Much of my life before moving to Tokyo was spent in the rural areas of the American South. Though not the son of a farmer, I grew up next to fields of tobacco, corn, and grazing cattle. As a child, I loved watching hay bails being loaded onto flatbed trucks donning “farm use only” license tags, and seeing overall-clad farmers walking their fertile land. I saw farmers and their farmhands walk into the fields as the sun rose and shut off the barn lights well after dark.
At the time, I didn’t realize that these scenes served as my introduction to the concept of industry. While I wasn’t yet aware of stock futures or agricultural regulation, the scenes helped me comprehend the incalculable amount of sweat it takes to carve out a life as a farmer.
Five years ago I photographed a salt farm in Sinan County, South Korea for a short series titled Southern Salt. This was my first time seeing salt cultivation. I was intrigued by the massive salt flats made thick black tarps and levees to separate the individual salination pools. The sun beat down and the farmers worked furiously to cultivate and collect the salt. Watching the Korean salt farmers took me back to my childhood and reminded me of the American laborers who, as I know now, worked so damn hard for so little.
Early this year, I had another chance encounter with salt farming. Far into the Danakil region of northern Ethiopia, I witnessed a way of farming salt that was much older and laborious than the one I witnessed in South Korea.
Ethiopian salt farmer binds a stack of ten salt slabs.
These Ethiopian salt “mines” form part of the Danakil Depression, a 60,000 square meter mineral deposit that reaches up to 100 meters below sea level. It is here in the Danakil that the Afar tribe has mined the salt that was left as an unexpected gift by ancient Red Sea floods. For centuries, this stretch of baked earth gave a trade to the Afar people and established the Ethiopian salt industry.
Salt farmer binds a stack of salt.
Carved salt bricks.
To say that salt extraction in the Danakil is laborious would be an understatement. Each plate of salt is extracted from the earth’s crust, hand-chopped into massive slabs, and then reduced to manageable tiles. To transport the salt, thousands of donkeys and dromedaries (also called Somali or Arabian camels) are loaded to the hilt and form caravan lines that will trudge to Berahile, a make-shift commercial town three days walk away. Once in Berahile, eager merchants gather from across Ethiopia to buy and sell the mineral that both Ethiopian homemakers and farmers rely upon.
Camel caravan returning back to the salt plains of the Danakil to fetch another load of salt bricks.
This physical strain of salt production is compounded by the environment. The Afar salt farmers conduct business in an inhospitable landscape. Appropriately nicknamed the “Gateway to Hell,” the Danakil is one of the hottest places on Earth. With daily temperatures averaging 34˚C (and frequently touch 50˚C), the salt farmers of the Danakil work in an unimaginable cauldron in order to survive and to carry on the traditions that have sustained the Afar people for generations. From the first chop to sale, the process of salt mining in the Danakil is truly one of the most physically demanding ways any farmer could make a living.
Beginning of the vast expanse of salt deposits in the Danakil Depression of northern Ethiopia.
Leaving the region, I learned that Danakil salt was once so valuable that people used it to barter, an unofficial currency. I sat in silence hearing that now, with corporate competition and Ethiopian modernization on the rise, each hand-carved slab will only yield four Ethiopian birr (twenty cents per four-kilo brick). After spending a short amount of time learning about the process of salt farming in Ethiopia’s far north, I was taken back to the farms of East Tennessee and was again reminded about the effort and energy it takes to sustain an industry. I was reminded of the people who, despite making the industry prosper, never truly reap the rewards of their efforts. Here in Ethiopia, we find yet another example of how, for some, hard work doesn’t pay off.
