Continued rising food prices coupled with famine and drought has been taking its toll on Ethiopia.Permaculture could provide a solution... So Peter Wiggins packed his bag and signed up for the International Permaculture Design Course to be held at the new Strawberry Fields eco-lodge in the Konso region. Permaculture is a system for creating human settlements that function in harmony with nature. It sounds a bit hippy dippy, but it's a design system that allows farmers to lead dignified lives by using sustainable methods that truly do last forever.

The term 'permaculture' was coined by Australians David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the 1970s and it was seen as a radical approach to food production, integrating organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry. Permaculture fits well into the pre-industrial ethos of the Konso people.

The Konso are an eastern Cushitic speaking people, who live in the highlands of southern Ethiopia. They are known for being intensive agriculturists who subsist primarily on millet and maize, grown on an extensive system of stone terraces. They are also the only remaining stone-tool culture where women predominantly make and use the stone-tools. The hills and valleys of Konso are not fertile and the climate is dry with the occasional flash flood, but with sheer hard-work the farmers go to great lengths to extract a productive living from their land.

In Konzo's traditional pagan culture, water is paired with divinity, and before Protestant missionaries came to the area, the Konso people looked to the water spirits to end drought. Their only protection against floods are the dry-stone walls that surround the villages. Permaculture is similarly concerned with making the most of natural resources by avoiding waste through efficient design. Indeed, the primary consideration is to maximize the capture of water with swales, which are slight depressions that run along the contour of the land. They're designed to prevent soil erosion - and to maximize the capture of water. The cheapest way to store water is in the soil.

Strawberry Fields eco-lodge is a working permaculture farm and feeds 20 permaculture design students, three times a day. The menu boasted a variety of fresh fruit and vegetables served with injera and bread. Every meal we ate on the course reinforced the idea that permaculture would make such a difference in the area. The Filipino chef, Bodge, became very popular and no one ever went hungry.

The students were made up of farmers, civil servants and environmentalists - the majority undertaking agriculture-related work. Volunteers translated the course into both Amharic and Konso. Native Konso students, as part of the course, designed and presented the plans for the design of the Stawberry Fields farmland. The purpose of a permaculture designer is to map out a human settlement, whether in a rural or urban setting, using the principle of ‘relative location' - meaning that all resources are placed so as to best enable interaction with each other. Sustainability is achieved by echoing natural environmental processes and capturing the harmonious relationships that exist in natural ecologies.

The course was lead by Rosemary Morrow and ably assisted by Dan Palmer. Rosemary moved from Australia to Konso to teach the course unpaid - just with a passion to help spread permaculture. She has been teaching permaculture for nearly twenty years in Australia, Vietnam, Cambodia and other countries and in the eyes of her students is the fairy godmother of permaculture. She was an inspiration and surrogate mother to all.

Rosemary explained permaculture to the class using the chicken as an example. Just as a chicken needs food and water while it produces eggs and manure for us, on a permaculture farm the chickens would be placed where they can have easy access to a water source, where they can feast on natural vegetation and where their manure will act as compost for the soil. In this way, the chickens help the soil just as the vegetation helps the chickens. Through the use of ‘chicken tractors' (portable chicken cages) they can be moved around the farm to spread their mess.

In a permaculture design, a piece of land is organised into zones. The land in need of most frequent attention is the vegetable garden, located in Zone 1 closest to the house. The land in need of least attention, the trees and woodland, are located furthest away, in Zones 4 and 5. Permaculture farms grow multiple crops in the same space by grouping together plants, animals and microbacteria that compliment and support each other. The use of organic methods of gardening allows the soil to become richer and richer, and enables more and more species to thrive.

Permaculture theory is also concerned with minimizing human effort, therefore perennial plants are frequently used as they do not require annual replanting. The less man-hours required on a farm the more time there is for education, family and leisure, which will also increase the quality of life. The idea is that as the permaculture system evolves it will require less and less work and you should end up with a giant food forest.

During the course students were encouraged to relax and take time out to socialise. The course has inspired several initiatives to teach permaculture in schools in the region and two students from the course have also agreed to stay on and train as permaculture teachers.

In discussing the political and economic implications of permaculture we asked why permaculture hasn't been brought to Ethiopia before now. Probably because their cash-strapped government is more concerned with export-led growth and partly because the government of the prime minister Meles Zenawi has ruled with an iron fist since unrest in 2005. In contrast, permaculture is not concerned with economic growth, but with the promotion of food sovereignty and in the long-run will protect farmers against rising food prices and fluctuations in the international market as it is completely self-sufficient.

Strawberry Fields eco-lodge will open to the general public in September 2008. Courses on permaculture will continue to run and hopefully permaculture will continue to spread throughout Africa.

To find out about permaculture visit www.permacultureactivist.net or www.permaculture.co.uk Strawberry Fields eco-lodge has accepted many different volunteers. For information about volunteering at Strawberry Field, contact Alex McCausland on alex1mcc@yahoo.com.