Poor Farmer

Ethiopia’s Coffee: Big Claims, Little Accountability

2026-10-29T11:01:51.664-07:00

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

I have seen this celebration before. In the summer of 2007, Ethiopia’s government and Starbucks congratulated each other on an agreement over our most famous coffee names. Officials called it a victory, although the full terms were not public. I questioned that celebration in an August Addis Fortune article, “Ethiopia’s Loss in the Starbucks Affair.” What had Ethiopia secured, and what would it mean for the people who grew the coffee?

Nineteen years later, a different government is celebrating what it calls a record coffee export year. It has built a national traceability system for Europe’s deforestation rule and announced a fund to protect growers. Oromia now collects a coffee levy in farmers’ name. Yet ask what farmers have received, how much of the country the system covers, or where the money has gone, and the public record falls silent. Since August, I have sent six written requests to three federal institutions seeking answers. Not one has responded. I’m tired of the announcements, the unanswered questions, and the expectation that the public should simply take officials at their word.

On July 7, the Prime Minister announced $3.1 billion in coffee export earnings for 2025/26. Days earlier, the director general of the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority (ECTA) had announced about $3 billion at a press briefing. On July 15, the Authority’s Telegram channel, summarizing an internal management review, reported 440,000 tons exported for $3.13 billion and called it the highest result in the country’s history. That volume fell 160,000 tons short of the government’s own 600,000-tonne target, a miss of more than a quarter that the celebratory post did not mention.

If the earnings figure is accurate, the credit belongs first to the farmers who grew the coffee. Nearly four months after the fiscal year closed, the public still cannot examine the complete account behind it. What coffee was counted, under which product definitions, on what valuation basis and over which reporting period? So far, the public has been given a speech in Parliament, a post on Telegram and the Ministry of Agriculture repeating the same number. Repetition is not verification. Publish the account.

What did the farmer get?

The National Bank reported the previous year’s coffee exports to the nearest ten kilograms. The Coffee and Tea Authority sets a minimum export price every week. Yet Ethiopia still lacks a regular, nationally comparable public account of what growers actually receive, by region and season, alongside production costs. The government measures coffee at the border with precision. Why does that precision disappear when the money is traced back to the farmer?

Ask what share of export value reaches the grower and the answers are 40, 60 or 80 percent, depending on the source. Where is the reproducible calculation? The frequently repeated 60 percent figure traces through a 2019 paper to an older TechnoServe business case. The paper’s lead author confirmed to me in writing that he had not calculated it independently. These percentages cannot replace actual transaction records.

A state that weighs its coffee to ten kilograms at the border has no excuse for leaving what farmers were paid out of the public account.

A record beyond the farmer’s reach

From December 30, large and medium operators placing coffee on the European market must demonstrate that it is traceable, legally produced and not linked to deforestation after 2020. Ethiopia has built a national traceability system with German support and tested it in Sidama. Other coffee-producing countries are building such systems too. The difference lies in what the public is told.

In an undated procurement document, Uganda’s agriculture ministry reports 1.6 million coffee farms mapped out of an estimated 2.8 million. The only Ethiopian national figure I have found comes secondhand, from a foreign government: the US Department of Agriculture reported in May that, according to the Coffee and Tea Authority, “hundreds of thousands” of plots had been mapped and registered.

Hundreds of thousands out of how many? ECTA’s figure of 5.9 million coffee growers does not answer that: growers and plots are different units. In July, the director general declared data gathering complete. On October 25, according to Capital, the Authority said that more than 99 percent of Ethiopia’s coffee farms are deforestation-free, and that European buyers in five countries have been given access to data to verify their supply chains. That is the Authority’s word for it. How can it vouch for 99 percent of farms when it has not said how many it has mapped? Weeks before that claim, new research from the Rift Valley Institute found that “neither the ECTA nor regional governments are well prepared” for the EU rule, citing a lack of technical capacity, “especially in the geo-location of coffee farms.” Publish the count, the denominator, the districts and the coffee volume supported by a verified plot-to-export chain.

Since the Authority has not published a national map of its claimed mapped plots, I made a map of what an outsider can establish. It shows every zone where Ethiopia’s 2021/22 agricultural survey recorded smallholder coffee growers, and the places where specific mapping activity is publicly documented. It does not identify every mapped plot or claim to locate unmapped plots. The national system was tested in Shebedino, Sidama. A Farm Africa/Farmforce pilot in Bale and Illubabor mapped 3,619 farms. Farmforce reported that transferring the pilot data to the national system was paused at the time of its account. Whether that transfer has since been completed is not established.

What this map cannot show is the very information the Authority should make public: where national coverage is complete, where gaps remain and how much coffee is affected.

Every zone where the 2021/22 national agricultural survey recorded smallholder coffee growers, and places where plot mapping is publicly documented. Sources are printed on the map.

In ECTA’s published registration guide, the individual farmer is a source of coffee, not one of the six categories permitted to open an account. Those categories are exporters, warehouses, suppliers, unions, cooperatives and primary industry. I have found no published procedure telling a farmer how to see the record attached to her plot or get it corrected when it is wrong.

ECTA says foreign buyers have access to the data. So an importer in Germany can check where a farmer’s coffee was grown, while the farmer has no published way to look at the same record, let alone correct it. If a correction procedure exists, it is one of the best-kept secrets in Ethiopian coffee.

The consequences can begin at the collection point. Where verified origin carries a premium, a sebsabi has an incentive to offer less for coffee from a plot without usable documentation. No national transaction series establishes how often that happens or the size of any discount. That is precisely why the missing record of actual farm-gate prices matters.

A farmer may have preserved forest cover for decades and still face a lower offer because a plot was not mapped or its record cannot travel through the system. She did not build the databases and has no say in how they connect. Why should she pay when they fail?

Promises in the farmer’s name

In July, the Coffee and Tea Authority described plans for a Coffee Fund to cushion price shocks and help replace ageing trees. Farmers have needed that protection for years. Where does the Fund stand today? What has been approved, what remains undecided and when will it become operational? Nothing published answers any of it.

The Authority’s deputy director publicly described compensating suppliers who have bought coffee when falling world prices cause exporters to stop buying. That may protect traders from losses. For farmers, he offered only that the Fund would train and support them when they face market losses or production problems. But what does it pay the farmer whose price has fallen? Who qualifies, what triggers a payment and how will anyone establish that assistance reached the grower, directly or through an intermediary?

A family that uproots its old trees loses that income for years while the new ones grow. What is it supposed to live on in the meantime? The Authority has published no rules on income support, no financing plan and no timetable.

Oromia, meanwhile, has introduced a levy in farmers’ name. Last December, Addis Fortune reported a five-percent charge on coffee bought for export, assessed on half its market value, with proceeds intended for farmer training, quality and rural infrastructure. An Oromia Trade Bureau notice reproduced in Rift Valley Institute research specifies collection at five birr per kilogram. Which formula governs actual collections? The public should not have to untangle two different descriptions of a charge that is already being collected.

The coffee industry association negotiated concessions, including tax deductibility. Its chairman publicly worried about what rising prices in farmers’ markets would mean for exporters. What voice did smallholders have in those negotiations? An expert quoted by Fortune warned that exporters could pass losses on to suppliers and farmers through lower prices. The new Rift Valley Institute study of the Jimma belt raises the same pass-through concern about the levy.

How much has Oromia collected? Which zones paid it? Where has the money gone? Who benefited?

The same Fortune report mentioned a regional study suggesting that green coffee sold below 100 birr a kilogram was not viable for most farmers. Publish that study. Publish the levy’s receipts, spending and results. Show whether farmers benefited or bore yet another cost.

Money collected in farmers’ names cannot be accountable only to those who collect it.

The problem goes deeper than missing records and unanswered letters. The Rift Valley Institute’s 2026 synthesis of three major coffee belts finds that “corruption is widespread in the coffee sector, involving cooperative leaders, local officials and state institutions,” among them law enforcement and customs. It finds that “patronage and clientelism heavily influence licensing, land grants and coffee marketing,” and that smallholders “continue to receive little benefit for their participation.” These are research findings, not court rulings against particular individuals. But they call for an independent investigation, not another round of official reassurance. In 2022, when a national anti-corruption committee was set up, the Prime Minister called corruption “a termite that hollows a country” and asked citizens to help expose it. Independent researchers now say the termites are at work in coffee. What is his government going to do about it?

Who will answer?

Between August 17 and October 5, I sent six written requests to the Coffee and Tea Authority, the National Bank and the Ministry of Planning and Development. The questions concerned the export account, the figures behind official claims and how the national traceability system works.

The requests and review dates are publicly logged. None of the three institutions answered by the review dates, and none has answered since. A foreign development partner answered within days and pointed me to the responsible office at ECTA. That office has ignored both of my letters.

A public export account, the rules of a public fund and an explanation of a public traceability platform should not depend on knowing the right person. If these institutions will not answer a researcher with a public log and a newspaper column, what chance does a farmer have of correcting a boundary, challenging a price or finding out whether promised support will ever arrive?

Many Ethiopians gave this government the benefit of the doubt. Its leaders promised openness, invited criticism and called for dialogue rather than confrontation. On July 7, the same day the Prime Minister announced the coffee earnings, he told Parliament that he had led more than 225 public dialogue forums. Dialogue, it seems, does not extend to answering letters.

Transparency cannot stop at the podium. It must reach the ministries, authorities, regional bureaus and local offices where figures are recorded, money collected, decisions made and people turned away. A citizen invited to dialogue but denied the evidence has been invited only to applaud.

What angers me is the casual treatment of these failures as paperwork. They concern what farmers are paid, whether their coffee can command its full value, whether a household can receive protection and where money collected in communities’ names goes. Farmers carry these risks in real life while officials issue reassuring statements.

Publish the complete 2025/26 coffee export account, including its scope, method, volume, value and performance against targets. Publish actual farm-gate prices and production costs by region and season. Publish validated plot counts against a national plot total, by district, and show which records are connected to the national system.

