(ERGO) – Nearly 500 people who depend on salt production in God-cusbo village in Ethiopia’s Somali Region are facing severe financial hardship after floodwater destroyed large salt reserves that had been prepared for sale earlier this year.
Seasonal Gu rains in March swept through the area in Afdher zone that is known for natural salt production in shallow underground pits. Floods destroyed production sites and thousands of sacks of salt that producers had spent months preparing.
Ibrahim Mohamed Omar said the destruction has left families uncertain about how they will survive. Salt production was the only reliable source of income for his family of six. Since the losses, he has been surviving on occasional casual labour jobs.
“The loss affected us deeply. We felt as though our whole future had been destroyed. For four and a half months we invested fuel, money, and labour into this work, and all of it disappeared. The pain we feel cannot really be measured,” he told Radio Ergo.
He lost 4,000 sacks of salt that could have earned him around $5,000. Some of the salt was washed away completely, while the rest dissolved in stagnant water. He has debts of about $1,000 accumulated from fuel costs, food purchases, and wages for labourers helping prepare the salt.
Ibrahim, 38, said he had been unable to pay school fees for two of his children since February.
Salt producers had expected the risk of flooding and had planned in advance to transport the salt to storage warehouses. However, he blamed delays by a government-appointed committee responsible for coordinating transportation, pricing, and quality control.
“I trusted that my salt would be transported. I could not move it myself because the cooperative and contracted companies were supposed to handle it. We could not sell to anyone else because those companies had agreements with the government. We are not blaming the government itself, but the agreement and delays caused the problem,” he said.
He owns 20 salt pits, all of which are now filled with floodwater. Production cannot resume until the water dries up. He feels lost, he said, and has no savings to fall back on:
“I feel like someone whose house burned down and nothing was saved. That is the kind of pain I am carrying. It happened during a period of high inflation, when the only thing we depended on was destroyed. Recovering from this will not be easy.”
Producers in God-cusbo dig pits between three and five metres deep and pump water into them until salt forms naturally over a four-month period. As rainfall patterns become increasingly unreliable, workers invested in wells to maintain production throughout the year.
Siyaad Omar Roble, who has lived off salt production for the past decade, said he was surviving on borrowed money after losing his harvest. His debts have reached $740 and creditors are refusing to lend him more until he repays what he owes.
“My family has been badly affected because salt production was our only livelihood. Now the rain has taken everything. We are trying to survive, but the pressure is very heavy. Some of the people I support are pastoralists already affected by drought, and they have nothing else to rely on,” he said.
Floodwater destroyed 2,000 sacks of salt from his 20 pits. Still, he hopes to resume production if conditions improve.
“In business, sometimes you profit and sometimes you lose. One loss does not mean the end, so I want to try again. The problem was that the salt stayed too long in the fields. If it had been transported earlier, this damage would not have happened,” he said.
According to Ahmed Barre Jama, a member of the local salt producers’ cooperative, the area contains around 184,000 salt pits. He estimated that nearly 800,000 tons of salt were destroyed by the floods, affecting almost half the population of God-cusbo.
Ahmed said community leaders repeatedly appealed for assistance before the rains intensified, but received no response.
“People were crying out for help to save the salt, but nobody responded to them or even answered their calls. The people themselves have very limited capacity. This is a huge area covering several kilometres, and the salt pits are spread across a very wide stretch of land,” he said.
He warned that recovery may not be possible until next year, leaving many families without their main source of income for months to come.
