Kalkidan Sleshi, studied natural resource management from Haromaya University. Her research was on mushroom cultivation and spawn production. After the graduation, she started cultivation of mushrooms at small scale.
Before two years Kalkidan was the lonely private high-tech producer of mushroom in Ethiopia. Mushroom only became popular in Ethiopia within the last decades. They are a climate resilient crop, needing little sunshine, water and space. Mushrooms are notoriously hard to grow through. Cottages farmers in Ethiopia regularly lost 30 to 40 per cent of their crops due to spoilage and pests.
Kalkidan needed to purchase high-tech equipment to produce quality mushroom spawn but it was pricey. I was so eager to establish my own laboratory but at that time I could not get money. Then, I found out the Center for Innovation Competition (ECIC). The competition is one of the main things that helped me to establish the laboratory.
Kalkidan used the 33,000 USD grant from ECIC to launch Silew mushroom and rent a government building. She then became one of the three mushroom spawn producers in Addis Ababa and the only private one. Not only does Sliew mushroom produce quality spawn, it also trains new mushroom farmers. They are creating jobs for young and older Ethiopians. “I got the idea about silew from TV” Samrawit Amare, one of the trainees said. “I talked to Kalkidan and she offered me training and I started the business”
Kalkidan has a big dream for her company. “The demand of mushroom in Ethiopia is big and growing. Our vision is establishing a large scale mushroom farm especially shiitake and button. We have connections with three hotels. They need each of them 10 kg of mushroom a day. We could not get that so the demand is very high. We want to produce this species at large scale and scale up the laboratory” she indicated.
Wild mushrooms are parts of the livelihood of people in different parts of the world. They have long been collected as valuable NTFPs, generate cash income by market trade, and are used for local subsistence in food and traditional medicine. These practices help rural people reduce vulnerability to poverty and strengthen their livelihoods through a reliable income and have turned ethno mycology into a discipline in different parts of the world. In Ethiopia, however, wild edible mushrooms are the most neglected NTFPs resources.
Despite their importance, wild mushrooms have been given little attention, and they are less studied and rarely documented. Then again, the justification behind forest resource management in the country has been primarily based on the production of wood products. The values and roles of NTFPs like mushrooms have been neglected and all activities related to forest management are focused on maximizing wood products
However, if managed and conserved properly, mushrooms could potentially support the livelihoods of rural people as major sources of food, medicine, and means of cash. Interestingly, other studies in different part of the world indicated that wild mushrooms could play key roles in local economic developments. In some cases, they could generate even higher economic benefits than timber productions.
Thus, this could help reconcile the social, economic and ecological values of the forests and could encourage the rural people to rationally manage and conserve forest resources in their locality. Ethiopia is a country where subsistence agriculture of low productivity predominates and there has been an acute deficit in food supply and hence food self-sufficiency is a primary issue in the national agricultural development policy.
Rural agriculture is not in a position to supply sufficient food both for the rural and the urban population. Hence, urban agriculture activities have been carried out in cities supplementing rural agriculture.
A study by Gebrelibanos Gebretsadkan indicated that although Urban Agriculture plays a significant role in producing food and generating employment and income for the urban dwellers, it has been given less emphasis. Despite its critical role in producing food for the city dwellers around the world, urban food production has largely been ignored by scholars and agricultural planners; government officials and policy makers at best dismiss the
activity as peripheral and at worst evict farmers, claiming that urban farms are not only unsightly but also promote pollution and illness. In Ethiopia, urban agriculture has been given low consideration by households in their sequence of survival strategies. Households in the urban areas respond to the extreme threat of poverty and food insecurity by carrying out urban farming on any vacant space available. Urban agriculture is also practiced because of shortage of income and unemployment in the urban centers.
Mushroom with their great variety of species, constitute a cost effective means of both supplementing the nutrition to human kinds and can generate additional employment and income through local, regional and national trade offering opportunities through processing enterprises. 4 – 5 species of mushroom are of industrial significance throughout the world.
Governmental institutions should create appropriate, encouraging and working environment for the mushroom agriculture. Through more appropriate production technology available through research, improved management and investment in mushroom agriculture particularly and in human resource development in general.
Linking urban agriculture with sustainable urban development programmes in order to support mushroom agriculture with education, nutritional and environmental issues and regular information on mushroom agriculture should be provided to the city administration about urban mushroom cultivators including how they produce, their motives and the materials being used, and about environmental impacts of mushrooms in order to make right policy decisions.
The number of cultivators and the level of growth in mushroom production should grow at a faster rate by making use of improved and easy access to seeds and appropriate management of the city government. There should be a mechanism of motivating private sector in the mushroom agricultural practice by providing adequate legislative and regulatory frameworks and all the necessary support the producers need to have good opportunities to the cultivation process.
The city government specifically should give attention to solve the major challenges and problems of producers. The city government urban agriculture extension should form a self-help mushroom cultivator groups by way of establishing voluntary mushroom associations which organize mushroom collection, processing and distribution, for information and experience exchange and credit availability.
Educating the people through variety of methods such as child care services, nutrition, popular magazines, the press, radio and television and included in the education policy is crucial to underline in the popular mind of mushroom in human. Finally, Universities should undertake researches on the methods of cultivation and practices of mushroom to do in a modernized as well as commercialized level and also needs to be expanded the importance, productivity and profitability of mushroom agriculture. This opens the door for improvements to tackling mushroom production problems, identifying basic materials required and improving quality of mushroom products.
BY GIRMACHEW GASHAW
The Ethiopian Herald May 8/2021