Give farmers a way to inspect and correct their own records. Tell the public the Coffee Fund’s status and publish its financing, eligibility and payment rules. Account for Oromia’s levy, birr by birr. Investigate the governance failures identified in independent research. Answer the questions.

The farmers have delivered the coffee. The government owes them an account.

Supporting records: Coffee Monitor Questions · Coffee Monitor Research · ECTA July 15 statement · Capital October 25 report · Rift Valley Institute synthesis · RVI Jimma study. Map sources are printed on the figure.

Coffee in Retrospect: "A Grocery in Congress" (1906)

2026-10-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

It is staggering to know 95 per cent. of the people who think they drink Mocha and Java every day have been deceived, and yet the facts seem to be rather plain.

A GROCERY IN CONGRESS

The Lowell Ledger (Lowell, Michigan), page 6; the same syndicated article ran in The Kiowa Breeze (Kiowa, Indian Territory) on July 27, 1906

July 26, 1906

REPRESENTATIVE MANN PLAYS SALESMAN AND DRUGGIST TO UNMASK FRAUDS.

Short Weight and Fraudulent Foods the Lure of Many Department Stores and Mail Order Houses. Honest Dealers Handicapped by Deceptions.

When the pure food bill was before the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, intense interest was displayed by the members of that body in a "grocery store" established by Representative Mann of Illinois. Mr. Mann had been given a special privilege by the House committee having the bill in charge to demonstrate the manner in which the ordinary food products of the country are adulterated, and how the consumer is defrauded. The space in front of the speaker's desk resembled a small section of a delicatessen store and a corner grocery with cereals, jams, jellies, tins of peas, tomatoes, corn, prepared spices, bottles of whiskey and wine, imported sausages, brandied cherries and other edibles and drinkables scattered over two tables. Representative Mann proceeded to demonstrate to the House through these various food products the necessity for a national pure food law.

One of the first articles taken up by the Congressman was the ordinary condiment, pepper, which to the lay mind is considered too cheap for any manufacturer to spend time in adulterating. He read circulars from numerous concerns offering for sale a certain grade of adulterant which could be used to produce pepper or almost any other of the spices with some slight modification. As he scattered a package of this over his desk the members in the vicinity started back in order to avoid the usual sneezing which follows the inhalation of a small quantity of pepper. But they were reassured by the "groceryman" that it was not harmful, for while it was called pepper it was nothing but ground olive pits. He convulsed the House when he read the price list of adulterants showing that they were offered to the trade for $20 a ton in five-ton lots, and that at that rate they were guaranteed to make the finest black pepper which, as everyone knows, is sold by the ounce. He made the statement that even the pepper berry itself was adulterated by a cleverly contrived manufacture of tapioca colored with lamp black.

Possibly the most striking demonstration of the afternoon was one with a bottle of red cherries. These cherries, it was explained, were picked green, and that after being bleached out white by the use of a powerful acid, had been colored the brilliant red by the use of coal tar dye, a deadly poison if used in large quantities. Representative Mann dipped a piece of white cloth in the "juice" of these cherries, and it partook of a brilliant red as though it had just come from a dyers.

Olive oil, explained Mr. Mann, is a product which is in most cases, adulterated. In many instances the counterfeit is merely American cotton seed oil, a wholesome and satisfactory dressing for salad, but it costs about 1/4 as much as real olive oil, and the American buyer certainly does not care to purchase a dressing for four times its actual worth.

HIVELESS HONEY.

One of the freak exhibits was a bottle of "honey" which, in order to complete the assurance of the buyer that the article was genuine, contained, as if by accident, the body of a real bee, yet the whole mess was pure and simple glucose, and had never been near a hive, much less a comb. The hive probably was a ten story factory in one of the large cities.

A bottle of "Freezine" was exhibited by Mr. Mann, who explained that this remarkable article was guaranteed to preserve meat from the action of the air and stop decay. While he admitted that it would stop the action of nature on meats, he claimed that the preservative itself was actually poisonous, containing sulphide of soda with red coal tar dye and could not be used safely upon human food.

The public is unwittingly defrauded to a great extent through short weight and short measure in package goods, explained Mr. Mann, and he insisted that the manufacturers should be compelled to state on the label the quantity contained in the bottle or carton. In line with this was a dramatic demonstration when the Chicago pure food expert held up before the House a bottle supposed to contain a quart of vinegar, which when poured into a large graduate did not nearly reach the quart mark thereon, in fact was three inches below it. Raisins, currants and numerous other articles of food are apparently put up in pound packages and so the buyer considers, but in fact few of those on the market really contain a full pound.

DEPARTMENT STORE BARGAINS.

"It is the department stores and mail order houses," said the demonstrator, "which make profit from short weight cans and under-sized bottles. We are seeking to protect the legitimate grocery and the honest canner from men who are willing to make money by depriving the people of things they think they are getting. All that we urge is that an approximate weight or measure may be put upon each one of these packages and then, if the public chooses to buy a smaller package at a smaller price it may do so, but the manufacturers and dealers must not any longer deceive the people as to how much they are buying."

BREAKFAST FOODS A DELUSION.

On the tables where Mr. Mann, ably but silently assisted by Mr. Stevens of Minnesota, acted now as groceryman, now as druggist, and now as bartender, there were a dozen or more packages of breakfast foods with their familiar labels. A reference to table weights and skillful dropping of packages upon a balance scale in front of him enabled Mr. Mann to show that in a great many cases the public paid full price for an abnormal amount of pasteboard box. In scarce any case did the prepared food weigh twice as much as the box, and in many instances food and package were in nearly equal proportion.

Everybody knew, as Mr. Mann stated, that 25 per cent. of all the coffee used in the United States is sold as a mixture of Java and Mocha. He was prepared to show from official figures that while we used last year more that a billion pounds of coffee, and while about 250,000,000 pounds were supposed to be Mocha and Java, there were actually imported into this country last year only a fraction over 2,000,000 pounds of Mocha and 10,000,000 pounds of Java, or approximately less than 13,000,000 pounds, or only 5 per cent. of the popular blend. It is staggering to know 95 per cent. of the people who think they drink Mocha and Java every day have been deceived, and yet the facts seem to be rather plain.

Figures like these, however, although ordinarily impressive and convincing, did not attract so much attention in the House, because the members were so absorbed in the practical demonstration of the extent to which fraudulent manufacturers of food products have been willing to go in the way of swindling the public.

Editor's note. Transcribed from the page image of the Lowell Ledger and checked against the Kiowa Breeze printing (Gateway to Oklahoma History). Representative James R. Mann of Illinois managed the Pure Food and Drugs Act on the House floor; the Act became law on June 30, 1906, a few weeks before this story ran. The coffee passage is the reason it belongs here. The figures are the article's own and they describe labels, not origins: the piece never says where the coffee sold as "Mocha and Java" actually came from. Within two years the Department of Agriculture would answer that question for Mocha, and Ethiopia would be at the centre of the answer. "More that a billion" is as printed. Public domain.

Coffee in Retrospect: What the 1903 treaty between Menelik II and the United States did and did not say

2026-10-26T16:51:08.233-07:00

The first treaty between Ethiopia and the United States never mentions coffee. The mission that negotiated it had a coffee errand all the same, and the treaty set the terms on which Americans would later buy Ethiopian coffee.

On December 27, 1903, Robert P. Skinner, the American consul general at Marseille, signed a short commercial treaty with Emperor Menelik II in Addis Ababa. Theodore Roosevelt had sent him at the head of the first American mission to the Ethiopian court. The party came up from the coast by way of Harar, where, Skinner reported, their reception "had not been devoid of military pomp." Menelik had defeated an Italian army at Adwa seven years earlier, and the railway from Jibuti had reached Dire Dawa only the year before. Britain, France and Italy had all signed agreements with him in the 1890s. The Americans were late.

The English text in the State Department's records has a small detail I like. It dates the treaty the "seventeenth day of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-six in the year of grace," then adds in brackets that this corresponds to December 27, 1903. The month has been put into English, but the day and the year are Ethiopian: the seventeenth of Tahsas, 1896. In the European calendar, 1896 was the year of Adwa.

The treaty itself runs to seven short articles, and none of them names a product. Citizens of each country could travel and do business in the other, respecting local custom and answering to local courts. Each government would protect traders and their property. Each would give the other's citizens whatever it gave any other foreign power in customs duties, taxes and jurisdiction. Americans in Ethiopia could use the telegraph, the post and other transport on the same terms as other foreigners. The two governments would exchange representatives, and an envoy who stopped being acceptable would be replaced. The treaty would run for ten years, and it would take effect only if Washington ratified it and informed Menelik within a year. Menelik was notified of the ratification on August 2, 1904, and Roosevelt proclaimed the treaty on September 30.

Coffee is nowhere in it. I say so plainly because it is tempting, in a series like this one, to read the treaty as the beginning of the American coffee trade with Ethiopia. Skinner's own summary of the mission, which the New York Times printed in February 1904, shows what he had actually gone for. His job, he wrote, was to safeguard "a valuable existing market in Ethiopia" for American goods and to increase it "by all legitimate means." The Americans came to sell. Buying came later.

Coffee was on his list, though not as trade. The Department of Agriculture had asked him for wild coffee seed. Its experts believed that plantation coffee had degenerated because it was all grown from seed first taken out of Arabia, and that going back to the wild plant in Kaffa might give them a new variety "the value of which will be incalculable." Skinner could not get the seed. It grew only in Kaffa, he explained, and getting there meant "a long and expensive journey," so he placed an order and left. He had no better luck with the pair of large zebras he had hoped to bring home for cross-breeding. I reprinted that report here in 2011, and it reads differently to me now. In 1904 Washington's interest in Ethiopian coffee was in the wild plant, not in the people who grew coffee or the trade they ran.

