teff

The Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands; Eragrostis tef, domesticated by Ethiopian farmers before any written record and before wheat and barley reached the country, and still grown widely almost nowhere else

Grown in Ethiopia for millennia as staple and cash crop; taken up abroad as a gluten-free health food, where a Dutch patent on teff flour and its processing, granted in 2007, was declared void in the Netherlands in 2018 and left standing in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria and Britain

Teff carries Ethiopia: it covers 22 percent of the cultivated area, about 6.6 million smallholders grow it, 43 percent of all the country's farmers, and its marketed surplus is worth more to producers than coffee, the main export. It tolerates drought and waterlogging, stands in as the catch crop when maize and sorghum fail, mills to 99 percent flour where wheat gives 60 to 80, and makes injera, the national dish of Ethiopia and of Eritrea. Ethiopia kept an export ban on the grain, wary of what open markets would do to prices at home, and has let only a few commercial farms export it, which is a rare case of a government refusing commodity logic outright. A Dutch agronomist applied in 2003 and held a patent from 2007 over teff flour and how it is processed, alongside a 2005 agreement with what is now the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute that returned Ethiopia about four thousand euros before his company went bankrupt in 2009. The Hague court found the Dutch patents void for lack of inventiveness in November 2018, noting that they had carved out injera because making injera from teff flour is an old tradition in Ethiopia. The patent stood on in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria and Britain. A grain Ethiopian farmers domesticated before anyone wrote it down was, across most of Europe, legally somebody's invention for as long as that patent ran.