BEDESA, Ethiopia - Usmani Ali has given up on coffee and turned to growing something more profitable: khat, a leafy narcotic that's this region's version of moonshine.

During previous droughts like the one now gripping the country, the global coffee market helped Ali, 28, stave off starvation. He sold his prized crop to traders, who paid him decent prices and sold his coffee to American and European companies, who stocked it on grocery shelves and cafes from Stockholm to Miami.

But today there's too much coffee in the world, and prices are at 30-year lows. While premium Ethiopian coffees fetch up to $12 a pound in the United States, Ethiopia's farmers get only 15 cents for it.

That's not enough to cover Ali's costs. So he's turned to khat, a leafy cash crop that is chewed legally by millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Middle East.

In the United States and Britain, where it is illegal, khat fetches as much as $200 a pound.

"Khat is much better than coffee," said Ali, standing next to his family's last patch of coffee trees. The red coffee berries are rotting from a drought-related pest because Ali can no longer afford pesticide.

Down the hill are rows of green khat bushes glistening in the sun. The narcotic is drought and pest resistant. It can grow on less water and in less time than coffee. And when chewed for a long time, khat has another powerful draw: It makes people feel less hungry.

"A person can stay for two days without eating," says Muhammed Ali, 39, Usmani's brother. "But then you fall down."

Ethiopian officials say khat production is hurting the country's economy because it is part of the underground economy and is not taxed.

By contrast, coffee was Ethiopia's prime source of hard currency.

Hard currency will be needed to pay for imported food next year when aid workers are predicting that as many as 11 million Ethiopians could face starvation.

According to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, khat also has very serious social implications. Insomnia and impotence are among the main side effects, he said, and studies have shown a rise in wife beatings and other violence. Then, there's the effect on the labor force.

"If you're stoned all afternoon you're not doing much," said Alex Jones, emergency humanitarian coordinator in West Hararghe for the Atlanta-based relief agency CARE.

But for men like Usmani Ali, khat is a vital lifeline. He doesn't need Western food aid. He lives in a house with a corrugated iron sheet roof, a sign of affluence here. His four children are healthy. And clean clothes hang from a clothesline.

"I buy grains with the money from khat," he said.

An estimated 75 percent of all coffee farmers in the highlands of Hararghe, home to the aromatic Harar coffee, have either uprooted coffee trees to plant khat or are growing both, said Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromiya Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in the capital, Addis Ababa.

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Farmers like Ali could never grow large quantities of food, given drought-prone conditions; nor, as the World Bank suggests, can they grow cash crops, such as cotton and sugar, for export. They can't compete with more efficient, government-subsidized U.S. and European farmers. They have little incentive to invest in tractors and irrigation systems to increase productivity because the government owns all the land. Rapid population growth also has shrunk farm sizes with each generation.

In addition, there are few paved roads to get crops to market, and transportation and marketing systems are primitive.

Khat, produced mainly in the Horn of Africa and in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, has no U.S. or European competition, and sells especially well when food is scarce.

Of late, business has been so good that Ali and neighboring farmers have even dug a communal well to irrigate their khat.

But, like coffee farmers, Ali and his colleagues are vulnerable to the vagaries of the khat free market.

Traders recently negotiated to pay Ali about 45 cents to $1.40 per pound for his three harvests this year, depending on their quality. They agreed to send trucks for the produce, which is then flown to Djibouti, where it will be sold for about $11 per pound. But Ali never knows the price of khat in Djibouti. And once picked, khat must be chewed within two days.

"You're totally at the mercy of the traders," said Jones. "If they say we're not going to buy it today, you're dead. You've already picked it."

Even that risk is better than Ali's prospects on the world's glutted coffee market. Oxfam, the British international relief agency, and other relief groups are pressing coffee companies to improve prices paid to farmers, but that hasn't happened yet.

"If we were making more money, I would grow more coffee," said farmer Kadir Yua, 50. "For now, even my children will grow khat."