In the treaty itself, the article I find most telling is the first. Americans doing business in Ethiopia would answer to Ethiopian courts. In those years, across much of Asia and Africa, European powers insisted that their citizens be tried by their own consuls rather than by local judges, and they usually got their way. Menelik's treaty asked Americans to accept his tribunals. There is a qualification in Article III, which promised Americans any advantage in jurisdiction that Ethiopia granted another power, so a privilege won by the French or the British would pass to them too. But the starting point was Ethiopian law, and the document reads as an agreement between two governments, not a concession taken from one of them.

For coffee, Article III was the clause that counted. It never names a crop, but it meant that an American buying coffee in Harar would pay no more in Ethiopian duties than a French or British buyer standing next to him. Skinner told Washington the treaty would secure these privileges "for all time." The treaty itself said ten years. How many American buyers followed Skinner to Harar, these records do not say. The coffee was reaching them all the same. By 1908 the American consular agent at Aden was telling Washington that a considerable quantity of Harar coffee passed through his port on its way to Europe and the United States.

Skinner went home and wrote a book about the mission, Abyssinia of To-Day, published in 1906. The treaty he brought back made the American buyer the equal of any European in Ethiopia. It had nothing to say about the Ethiopian who sold him the coffee, and no one would expect a commercial treaty to say it. That was left to the market in Harar. Nothing in these American papers tells us what that market paid.

The treaty and Roosevelt's proclamation are reprinted in full in this series from the State Department's official record.

Sources.

U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904, Document 258 (treaty and proclamation). Office of the Historian.
"Skinner and the Negus," The New York Times, February 22, 1904, reprinted in Coffee in Retrospect, October 2011. Poor Farmer.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Inspection Decision 91 (1908), quoting the consular agent at Aden. Internet Archive.

Coffee in Retrospect: The Treaty of Commerce between Menelik II and the United States (1903)

2026-10-26T16:49:59.228-07:00

His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and the United States of America, having agreed to regulate the commercial relations between the two countries and develop them...

TREATY OF COMMERCE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ETHIOPIA, WITH THE PROCLAMATION OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT

Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), Document 258, pages 298 to 300

Signed at Addis Ababa, December 27, 1903; proclaimed September 30, 1904

By the President of the United States of America. A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas a treaty of commerce between the United States of America and His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, was concluded on the twenty-seventh day of December one thousand nine hundred and three, the original of which treaty, being in the Amharic and French languages, is word for word as follows:

(Translation.) TREATY OF COMMERCE.

His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and the United States of America, having agreed to regulate the commercial relations between the two countries and develop them, and render them more and more advantageous to the two contracting Powers:

His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, in the name of the Empire, and Robert P. Skinner, in the name of the United States of America, have agreed and stipulated that which follows:

Article I. The citizens of the two Powers, like the citizens of other countries, shall be able freely to travel and to transact business throughout the extent of the territories of the two contracting Powers, while respecting the usages and submitting themselves to the tribunals of the countries in which they may be located.

Article II. In order to facilitate commercial relations, the two Governments shall assure, throughout the extent of their respective territories, the security of those engaged in business therein, and of their property.

Article III. The two contracting Governments shall reciprocally grant to all citizens of the United States of America and to the citizens of Ethiopia, all the advantages which they shall accord to other Powers in respect to customs duties, imposts and jurisdiction.

Article IV. Throughout the extent of the Ethiopian Empire, the citizens of the United States of America shall have the use of the telegraphs, posts and all other means of transportation upon the same terms as the citizens of other Powers.

Article V. In order to perpetuate and strengthen the friendly relations which exist between Ethiopia and the United States of America, the two Governments agree to receive reciprocally, representatives acceptable to the two Governments. These representatives shall not however, be maintained at their posts, unless they are agreeable to the receiving Power, in such cases, they shall be replaced.

Article VI. The duration of the present treaty shall be ten years. It is understood that at the expiration of these ten years the two Governments shall be able to modify all or any part of this treaty. The Government which shall request at that time the modification, shall make its proposal to the other Government one year before the expiration of the treaty.

Article VII. The present treaty shall take effect if ratified by the Government of the United States, and if this ratification shall be notified to His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, within the period of one year.

His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, in the name of his Empire; Robert P. Skinner in virtue of his full powers, in the name of the United States of America, have signed the present treaty, written in double text, Amharic and French, and in identical terms.

Done at Addis-Ababa, this seventeenth day of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-six in the year of grace (corresponding to December twenty-seventh, 1903).

[Seal of Menelik II.] (Signed) Robert P. Skinner.

And whereas it is provided by the said treaty that it shall take effect "if ratified by the Government of the United States of America and if this ratification shall be notified to His Majesty King Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, within the period of one year";

And whereas the said treaty has been duly ratified on the part of the United States of America and notification of such ratification was given to His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, on the second day of August, one thousand nine hundred and four;

Now, therefore, be it known that I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, have caused the said treaty to be made public, to the end that the same and every article and clause thereof may be observed and fulfilled with good faith by the United States and citizens thereof.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and twenty-ninth.

[seal] Theodore Roosevelt By the President: Francis B. Loomis, Acting Secretary of State.

Editor's note. This is the official English translation of the treaty negotiated by Robert P. Skinner, the American consul general at Marseille who led the first United States mission to Ethiopia. The original was in Amharic and French. The signing clause dates it the seventeenth of December 1896 "in the year of grace," which is the Ethiopian date, 17 Tahsas 1896, with the month put into English, and gives December 27, 1903 beside it. Read it for what it does not say as much as for what it does: the word coffee appears nowhere. The treaty sets the ground rules of travel, security, customs treatment and most-favored-nation status under which American merchants could later buy Ethiopian coffee; it grants no privilege in coffee itself. Skinner's own report on the mission, including the wild coffee seed the Department of Agriculture had asked him to bring back from Kaffa, appeared in the New York Times in February 1904 and was reprinted here in 2011. A United States government publication, in the public domain.

Coffee in Retrospect: The price of coffee and the cost of the road to Berbera

2026-10-25T04:03:30.126-07:00

In 1855 it cost more to carry Harar coffee to the sea than to buy it. Thirty-two years later, a newspaper in New Zealand called the town a great emporium of the coffee trade. Neither tells us what the grower was paid.

Richard Burton spent ten days in Harar in January 1855. By his own account he was the first European to enter the town. He met the Amir and spent most of his stay waiting for leave to go. Yet in the short chapter he wrote about the place, he stopped to record what a load of coffee cost.

A parcel of twenty-seven pounds sold in Harar for a quarter of a dollar. To hire a camel to carry twelve of those parcels to Berbera, on the Somali coast, cost five dollars. Twelve parcels came to three dollars of coffee. The camel cost five. Burton did the sum in the same sentence and concluded that "the profit did not repay labour and risk."

I keep returning to that sentence. Burton was a traveller repeating prices he was told, not a merchant keeping books, and the quarter dollar was the price in town, not what a farmer in the gardens outside the walls received. But the shape of it is hard to miss. In 1855 the road to the sea was worth more than the coffee, and whoever controlled the road controlled the trade. Burton heard the people of Harar say as much themselves: "He who commands at Berberah, holds the beard of Harar in his hand."

He wrote down two other things he was told about the Amir. One was that the Amir held coffee back so as not to flood the market at Berbera. The other was that the Harash, the men who tended the coffee, were forbidden to travel, so that the skill of growing it would not leave the country. Burton gave both as hearsay. Still, they describe a ruler who decided how much coffee went out and who kept the growers where he could use them. A reader in Ethiopia today will not find that unfamiliar.

Burton also told the Amir he was sorry Harar coffee was not better known among Europeans. That changed within a generation. On January 26, 1887, The Press in Christchurch, New Zealand, printed a short Reuters cable from Aden. Abyssinian forces had defeated the Emir's army and taken Harar. The battle was Chelenqo, and the army was Menelik's. Because its readers would not know the place, the paper added a note: Harar "is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade."

The editor's note gets several things wrong. It puts Harar three degrees too far south and calls it the ancient capital of the Hadya, which it never was. But the one fact the editor thought his readers needed was coffee. By 1887 the name of a walled town in eastern Ethiopia could be explained to a reader in Canterbury in a single line, and the line was about its coffee.

So in thirty years Harar went from a place whose coffee was worth less than the camel that carried it to a name known on the other side of the world. What I could not find, in Burton or in The Press, is what the people who grew it were paid. Burton tells us the cultivators owed the Amir a tenth of their harvest, paid in kind. We know the price in the market and the cost of the road. We know who held the beard of Harar. We do not know what the Harash took home.

That gap runs through every document in this series. The consular reports, the court rulings and the trade treaties that follow are careful about ports, names, duties and quotas. On the grower they are almost always silent. When a price does appear, it is the price at the town gate, at the port or on the exchange in New York.

Both sources are reprinted in full in this series: the 1887 telegram and Burton's chapter on Harar.

Sources.

Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa; or, An Exploration of Harar (London, 1856), Chapter VIII. Project Gutenberg text.
"Home and Foreign," The Press (Christchurch), January 26, 1887, p. 5. Papers Past.

Coffee in Retrospect: Richard Burton on the coffee of Harar (1856)

2026-10-25T03:59:55.964-07:00

When I visited Harar, the price per parcel of twenty-seven pounds was a quarter of a dollar, and the hire of a camel carrying twelve parcels to Berberah was five dollars: the profit did not repay labour and risk.

TEN DAYS AT HARAR: THE TRADE OF THE CITY

Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa; or, An Exploration of Harar (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), Chapter VIII

1856 (describing January 1855)

Harar is essentially a commercial town: its citizens live, like those of Zayla, by systematically defrauding the Galla Bedouins, and the Amir has made it a penal offence to buy by weight and scale. He receives, as octroi, from eight to fifteen cubits of Cutch canvass for every donkey-load passing the gates, consequently the beast is so burdened that it must be supported by the drivers. Cultivators are taxed ten per cent., the general and easy rate of this part of Africa, but they pay in kind, which considerably increases the Government share. The greatest merchant may bring to Harar 50l. worth of goods, and he who has 20l. of capital is considered a wealthy man. The citizens seem to have a more than Asiatic apathy, even in pursuit of gain. When we entered, a caravan was to set out for Zayla on the morrow; after ten days, hardly one half of its number had mustered. The four marches from the city eastward are rarely made under a fortnight, and the average rate of their Kafilahs is not so high even as that of the Somal.

