Awaday, a few kilometers from Harar in eastern Ethiopia, is the world’s biggest khat market, where an estimated $80 million is said to change hands in a single night, Deutsche Welle reported.
Women selling khat in Harar, eastern Ethiopia, April 2014 (Rod Waddington, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0) [file photo]
The market runs around the clock, with trucks, merchants and roadside sellers, and teams of young men cutting, cleaning and packing branches. Activity peaks after sunset because the leaves must be chewed within about 48 hours of harvest, and the trucks leave before the morning sun can burn them. They carry khat to Djibouti and Somaliland, and to Ethiopian cities including Addis Ababa, about 500 kilometers to the west.
Jarra Teklay Yohannes, a 50-year-old trader and one of the six biggest exporters at Awaday, sends seven trucks a day to Somaliland. He told DW he had paid 40,600 birr in customs duty from one night’s earnings, and that the biggest exporters can pay as much as $91,000 in a single day. He claimed the government earns about ten times more from khat than from coffee, officially the country’s leading export. DW said the true figures are impossible to track, and that many people believe they are higher still and that corruption is endemic.
Khat chewing in Harar is traced to Sufism, which has been practised in the city since the 11th century. Today the leaf is chewed by Muslims and Christians alike and is popular with students across the country. Ethiopians who chew consume about 400 grams a day on average, according to DW. “If you want to make peace with someone, you ‘khat and chat’,” Jarra said. “If you go to a wedding, or if you want to ask to marry my child, you bring khat.”
Ephrem Engidawork, a professor of pharmacology at Addis Ababa University who has studied khat for more than a decade, said about 20 percent of Ethiopians chew it to a degree that can damage their health. “The most common adverse effect occurs on the cardiovascular system,” he said, naming myocardial infarction as the deadliest risk of prolonged use. He linked long-term chewing to schizophrenia and said it can also affect the liver and teeth. His proposal for a khat research institute “fell on deaf ears,” he said.
The money keeps pulling farmers away from coffee and other crops. About 70 percent of agricultural land in the Harari region is now planted with khat, DW reported. Chala Jemal, whose family farms about five hectares of khat handed down over generations, said the plant can be harvested three to five times a year, against once for most crops. A kilogram of export-grade khat sells for around €20, and more for top quality.
Many countries ban khat, although there are no international controls on the leaf.
Sources: Deutsche Welle