teff

Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands; domesticated c. 4000-3000 BCE, grown almost exclusively in Ethiopia and Eritrea to this day

Ethiopian and Eritrean Highlands, hyper-local for millennia, carried out by the Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora, then into the Western gluten-free market, where a Dutch patent on teff flour and its processing stood from 2007 until it was struck down in the Netherlands in 2018 and left standing elsewhere in Europe

Teff carries Ethiopia: roughly 24 percent of the country's cultivated land, about 21 percent of its grain, some 6.2 million smallholders growing an estimated 5,000 landraces. It is drought resistant, nutritionally dense, and embedded in the cultural and ritual life of Ethiopian and Eritrean communities. Ethiopia restricted its export for years to protect domestic food security, which is a rare case of a government refusing commodity logic outright, and it was defending against something specific. A Dutch agronomist applied in 2003 and held a European patent from 2007 over teff flour and how it is processed, following a 2005 agreement with what is now the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute that returned Ethiopia almost nothing. The same institute had by 1997 conserved 3,842 accessions of teff against exactly this kind of loss. The patent meant Ethiopia could not export its own staple's flour to the Netherlands and nobody else could process the grain either. The Hague voided it in November 2018 for lack of inventiveness. It remains in force in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria and Britain. A grain domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands thousands of years ago is still, across most of Europe, legally somebody's invention.