The principal exports from Harar are slaves, ivory, coffee, tobacco, Wars (safflower or bastard saffron), Tobes and woven cottons, mules, holcus, wheat, "Karanji," a kind of bread used by travellers, ghee, honey, gums (principally mastic and myrrh), and finally sheep's fat and tallows of all sorts. The imports are American sheeting, and other cottons, white and dyed, muslins, red shawls, silks, brass, sheet copper, cutlery (generally the cheap German), Birmingham trinkets, beads and coral, dates, rice, and loaf sugar, gunpowder, paper, and the various other wants of a city in the wild.

[Two paragraphs on the slave trade and the ivory monopoly are omitted here.]

The coffee of Harar is too well known in the markets of Europe to require description: it grows in the gardens about the town, in greater quantities amongst the Western Gallas, and in perfection at Jarjar, a district of about seven days' journey from Harar on the Efat road. It is said that the Amir withholds this valuable article, fearing to glut the Berberah market: he has also forbidden the Harash, or coffee cultivators, to travel lest the art of tending the tree be lost. When I visited Harar, the price per parcel of twenty-seven pounds was a quarter of a dollar, and the hire of a camel carrying twelve parcels to Berberah was five dollars: the profit did not repay labour and risk.

[Paragraphs on tobacco, safflower and woven cloth are omitted here.]

Three caravans leave Harar every year for the Berberah market. The first starts early in January, laden with coffee, Tobes, Wars, ghee, gums, and other articles to be bartered for cottons, silks, shawls, and Surat tobacco. The second sets out in February. The principal caravan, conveying slaves, mules, and other valuable articles, enters Berberah a few days before the close of the season: it numbers about 3000 souls, and is commanded by one of the Amir's principal officers, who enjoys the title of Ebi or leader. Any or all of these kafilahs might be stopped by spending four or five hundred dollars amongst the Jibril Abokr tribe, or even by a sloop of war at the emporium. "He who commands at Berberah, holds the beard of Harar in his hand," is a saying which I heard even within the city walls.

From Burton's footnote 40 to the same chapter:

In the best coffee countries, Harar and Yemen, the berry is reserved for exportation. The Southern Arabs use for economy and health, the bean being considered heating, the Kishr or follicle. This in Harar is a woman's drink. The men considering the berry too dry and heating for their arid atmosphere, toast the leaf on a girdle, pound it and prepare an infusion which they declare to be most wholesome, but which certainly suggests weak senna. The boiled coffee-leaf has been tried and approved of in England; we omit, however, to toast it.

Editor's note. Burton entered Harar on January 3, 1855, by his own account the first European to do so, and left on the 13th. The "dollar" is the Maria Theresa thaler. His figures give a clean sum: twelve parcels of coffee at a quarter-dollar each cost three dollars in the town; the camel to carry them to Berbera cost five. Burton's own conclusion follows in the same sentence. The saying he records, "He who commands at Berberah, holds the beard of Harar in his hand," is the earliest statement in this archive of a theme that runs through everything that follows: whoever holds the road to the port holds the coffee. Burton wrote as a Victorian officer and his language about the peoples he met reflects it; the text is reprinted as published. The bracketed omissions are ours. Public domain.

Coffee in Retrospect: "A great emporium of the coffee trade" (1887)

2026-10-25T03:56:53.339-07:00

It is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade.

WAR IN SOMALI. ABYSSINIAN FORCES OCCUPY HARAR.

The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), page 5

January 26, 1887

HOME AND FOREIGN.

[Reuter's Telegrams.] Received January 25th, 1.15 p.m.

WAR IN SOMALI.

Aden, January 24.

News has been received from Somali that the Abyssinian forces attacked and completely routed the Ameer of Harar's troops. They then occupied the town of Harar. The Ameer, however, escaped.

[Harar is a town of N.E. Africa, situate in lat. 6deg 20min N., long. 42deg 17min E. It was the ancient capital of the Hadyah. It is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade. It is situate about 5500 ft above the level of the sea, and has a population of 8000.]

Editor's note. This is the whole of the item as printed, a Reuters telegram from Aden with the newspaper's own bracketed note. The battle it reports is Chelenqo, fought on January 6, 1887, after which Menelik's army entered Harar and Emir Abdullahi fled. Two details in the note are wrong: Harar lies near latitude 9 degrees north, not 6, and it was the seat of the Emirate of Harar, not "the ancient capital of the Hadyah." The telegram's spelling of Somali, rendered by the scan as "Soumali" and "Somauli," has been normalised; nothing else has been changed. What the note gets right is the point of reprinting it: in 1887 a newspaper on the far side of the world could introduce Harar to its readers in one phrase, as a coffee emporium. Transcribed from the digitised page at Papers Past; the 1887 text is in the public domain.

Part 6: The Coffee Year Closed. The Account Did Not.

2026-08-21T10:20:52.540-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

A postscript to the series, six weeks after Part 5.

When Part 5 ran on July 7, Ethiopia's fiscal year had closed and the Prime Minister had told Parliament that coffee exports earned 3.1 billion dollars.

One question was deliberately left open: what would the written close-of-year account show?

The Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority had already offered an explanation for the record. Better grades, more specialty coffee, direct sales, new markets and tighter control of diversion had allowed Ethiopia to earn more even as the international reference price fell. I wrote then that the final account should show how much of the result came from price, how much from volume, how much from quality mix, and how much from stock drawdown and coffee carried over from earlier harvests.

More than six weeks later, I still have not found that account.

A volume figure has surfaced, but not where anyone would think to look.

On August 19, Ethiopia Today reported that the Authority had fined exporters five percent of revenue for holding coffee off the market rather than supplying it during the harvest year. In the course of that report, it stated that Ethiopia closed the year with exports of about 430,000 metric tons worth 3.1 billion dollars.

I have not found the figure of 430,000 metric tons in any other published source, official or otherwise.

It may be right. But it is not the close-of-year account Part 5 was waiting for, and there is still no public table against which to check it.

The arithmetic, and what it cannot settle

The previous year's official record was 468,967 metric tons and 2.65 billion dollars. If the new figures are measured on the same basis, export volume fell by roughly eight percent while the average export value rose from about 5.65 dollars a kilogram to 7.21, an increase of roughly 28 percent.

That would explain how Ethiopia earned substantially more while shipping less.

What it does not do is prove the Authority's explanation. A rise of that size could also come from a stronger world arabica market. Without the grade composition and destination mix, there is no way to tell how much came from better coffee and how much came from a higher market. Both can be true.

The hoarding story raises another question: timing. Coffee held back in one period can be sold in another. If stocks cross reporting periods, an annual total cannot tell the difference between a timing change and a change in current production.

When did the coffee move? How did the value change through the year? Which grades and origins accounted for the increase? How much came out of earlier stocks? How does each month compare with the same month a year before? A yearly total answers none of it. One published table of monthly export volume and value would answer most of it.

The National Bank of Ethiopia had already pointed at the same puzzle months earlier. Its March 31 Monetary Policy Committee release said coffee export volume had declined compared with the same period a year earlier. In the same release, the Bank reported significant improvement in exports, particularly coffee and gold, during the first eight months of 2025/26. It gave no coffee volume or value figures to quantify either statement.

That is a small data problem. It should also be a cheap one to solve.

The number still missing

But the larger problem this series uncovered was never the difference between 430,000 and 469,000 metric tons.

It was the number that could not be put on any of the charts.

What was the farmer paid?

Part 5 put the old claim that farmers received roughly 40 percent of coffee-sector revenue against the more recent claim that reform had raised the farmer share to 80 percent. Neither arrived with a published calculation showing the numerator, the denominator, regional differences, marketing channel or production costs.

There have been partial attempts. The Enveritas sustainability map publishes field-level indicators for Ethiopian coffee, and farm-gate price is among them. It appears as a category rather than a value. A category can describe a distribution. It cannot be reconciled against an export receipt, compared month to month, or used to calculate a benchmark.

So the series ended where it began. A record at the port is not a farm-gate account.

That is why the argument did not end with Part 5.

On July 18, Addis Fortune published The Missing Half of Ethiopia’s Coffee Plan. It argued that a national Coffee Fund should be designed around the grower, not around the financing difficulties of suppliers and exporters. The fuller framework is in my working paper, Beyond the Coffee Record: Farm-Gate Accounting and Income Stabilization in Ethiopia’s Coffee Sector, dated July 19 and later distributed through SSRN.

The design is deliberately narrow. Ethiopia needs a recurring regional farm-gate price series, a public estimate of what it costs a representative grower to stay in coffee, verified production and transactions, and payment made directly to eligible growers. One window would support approved rehabilitation and replanting, when a household has to survive while the trees recover. A second would provide temporary support when the regional farm-gate price falls below a published benchmark. Payment stops when the trigger disappears.

The institution that calculates the benchmark should not approve claims. The verifier should not move the money. Payments should reach growers directly. The arithmetic should be reproducible from outside government.

That is not a national coffee price and it is not a guaranteed profit. It is a way of keeping a temporary market or rehabilitation shock from becoming a permanent exit from coffee.

Two other pieces followed the same question. In African Arguments, Ethiopia Counts Coffee at the Wrong End asks what a record export year means to a household deciding whether coffee still earns enough, and often enough, to keep the land. In Hararghe, that decision is already visible in the movement from coffee to khat.

That movement is not new, and this blog has the receipts. In October 2009 I quoted Addis Fortune reporting that farmers with access to transport were dropping coffee in favor of khat, and a former grower in Harari who said export-quality khat brought him 300 to 500 Birr a kilogram while export-quality coffee brought him 25 to 35 Birr. Seventeen years later, a 2025 study of 788 households in East and West Hararghe found that 64 percent had made the same switch. The substitution was documented, then measured. What was never published, in 2009 or in 2025, is the farm-gate price that would have let anyone see it coming.

