Eritreans call it the breadbasket, and they mean it literally. The major crops are bananas, tomatoes, cotton, onions, millet, sesame, green pepper, and sweet melon - a mix that tells you something about elevation. The average altitude of 1,800 to 2,100 meters produces a temperate climate, with the hottest month in May reaching 30 degrees Celsius and the coldest month dropping to freezing. Two rainy seasons bring a total of around 508 millimeters of precipitation annually: a heavier summer rain and a lighter spring one. The soil holds water. The farms produce. For an authoritarian country that cannot easily import food, this region is not just agriculture. It is strategic depth.

There is also metal in the ground. Gash-Barka is rich in marble, other important minerals, and gold - the commodity that funded much of Eritrea's modest economic growth after independence. Italian colonists mined gold near the village of Ougaro during the colonial period, and their old mineshafts and abandoned machinery are still visible in the scrub. Modern Eritrean government partnerships with foreign mining companies, particularly the Bisha Mine operated in part by Canadian firms, have brought new extraction to the region. Mining revenues helped offset the economic isolation Eritrea experienced through sanctions. For the villages near mines, the relationship is always complicated: jobs, yes, but also displacement, environmental questions, and the usual negotiations between local interests and distant regulators.

The regional capital is Barentu, a highland town that took over from the older former capital Agordat. Other significant settlements include Molki, Sebderat, and Teseney - the last of which sits near the Sudanese border and serves as the main customs point for traffic moving between Eritrea and Kassala. In 2005, the region's population was 708,800, up from 625,100 in 2001 - a net growth rate of 11.81 percent. Population density runs at around 21 people per square kilometer, low by regional standards. The total fertility rate was 5.1 children per woman as of 2002. Infant mortality was 66 per 1,000 live births. Under-5 mortality reached 123. These numbers improve slowly. Agriculture provides 42.5 percent of employment; sales and services, 26.4 percent; skilled manual labor, 14 percent.

What lived here before the farms matters. As recently as 1900, most of Eritrea including Gash-Barka was extensively forested; today less than one percent of the country has forest cover. The painted hunting dog, Lycaon pictus - an endangered African canid - once ranged across these plains in packs. It is now locally extinct, extirpated from both Gash-Barka and all of Eritrea, victim of human population expansion and habitat loss. The trail of disappearances goes back further. Aksumite-era settlements here gave way to medieval ones, which gave way to Ottoman and Italian ones. Each wave of human change pushed wilderness back a little more. Today the edges of the region are savanna bleeding into Sahel, with occasional acacia groves marking old watercourses.

This region was a crucible during Eritrea's 30-year independence war and again during the 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia. Eritrean fighters crossed and recrossed the plains around Teseney and Barentu. Ethiopian forces briefly captured Barentu in May 2000 during their final offensive, advancing through a 'mined but lightly defended mountain' approach that took the Eritreans by surprise. The region's villages absorbed waves of refugees - first Eritreans fleeing Ethiopian rule, later Ethiopians and Sudanese fleeing their own wars, and in recent years, people displaced by the Tigray conflict next door. Administratively, Gash-Barka comprises the districts of Agordat City, Barentu City, Dghe, Forto, Gogne, Haykota, Logo Anseba, Mensura, Mogolo, Molki, Omhajer (Guluj), Shambuko, Tesseney, and Upper Gash. Those names map a region that has done more than its share of the work of feeding a country and absorbing its shocks.