Relying on just a few crops in Ethiopia is like investing in just a handful of companies. Unfortunately, farmers here don't have the choice we do and sometimes when harvests fail they have to invest in the local version of boo.com: the Lathyr Pea plant.

Lathyr peas thrive when all else fails, taste great, provide fine nutrition, and permanently remove the use of your legs if you eat them for longer than three months.

Can you imagine the choice - starve, or eat and risk paralysis?

Oxfam to the rescue: a wider range of crops means a wider range of seeds, and this man is emptying pods cultivated in a new Oxfam-funded seed nursery. Here, some experimentation and plenty of propagation occurs, providing crops which you can harvest at different times of year, under varying environmental conditions, providing a healthy range of possibilities.