A second Addis Fortune commentary, Europe Needs the Plot, Ethiopia Needs the Price, asks whether the traceability system Ethiopia is already building for the European Union’s deforestation regulation could also record the first producer transaction. Europe requires Ethiopia to know where the coffee was grown. Ethiopia can use the same architecture to record what the farmer was paid. The missing farm-gate ledger may not require another national information system. It may require adding a small economic record to one already under construction.

Put the questions in writing

It is also why I rebuilt Coffee Monitor.

The point is not to add another set of claims about Ethiopian coffee. It is to keep apart five things that are routinely treated as though they were one: what no one publishes, what institutions collect but do not release, what officials state, what can be calculated from published figures, and what is published as a recurring series with definitions and a stated method.

Those are not the same thing. An announcement is evidence, and it may be authoritative evidence. A public series with definitions and a method can be checked, compared over time, corrected and used to design policy.

The standing questions there are deliberately narrow. A question belongs on that page only when a document, table or definition could close it.

One of those questions is now in writing. On August 17, I asked the National Bank of Ethiopia for the monthly coffee export volume and value figures underlying the 2025/26 record, together with the units, definitions and any revisions. If the table is already public and I have missed it, one retrievable citation closes the question and corrects the record.

That is how this should work. I am not trying to prove that an institution has no data. It may have the data and still not have a public record. The question is what someone outside the institution can retrieve, check and use.

The export question should be the easy one. The hard one remains at the other end of the chain. Even if the reported export volume of 430,000 metric tons is confirmed, even if the 3.1 billion dollars is reconciled exactly, and even if a monthly table shows precisely how Ethiopia earned more from less coffee, none of it tells us what growers in Jimma, Sidama, Guji, Hararghe or Yirgacheffe were paid. That requires the account that still does not exist publicly: a recurring farm-gate price series under a stated method.

Part 1 began with a record and asked what stood behind it. The coffee year has closed. The questions are more precise now. Some can be answered with a table. Others require building the record that should have existed all along.

The standard has not changed.

The port ledger tells us what the world paid.

The farm-gate ledger tells us whether the people who grew it can afford to grow it again.

Until both can be read, Ethiopia's record coffee year remains what it was at the beginning of this series: a record at the port, not an account at the farm gate.

Sources and related work

Part 5: What the Farmer Keeps, Poor Farmer, July 7, 2026: https://poorfarmer.blogspot.com/2026/07/part-5-what-farmer-keeps.html

Window dressing of Ethiopia’s coffee exchange, October 12, 2009: https://ethiopianreview.com/content/11037

Ethiopia Fines Coffee Exporters Over Unlawful Hoarding, Ethiopia Today, August 19, 2026: https://ethiopiatoday.net/ethiopia-fines-coffee-exporters-over-unlawful-hoarding/

National Bank of Ethiopia, Monetary Policy Committee Meeting No. 6, March 31, 2026: https://nbe.gov.et/nbe_news/press-release-monetary-policy-committee-meeting-no-6/

The Missing Half of Ethiopia’s Coffee Plan, Addis Fortune, July 18, 2026: https://addisfortune.news/the-missing-half-of-ethiopias-coffee-plan

Ethiopia Counts Coffee at the Wrong End, African Arguments, August 14, 2026: https://africanarguments.org/2026/08/ethiopia-counts-coffee-at-the-wrong-end/

Europe Needs the Plot, Ethiopia Needs the Price, Addis Fortune, August 14, 2026: https://addisfortune.news/europe-needs-the-plot-ethiopia-needs-the-price

Ethiopian Coffee Map, Enveritas: https://ethiopia-sustainability.enveritas.org/

Beyond the Coffee Record, policy brief: https://coffeemonitor.com/files/Beyond-the-Coffee-Record-Policy-Brief.pdf

Beyond the Coffee Record, working paper on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7142558

Coffee Monitor: https://coffeemonitor.com/

Standing Questions: https://coffeemonitor.com/questions

Poor Farmer | Coffee Politics | poorfarmer.blogspot.com

Part 5: What the farmer keeps

2026-07-07T08:34:55.959-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

The fifth and final post in the series.

The fiscal year has closed, and the Prime Minister says Ethiopia earned 3.1 billion dollars from coffee exports in 2025/26, up from 2.65 billion dollars the year before.

It will be celebrated, and it should be. Ethiopia has announced a five-year plan to raise productivity and push coffee-export earnings toward six billion dollars.

But a record at the port is not a farm-gate account.

That is where this series began, and it is where it ends. Not with the question of whether Ethiopia earned more. It did. The question is whether the grower kept more after the cost of producing, moving, and living through the coffee year.

The world price has already come down from its 2025 peak. Cherry prices rose to levels many washing stations could not finance. Costs remain high. And the one number that would settle the argument, what the smallholder kept after costs, in money that still buys what it bought before the windfall, is still not published.

The clearest sign that a record is not a raise is that washing stations closed during it. Cherry reportedly reached 220 to 250 birr a kilogram in parts of the 2025/26 harvest, about three times the previous season. On paper, a farmer's victory. In practice, the cash to buy cherry rose faster than many washing stations and exporters could finance, and reporting from the harvest described buyers holding back purchases and more farmers drying cherry at home for later sale. A high price is income only when someone can pay it, and the money to move the coffee was the scarcest thing in the chain.

There is a figure from inside the Authority that deserves to be remembered, even if its calculation was never published for public examination. In comments reported by Addis Fortune, Hairu Nuru, then the Authority's Market Information and Regulatory Director, said farmers received only about 40 percent of the total revenue generated by the coffee sector, with the remainder taken by collectors, suppliers, traders, wholesalers, the Exchange, and exporters.

That was not a current farm-gate survey, and I have not found the underlying calculation. It was an official's estimate of how the chain worked at the time. But the fact that such a figure could be stated without a public series behind it is part of the problem. If farmers receive forty percent, or sixty percent, or more than that today, the Authority should be able to show the country the calculation.

To be fair, the Authority has since made a very different claim. In 2025, it told the United States Department of Agriculture that the farmer share had risen from forty percent to eighty percent over five years as reforms shortened the chain and reduced reliance on intermediaries.

That would be important progress. But the calculation has not been published. The country has not been shown what was counted as the farmer's share, which price was used as the denominator, how the number differs by region, grade, or marketing channel, or whether it holds after the cost of producing coffee is deducted.

So the old forty percent and the newer eighty percent leave us at the same place: with a number, but no public ledger behind it.

Until that ledger exists, a record at the port tells us far more about exports than about the farmer's share.

The record was never a smooth climb, either. The ICO composite that averaged 354.32 cents in February 2025 was back to 273.70 by March 2026, 256.05 by May, and around 248 by June. The ICO has suggested that part of the 2024/25 export surge may have been supported by an unusually large drawdown of stocks as exporters took advantage of high world prices. Some of the growth, then, may have been coffee from an earlier harvest sold into a better market. That money was real. It does not recur simply because the headline does.

Put the pieces on one chart and the broad pattern is hard to miss. Through 2024/25, Ethiopia's export earnings moved closely with the world price. The cost of living the farmer carries climbed through the same period and did not come back down. In the lean years, it ran ahead of the sector's own earnings.

The 2025/26 result is the claimed break in that pattern. The Authority says better quality, direct sales, grade selection, market diversification, and tighter control of diversion allowed Ethiopia to earn more even as the New York reference price fell. The final account should show how much of that break came from price, volume, quality mix, stock drawdown, and the sale of coffee harvested in earlier years.

The price boom lifted export earnings; the farmer's costs stayed up

The one line that would settle the argument is the line missing from that chart, what the smallholder kept after costs, in money that still buys what it bought five years ago. It is absent because no one publishes it. A picture with a clean hole where the answer belongs is, in its way, the most honest one I can give you.

The Authority has an explanation for the break in the line, and it deserves a fair hearing. At the press conference announcing the record, its Director General, Adugna Debela, said Ethiopia earned it against a falling market, not because the market carried it there. He pointed to the New York price falling from around four dollars a pound a year earlier to roughly two dollars and forty to two dollars and fifty now. At the same time, he said Ethiopian coffee that had sold near six thousand dollars a tonne the previous year was selling near seventy-five hundred.

He attributed the difference to a move away from commercial and under-grade coffee into specialty and grades one through three; to direct quality-negotiated sales rather than sales tied only to the New York reference; to new buyers in more countries; and to tighter control of diversion and shipment tracking. If the final account supports those claims, it is a real accomplishment. Ethiopia should say so plainly.

But the explanation makes another absence harder to ignore. The Authority can tell the country how it improved the export side: the grades, the markets, the logistics, the buyers, the export price, and the foreign exchange earned. What it still does not publish is the matching account at the farm gate: what the kilo of cherry brought in each producing region, what it cost to grow, what share of the export gain reached the household, and whether that household was better off after costs.

Port accounting and farm-gate accounting are not the same thing. One does not automatically produce the other. But once the export side can be described in this detail, the absence of a regular farm-gate series is no longer a minor omission. It is the number needed to tell the country what the record meant.

Volatility, not the record, is the permanent condition. Colombia is not Ethiopia's twin, but it offers a useful lesson because it built institutions around the fact that coffee growers cannot wait for the market to recover.

The first is a purchase guarantee. Through the growers' federation and its cooperative network, a Colombian producer has a buyer available at a published, market-based price. It does not guarantee a high price. It guarantees that coffee is not left sitting with the farmer because the buyer has run out of cash.

The second is separate: Colombia's Coffee Price Stabilization Fund. It was created to protect producer income when coffee prices fall to exceptionally low levels and the margin turns against the grower. It is not a promise of a permanently high price. It is a mechanism meant to keep a price shock from becoming a household collapse.

