Ethiopia 2025 – AFP

In Ethiopia’s Afar region, a plant once introduced to fight desertification has turned into an ecological and economic disaster.
Brought from Latin America in the 1970s, Prosopis juliflora was meant to protect the soil and provide shade. Today, it consumes up to seven liters of water per tree every day and spreads across tens of thousands of hectares every year, according to various studies.

Its thorns wound animals, its toxic pods kill livestock — yet camels eat them and unknowingly carry its seeds across the desert, helping it spread even faster.
Once nomadic pastoralists, the Afar people now live surrounded by dense Prosopis forests: the trees encircle villages, block access to water points, and overtake their grazing lands. Life — and movement — are slowly being suffocated by this invasive green wall.

Experts estimate the economic losses at hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decades.
CARE International is trying to fight back by transforming uprooted trees into charcoal briquettes, livestock feed, and construction blocks — but the plant advances faster than it can be cleared. Stopping it now seems impossible. Much more needs to be done.

This story, produced with AFP, captures a bitter ecological irony: a tree once planted to heal the land has instead conquered it.
A cautionary tale of what happens when human solutions turn against nature itself..