ethiopia itself the tree may be receding. In a 2025 study by Kew and Addis Ababa University, roughly 60 percent of more than 400 southwestern farmers interviewed said the land they devote to enset had shrunk in recent decades, many reporting a pronounced decline in eating it at home — growers turning, under the pressures of urbanization and globalization, to wheat, maize and potato. Kew has run projects paying farmers to keep growing endangered varieties.
Borrell’s last theory requires no funding. “Rice, wheat, maize, potato and sweet potato are awesome, (but) there is nothing inherently different about them compared to loads of other species. If you ran history again, it could be something else that becomes a billion-pound crop,” he said. “Once you realize that it’s kind of luck why some crops have become as dominant as they are, then you start thinking, ‘Wow, there really are probably some untapped opportunities.’”