Ethiopia does not yet have an equivalent national purchase guarantee or a published coffee-income stabilization mechanism. It has rehabilitation programs, restoration finance, traceability work, and credit for parts of the value chain. Those matter. But they are not the same thing as a buyer with cash at harvest, or an automatic payment when the farm-gate price falls below the cost of staying in coffee.

That is the gap the next reform should fill.

Call it a Coffee Income Stabilization Fund. Build it first from a small, transparent contribution during strong export years, with public and development-partner support available when a severe shock exceeds what the reserve can carry. The contribution must not be passed back to farmers through lower farm-gate prices.

Trigger it only when a published regional farm-gate price falls below a verified regional cost benchmark. Pay registered smallholders directly into verified bank or mobile-money accounts after a legal sale has been confirmed. Cooperatives, washing stations, and licensed buyers may verify the transaction, but they should not control the payment. Publish every trigger, every payment, every region, and every beneficiary category.

Do not use it to subsidize exporters. Do not turn it into another discretionary fund for people with access. Its purpose is narrower: to keep a smallholder from selling cherry in distress, abandoning coffee, or sliding into debt because a price set in New York or London has turned against a household in Guji.

A reserve like this would not eliminate fiscal risk. It would limit it. It would accumulate in stronger years, draw down under published rules in weaker ones, and make clear when a shock is large enough to require additional support.

Ethiopia defaulted on its Eurobond in December 2023 and remains in debt restructuring, although it reached a preliminary bondholder deal on June 29, 2026. That makes transparent, limited, rules-based design essential, not a reason to avoid building a coffee buffer.

None of this is charity, and it is not a subsidy in the lazy sense in which the word is usually thrown around. It is income protection for one of the largest non-state systems of work in the country. When the livelihoods of some fifteen million people depend directly or indirectly on coffee, and most production begins on smallholder farms, a fund that steadies their income when the world price collapses is not a handout to a sector. It is a floor under the largest body of rural producers Ethiopia has. The question is not whether the country can afford to build it. It is whether it can afford to leave that many households exposed to a price it does not set, in a year when that price has already begun to fall.

The Authority is building traceability, and that is good. Traceability tells the state where the coffee came from. A stabilization fund would answer the harder question, the one that surfaces when the market turns, which is whether the person who grew it can stay on the land. And it would force the missing number into daylight, because a fund cannot pay below a cost benchmark that has never been published. The farm-gate series I asked for in the first post is not a separate transparency request. It is the trigger. One reform protects the household, the other proves whether it was protected, and neither works without the figure the Authority still has not published regularly.

The next barrier is already being built, and it has two names that should not be confused. From December 30, 2026, the European Union's deforestation regulation will begin applying to large and medium operators handling coffee, with most micro and small operators following in June 2027. For Ethiopian coffee entering that supply chain, the rule requires traceability to the plot where it grew and due diligence showing compliance.

It is not a rule that certifies each farmer. But the cost of mapping land and proving compliance can still be pushed down the chain to the smallest producer. Separate organic rules can place a different burden on cooperatives. Different rules, same danger: the grower who cannot afford the paperwork is left outside the market. The Authority's national traceability platform, which has already mapped hundreds of thousands of plots, may be the most important infrastructure the sector has built. But mapping is not financing. Unless the cost is shared, traceability becomes one more advantage for whoever already holds the capital.

I have stood on the winning side of a famous coffee victory before. In 2006 and 2007 I was among those who argued that Ethiopia should own the names of its great coffees, Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, Harar, against a company that did not want it to. We won. The names are Ethiopia's, and I am in the record of that fight. Then I watched the part I had not braced for. Owning the name changed less than we had promised, because the links meant to carry the value back down the mountain to the farmer were weak, and a trademark does nothing to strengthen them. The legal right was necessary. It was not sufficient. I learned, in public and a little painfully, that winning the argument and changing the household are two different jobs.

There was an older question underneath that one, and the trademark fight never reached it. Owning a name settles who holds the right. It does not settle whether the people whose labor gives the name its value have any claim on the value built around it. We answered the first question in 2007 and left the second untouched. The record answers it the same way. It proves the name sells. It says nothing about whether the labor behind it shares in what the name earns.

The 3.1 billion dollars is real, and it proves the world will pay for Ethiopian coffee. It does not yet show the grower keeping more of it. The evidence available to the public points to a harder picture: washing stations short of finance, costs that remain high, premium coffee sold at home for foreign currency, new compliance burdens, and farm-gate figures the government still does not publish.

The country is now promising six billion dollars on the strength of a better tree, in a market whose price it does not set. I hope it reaches it. But six billion earned is not six billion kept. A larger record only makes the question larger: who kept it? I will continue counting at the farm gate, the only place the number has ever mattered. I would be glad to be proven wrong in the right direction.

Source note: International Coffee Organization, Coffee Market Reports | Coffee livelihood estimates (about fifteen million livelihoods linked to coffee across the chain; about 5.9 million coffee farmers; smallholders produce roughly 90 percent of output) from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, USDA, and peer-reviewed studies | Bezawit Huluager, "Authority Relaxes Coffee Export Restrictions," Addis Fortune, posted November 2020 and shown as updated August 9, 2025, quoting Hairu Nuru, then Market Information and Regulatory Director of the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority, on farmers receiving about 40 percent of sector revenue (methodology not published) | USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual (2025, ET2025-0014), carrying ECTA's claim that the share of export price received by farmers doubled over five years, from 40 to 80 percent, on reforms enabling direct market access and reducing intermediaries (methodology not published) | Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, on the coffee purchase guarantee and the National Coffee Fund (FoNC), and the separate Coffee Price Stabilization Fund (FEPC), Law 1969 of 2019 | EU Environment, EUDR FAQs (April 2026) and European Commission, EUDR application dates | USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual (May 2026) | Adugna Debela (PhD), Director General, Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority, press briefing on the 2025/26 result, Ethiopian News Agency video, July 2, 2026

Part 4: The trees, and the land under them

2026-07-02T16:30:56.283-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

Part 4 of a five-part series. Parts 1, 2 and 3 published June 26, 28 and 30, 2026.

The part of this story I admire is the part happening in the soil. Too much of Ethiopia's coffee grows on trees that are simply too old. The Authority says a large share are past their productive prime, some more than a century old, and the national stumping campaign is the right answer to that. Cut the spent tree back, let it regrow, and with care the yield can rise sharply within several years. Field evidence from the south supports it. By the 2025/26 harvest, stumped trees covered around a sixth of the harvested area, with Oromia out front. Add the improved seedlings and the planting drive, and the production outlook reflects it: the USDA projects 2026/27 output at 12.1 million sixty-kilogram bags. This is not a slogan. It is work in the soil, and it is the part of the government's coffee program I can defend without hesitation. Credit where it is owed, and it is owed here.

I have been making this argument for a long time, which is why I can credit it without applauding. In 2007, when the coffee debate was still about names and branding, I wrote that Ethiopia's yields were among the lowest in the coffee world, and I said it again in 2009. So when the government announced, in June 2026, a five-year national coffee development package built to raise average yield from nine quintals a hectare to twenty-one by 2031, with improved varieties, stronger research, and a new tissue-culture facility at the Jimma research center, my first reaction was not suspicion. It was that Ethiopia has needed exactly this for twenty years. The USDA puts the area already rejuvenated or replanted with improved varieties at more than 450,000 hectares. The target is ambitious, and the direction is right.

Some farmers have already benefited from the rehabilitation work. Where stumping and pruning were done properly, and where growers had access to seedlings, extension support, and time for the trees to recover, productivity rose. That is a real gain, and it should be counted.

The question is whether those gains are reaching enough smallholders, and whether the farmer has the finance to survive the years between cutting an old tree back and the larger harvest that is supposed to follow.

The next question is the land beneath those trees. The same USDA report says 110 private investors received new farmland for coffee in Oromia and the southwest, with plans for mechanized planting, irrigation, and modern machinery, openly modeled on Brazil. Fully developed, it would enlarge the country's commercial coffee base substantially. As of the spring of 2026 the planting had not begun, and the Authority was pressing the investors to start.

That is not a technical distinction. In Ethiopia, land is not sold. The Constitution vests ownership of all land in the state and the people, so what these investors received is not title but a use-right granted by government decision. That is precisely why the terms matter. The state is handing out long-term control over its own land, and who it selects is a political choice before it is a commercial one.

The Authority regulates the crop. It does not allocate the land beneath it. Its re-establishment in 2015 did not change that division of responsibility. Its mandate reaches policy, quality, marketing, and coffee development. Land allocation sits with regional land and investment authorities. The public has not been shown how the interests of nearby growers, existing land users, water access, forests, or benefit-sharing are built into those decisions.

There is a serious case for investment. A smallholder cultivating less than half of a hectare cannot mechanize, and a country chasing a larger place in the world market will not get there on aging trees and fragmented plots alone. Larger farms may bring irrigation, equipment, finance, and steadier quality. But the concern is not imaginary. Ethiopia has a history in which land described as “underutilized” became available to investors before the people already using it had a meaningful say. The main coffee-producing areas are different. They are older, denser, more settled, and tied to farms, forests, and local livelihoods in ways that make easy comparison careless.

That is why the terms of the allocation matter. I am not against investment in coffee. What I am against is silence around it. When long-term control of land passes to an investor, the public has a right to know which land, who farmed it before, what rights were affected, what was promised in exchange, and who collects the benefit. In Ethiopia, land has never been just land. Land, livelihood, and political power have always been the same question.

What needs to be published is not another promise of modernization. It is documents. Publish the allocation and lease maps. Publish the prior land-use status and the holding, use, and communal rights the allocation touches. Publish the consultation records. Where rights are displaced, publish the compensation and resettlement terms. Publish the water arrangements and the benefit-sharing agreements that will govern the farmers next door. And require enforceable out grower contracts or cooperative participation before the deal closes, not vague language about inclusion after the land is already committed.

Modernization and displacement fit in the same infomercial or public address. With the allocation terms unpublished, the trees are a public story. The land is not. In twenty years of following Ethiopia's coffee economy, the part nobody wants to discuss has usually been the part that decides who benefits.

