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Production
Estimates and Crop Assessment Division |
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Production
Estimates and Crop Assessment Division |
Ethiopia is a country with great geographic diversity with mountains, high plateaus, deep gorges, river valleys, and lowland plains. The altitude ranges from 4620 meters above sea level to 120 meters below sea level at the Danakil Depression, one of the lowest and driest points on the earth. Despite the complexity of the topography, it is common to classify the country into the lowland (<1500 meters) and highland (>1500 meters) areas, where two-thirds of the land area is highland and the remaining one-third is lowland. Most of the highland plateaus are interspersed by deep gorges, steep-sided valleys, and numerous streams which feed major rivers.
Much of Ethiopia is part of the East African Rift Plateau, where the highlands are referred to as the Ethiopian Plateau and they are bisected by the Great Rift Valley into the northwestern highlands and the southeastern highlands, each with associated lowlands. The northwestern highlands are considerably more extensive and rugged and are further divided into northern and southern sections by the valley of the Abay (Blue Nile). The third physiographic region is the Ethiopian Rift Valley, which is part of the Great East African Rift Valley extending from the Jordan Valley in the Middle East to the Zambezi River's Shire tributary in Mozambique.
Ethiopia is often referred to as the “water tower” of East Africa because of its many rivers systems that drain into neighboring arid countries. All of Ethiopia's rivers originate in the highlands and flow outward in many directions through deep gorges. Most notable is the Blue Nile, the country's largest river, whose tributaries supply two-thirds of the Nile River’s flow. The Blue Nile, the Tekezé, and the Baro are among them and account for about half of the country's water outflow. In the northern half of the Great Rift Valley flows the Awash River, on which the government has built several dams to generate power and irrigate major commercial plantations. The Awash flows east and disappears in the saline lakes near the boundary with Djibouti. The southeast is drained by the Genale and Shebele rivers into Somalia and the Omo River in southwest drains into Lake Turkana in Kenya.