Step back from the land and look at the money around it. There is credit to give here, and one thing that stands out. Ethiopia is no longer a country that ignores its coffee. The government and its partners are putting real money into rehabilitation, land restoration, and credit. The FOLUR project, Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration, is real and running. It was inaugurated in January 2024 under a program that runs from 2023 to 2031. It carries about 20.84 million dollars across twenty-two woredas in Oromia, Sidama, Central Ethiopia, and the Southwest, and it aims to restore 10,500 hectares of unproductive coffee gardens, manage 60,000 hectares of forest, and reach about 440,000 people. The UNIDO credit line is real too. Backed by Italian cooperation, it is a ten-million-euro concessional facility run through the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia for coffee companies and cooperatives. By early 2026, roughly six million euros had been approved for eleven applicants, several of them large cooperatives. A separate Climate Investment Funds plan, 37 million dollars expected to mobilize some 492 million in co-financing, is landscape, forest, food-security, and resilience finance. It is not a coffee-income mechanism.

Now read the list as a single document. Every instrument on it finances a tree, a forest, a cooperative, or a company. The credit line lends to businesses and unions. The restoration money restores land. Not one public instrument on this list writes a rules-based payment that carries a smallholder through the income lost after stumping or replanting. Not one activates when the farm-gate price falls. That is the missing instrument. Ethiopia has learned to finance better trees, better land, and better coffee businesses. It has not shown that it can finance the farmer through the income gap that rehabilitation itself creates, or through the price collapse that follows a windfall. A doubled yield is a real gain. But if the grower borrows to eat while the new tree matures, or sells the larger harvest into a falling market, or surrenders the margin to the buyer who holds the working capital, the tree becomes more productive, and the household stays exactly as exposed as it was before.

Source note: USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual (May 2026) (tree age, stumping yields, more than 450,000 hectares rejuvenated, private investment) | National five-year coffee development package and the 900 to 2,100 kg per hectare target by 2031: Xinhua and Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture statements, June 27, 2026 | FOLUR (Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration) project, Ethiopia, UNDP and Global Environment Facility, inaugurated January 2024 within a 2023 to 2031 program (22 woredas; about 20.84 million dollars; 10,500 hectares of coffee gardens and 60,000 hectares of forest; about 440,000 people) | UNIDO concessional credit facility backed by Italian Development Cooperation, via the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, OECD reporting on approvals to early 2026 | Climate Investment Funds, Nature, People and Climate investment plan for Ethiopia (about 37 million dollars expected to mobilize 492 million in co-financing for landscape, forest, food security, and resilience) | Council of Ministers Regulation No. 364/2015 re-establishing the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Development and Marketing Authority (December 2015), with later reorganization in 2024 | EU External Action Service, Action Document for EU-Coffee Action for Ethiopia | FDRE Constitution, Article 40 (land vested in the state and the peoples of Ethiopia) | Earlier productivity analysis: Wondwossen Mezlekia, Poor Farmer, 2007 and 2009

Next in the series, Part 5: What the farmer keeps.

Poor Farmer | Coffee Politics | poorfarmer.blogspot.com

Part 3: The coffee we cannot buy in Birr

2026-06-30T04:13:03.079-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

Part 3 of a five-part series. Parts 1 and 2 published June 26 and 28, 2026.

Walk into a kiosk in Addis Ababa and the coffee you are legally permitted to buy is, with narrow exceptions, the coffee the export market turned down. Grades one through five are reserved for export. What stays home is grade six and below. In the birthplace of Arabica, the household is left to drink what the world declined.

Ethiopia already drinks a remarkable share of what it grows. Sector estimates put domestic consumption near half of production, among the highest on the continent, in a coffee culture older than most of the states now advising it on the subject. Coffee here is not a lifestyle product waiting to be marketed. The roasting pan, the three rounds, the smell crossing a neighbor's doorway before the first cup is poured: nobody needs a campaign to understand it.

At African Coffee Week, Dr. Adugna Debela of the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority and Ambassador Solomon Rutega of the Inter-African Coffee Organisation made the larger African case for domestic consumption, value addition, and intra-African trade. It is a serious agenda. Under the G25 initiative, twenty-five African producing countries are unifying standards and building regional markets, and the African Union has now adopted coffee as a strategic commodity in Agenda 2063. "Africa must learn to drink what it grows," Rutega has said, and for a continent that produces about twelve percent of the world's coffee and consumes only a fraction of it, the logic is sound. Their concern is legitimate. A stronger home market can shield growers from volatile world prices and keep more value inside producing countries. Even in Ethiopia, Adugna Debela has made the case for stronger domestic consumption alongside value addition and intra-African trade.

But Ethiopia begins from a different place than most African coffee exporters. It already has one of the continent's deepest domestic coffee cultures and consumes a large share of what it produces. Its problem is not that Ethiopians must be taught to drink coffee. Its problem is that the premium coffee market has been structured around foreign currency, export rules, and informal diversion rather than ordinary Ethiopian purchasing power.

I want to be fair to the fact that complicates this argument. Ethiopia's domestic coffee market is large, but it is not immune to war, displacement, inflation, or disruption.

The International Coffee Organization found that Ethiopian consumption had "seemingly plateaued" during coffee years 2019/20 through 2021/22. Its estimate showed average annual growth of minus 0.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent in the preceding three-year period. The ICO attributed the slowdown to the two-year conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front. After the November 2022 peace agreement, it recorded a 2.1 percent increase in consumption, to 3.7 million bags.

A domestic market can stall in a war. That does not mean Ethiopia has a cultural problem to solve by teaching people to drink coffee. It means conflict disrupted an already large market, and demand recovered when the disruption eased.

For premium coffee, access, not appetite, is the binding constraint. Since 2008, selling export-grade coffee on the open domestic market has been tightly restricted, a fact you can confirm in the USDA's own annuals, in the Institute for Security Studies' reporting, and in the peer-reviewed literature. The principle was always consume less, export more, the best beans held for hard currency. In 2023 the Authority created an exception, and the exception tells you everything. Directive No. 975/2023 lets graded, value-added export coffee be sold at home, but only in foreign currency, and only at hotels, airports, tourist parks, and conference centers, paid by card or by cash the central bank has verified. The ordinary Ethiopian earning birr is left outside the door.

That does not resolve the contradiction. It frames it. The state now accepts that premium Ethiopian coffee can be sold at home, and has decided it should be sold mainly to the person carrying dollars. A domestic market open only in foreign currency is not a domestic market. It is a foreign-currency window inside Ethiopia.

The state's own analysts know where the appetite goes when the front door is locked. The USDA attributes part of the recent rise in domestic consumption to export-grade coffee slipping into the informal market, where local buyers will pay more than the export price, alongside the spread of roadside roasting stalls in the towns. The demand for good coffee at home is not a theory to be stimulated. It is already being met, quietly and illegally, because the lawful version asks for a currency most Ethiopians do not hold.

So the continental agenda is sound, and the Ethiopian application of it is incomplete. A country cannot claim to be building a domestic coffee market while reserving much of its best coffee for the customer holding dollars.

Ethiopians are not a people who need to be taught to value coffee. We are a people who have been told that the best of what our own land grows is too valuable to be sold to us in the money we earn. There is a quiet insult in that, and the consumption talk only sharpens it.

The remedy is not complicated, and it is not mine. Let Ethiopians buy premium Ethiopian coffee in birr. Let local roasters compete for it in the open. A lawful premium market at home could do what seizures have not: reduce the premium contraband captures by giving consumers a legal channel to buy. It would give growers another source of demand when the world price falls. But I have stopped treating this mainly as a problem of directive design. It is a question of who the coffee is for. For nearly twenty years the answer, written into the law, has been: not the people who grow it, roast it, and pour it. I would like to still be writing this blog on the day that changes.

Source note: Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority, Directive No. 975/2023: domestic sale of value-added export coffee in foreign currency | International Coffee Organization, Coffee Report and Outlook, December 2023, p. 33 (domestic consumption plateau during the 2020 to 2022 conflict and the recovery after the November 2022 peace agreement) | Inter-African Coffee Organisation and African Union, G25 Kampala Declaration and the adoption of coffee as a strategic commodity in AU Agenda 2063 | remarks of Solomon Rutega (IACO) and Adugna Debela (ECTA) on domestic consumption and value addition | The Reporter, Premium Coffee for Local Market, But With USD | USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual | Institute for Security Studies, Organised crime pours cold water on Ethiopia's coffee exports

Next in the series, Part 4: The trees, and the land under them.

Poor Farmer | Coffee Politics | poorfarmer.blogspot.com

Part 2: Who is in charge of coffee?

2026-06-28T04:31:41.559-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

Part 2 of a five-part series. Part 1 published June 26, 2026.

Coffee in Ethiopia is not merely an export crop, a drink, or a culture. It is one of the country's largest non-state systems of work. Around fifteen million Ethiopians depend on coffee for a livelihood, and it is grown on roughly four million smallholder farms. What those households earn is not set by a single employer. It is set by a long chain of buyers, prices, and rules. So the question of who governs that chain is not bureaucratic housekeeping. It shapes how millions of rural households live.

I remember the optimism around the Commodity Exchange. When coffee went onto the floor in December 2008, it was sold as an answer to problems that had built for years: poor price information, late payment, unreliable contracts, weak grading, and smallholders with little bargaining power. Some of that optimism was earned. Price discovery improved. Payment and contract enforcement improved. Grading and warehousing became more orderly.

The cost took longer to show. It was traceability. Once a lot was graded and folded into a broad regional bucket, the trail back to the farm, the washing station, and the cooperative went cold. For much of the crop, a buyer could know the region but not the farm. I spent a long stretch of this blog writing about what that did. The problem was never that an exchange existed. It was that the exchange became compulsory for coffee and treated a differentiated crop as one more commodity.

Since then, the state has been opening exits from the system it built. The 2017 coffee proclamation, the 2018 implementing regulation, and later policy changes opened direct channels alongside the ECX. In 2019, qualifying smallholders and commercial farms gained a route to export directly. In 2021, the Authority's vertical-integration model gave exporters another way to buy from producers without going through the ECX. The Exchange that once sat in the middle of the trade is now one road among several.

The re-established Coffee and Tea Authority was supposed to address part of the problem. Ethiopia needed a federal institution that could set standards, coordinate policy, supervise export quality, collect market information, and give the coffee sector a center of gravity after years in which responsibility had been scattered across ministries and agencies.

There is an older institutional lesson here that Ethiopia has not fully absorbed. In May 2004, the government dissolved the Coffee and Tea Authority and scattered its functions through the newly restructured Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. More than eleven years later, in December 2015, it put the Authority back after years without one institution responsible for holding production, quality, marketing, and development together.

I do not mean to romanticize the old Authority. It had problems, and no institution is saved merely by keeping its sign above the door. But there is a familiar Ethiopian official habit in this, one that predates the current government and belongs to no single administration: dismantle a specialized institution, disperse its work in the name of reform, discover years later that nobody is carrying the whole burden, then present the return of a version of the old body as a fresh achievement.

Bringing the Authority back was necessary. It did not settle the larger question. Coffee cannot be run as a collection of disconnected offices, directives, and emergency meetings.

The Authority can issue directives, coordinate quality control, administer parts of the export system, and work with regional coffee bodies. What it cannot do by administrative instruction is settle the political question underneath the trade: whether coffee is governed first as a federal export and natural resource, or as a regional commercial crop produced and policed where it grows.

The law itself reflects the compromise. It assigns functions to the Authority and to the relevant regional organs. That may be sensible coordination on paper. In practice, where federal and regional rules conflict, it can leave everybody with a role and nobody with final responsibility. The gap was visible again in January 2026. A report on a Federal Auditor General operational audit said ECX lacked a system to ensure that coffee intended for the domestic market was traded through the exchange as required. ECX replied that its founding proclamation did not give it regulatory or supervisory power. The Authority said regional bodies oversee domestic coffee, while ECX data are not organized and shared in a way that makes monitoring easy. The Exchange sends data; someone else is supposed to police it. That is how the responsibility disappears.

The Institute for Security Studies described the rest of the problem in 2022. The federal government treats coffee as a natural resource under its constitutional mandate, while Oromia, where most of it grows, treats coffee as a regional commercial crop and legislates accordingly. The two regimes criminalize related conduct differently, so cases brought under regional law tend to collapse on appeal at the Federal Supreme Court's Cassation Division. An organized contraband trade has settled comfortably into the gap.

The answer is not to rebuild the old compulsory machine. But it is not one answer either. Some of this is administrative work that should have been done years ago. Some of it is a constitutional question. Ethiopia has been treating both as though another directive can settle them. It cannot.

Who licenses a trader, who inspects a warehouse, who holds the transaction data, who investigates a diversion case, and who reports the result can be settled now. The 2021 intergovernmental-relations proclamation already gives federal and regional executives a route to make working arrangements and report what they have agreed. The Authority and the coffee-producing regions should use it.

They should sign and publish a working agreement that follows coffee from the farm to export: licensing, quality inspection, transaction records, traceability, domestic diversion, export compliance, investigation, and prosecution. It should say who acts first when coffee leaves the lawful channel, who receives the case next, and who answers when a case disappears. Both levels of government should be working from the same transaction record, not trading excuses after the coffee is gone.

That would deal with much of what is now called confusion. It would not settle the question that keeps cases dying at cassation. A meeting of officials cannot tell a court which law must prevail. An agreement between executive offices cannot decide whether coffee is first a federal export and natural resource or a regional commercial crop. The Authority cannot settle that. Neither can the Exchange.

If the conflict is constitutional, it should be put to the Council of Constitutional Inquiry and, through it, to the House of Federation, which the Constitution gives the power to decide constitutional disputes. If the problem is narrower, if the coffee laws are simply incomplete or badly written, then the federal legislature should amend them and say plainly which institution leads, what law governs each offence, and how the case reaches court.

The point is not to take coffee away from the regions. The regions are where coffee grows, where land is administered, where local trade happens, and where most of the information begins. But a national export crop cannot be governed by rules that collapse when enforcement reaches court.

The public should be able to see the agreement, the transaction data, and the enforcement record: who inspected, who did not, who prosecuted, who did not, and why. Until that happens, the trader with the best lawyer, the deepest cash, and the closest political access will continue to understand the system better than the farmer does.

Source note: Coffee livelihoods: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Coffee Farming and Climate Change in Ethiopia (2017) (around 15 million livelihoods and roughly 4 million smallholder farms) | ECX traceability: Leonard Leung, Eroded Coffee Traceability and Its Impact on Export Coffee Prices for Ethiopia (2014) | Direct-trade reforms: USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual (2021, 2025, 2026) | Authority history: CFC-ICO, Scaling Up Enhanced Processing Practices in Ethiopia (May 2004 dissolution), and Council of Ministers Regulation No. 364/2015 (December 2015 re-establishment) | Coffee Marketing and Quality Control Proclamation No. 1051/2017 | Capital, ECX Denies Responsibility for Coffee Trading Oversight Gaps (January 4, 2026), reporting an Office of the Federal Auditor General operational audit | Institute for Security Studies, Organised Crime Pours Cold Water on Ethiopia's Coffee Exports (June 2022) | The System of Inter-Governmental Relations in the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia's Determination Proclamation No. 1231/2021 | FDRE Constitution, Articles 62, 83, and 84, on constitutional interpretation, the Council of Constitutional Inquiry, and the House of Federation.

Next in the series, Part 3: The coffee Ethiopians cannot buy in birr.

Poor Farmer | Coffee Politics | poorfarmer.blogspot.com

Part 1: The record, and the arithmetic behind it

2026-06-26T12:30:45.404-07:00

Editor’s note, June 27, 2026: Since this article was published, the government has announced that coffee-export earnings for the 2025/26 fiscal year reached about $3 billion. It has also launched a five-year coffee-development package aimed at raising average productivity from roughly 900 kilograms per hectare to 2,100 kilograms by 2031, with a target of $6 billion in annual export revenue.

That is a larger record and a more ambitious promise. It does not change the question in this article. It makes the question harder to avoid: how much of the record reached the farm gate, what did it buy after costs, and who will carry the risk if higher production arrives into a falling market?

A Record Is Not Enough

Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate

By Wondwossen Mezlekia

Part 1 of a five-part series. Figures current through May 2026.

I started writing about Ethiopian coffee when the Commodity Exchange was still an argument, before it became a building, a trading floor, and finally a system that touched nearly every coffee farmer in the country. I have kept at it, on and off, for the better part of twenty years.

This government came to office promising reform, transparency, prosperity, and a different economic future. Nearly a decade later, it has a record coffee year to point to.

The number is real. What it proves is another matter.

I am not returning to settle that question with a slogan. I am returning to count the record: what produced it, who gained from it, what it cost, and what reached the farm gate.

The question is not whether Ethiopia exported more coffee, or whether coffee earned more foreign currency. It did. The question is whether the grower, after the reforms and the promises, kept more of the value. That is the question behind this series. Not the headline at the port, but the account at the farm gate.

On sources, since they do not always agree, and I will not hide that. I use the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority for the official account; the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service and the International Coffee Organization for figures that are not the government's to shape; the Intercontinental Exchange for market prices; the IMF and the Ethiopian Statistical Service for the wider economy; and the Institute for Security Studies for the parts of the trade officials would rather treat as somebody else's problem. Where they diverge, I will say so.

Five posts. The first four run now, before the coffee year closes on July 7. The fifth, on what the farmer keeps, follows once the Authority publishes the final account and it can be measured against independent trade data.

Part 1: The record, and the arithmetic behind it

The Coffee and Tea Authority says Ethiopia earned 2.65 billion dollars from coffee in the fiscal year that closed in July 2025, on 468,967 tons. Its director general called the result historic. It was historic. But a historic figure deserves more than applause. It deserves an accounting.

Start with the fact that the country cannot quite agree with itself on the number. The USDA, working on a marketing-year calendar and a different trade series, puts the same broad period nearer 2.89 billion dollars on 7.43 million sixty-kilogram bags. The ICO, which has tracked these things since the 1960s, tells the story through price. Three serious sources, three different totals, built on different clocks and different definitions of what counts as an export. That is not proof anyone is cooking the books. It is proof that Ethiopia still does not publish one reconciled public account of what it shipped, when, and in what form. When a government announces a record to the dollar and the most-watched outside estimate lands a quarter of a billion away, the footnotes are not a side argument. They are the story.

Set the bookkeeping aside and ask what moved the money. Most of it was not made in Ethiopia. The world ran short of coffee, with the ICO counting market deficits in three of the four coffee years through 2024/25, close to eighteen million bags in all, and its composite indicator reached the highest monthly average on record, 354.32 cents a pound, in February 2025. Ethiopia sold into that shortage. A higher price for the same bean is welcome. It is not, by itself, proof that the coffee economy was rebuilt.

The global market did much of the lifting: ICO Composite Indicator Price, January 2024 to May 2026

The peak did not hold. By May 2026 the same index had slipped to 256.05 cents, roughly 28 percent below the February 2025 high, as the market began pricing in a record Brazilian crop. Still a strong price by any historical measure, but a record built on an exceptional and already fading price cycle is a windfall, not a foundation.

Then the birr. In July 2024, under its IMF program, the government moved to a more flexible exchange rate, and the official rate slid from about 57 to the dollar at the end of June 2024 to about 136 a year later. The record is denominated in dollars, and a weaker birr did not conjure 2.65 billion of them. The coffee still had to be sold, and buyers still had to pay. But the float changed who gained and who paid once those dollars came home. It swelled the birr value of export earnings and sharpened the incentive to export, and it raised the price of fuel, fertilizer, transport, food, and medicine, everything a farming household buys in birr. In plain terms it was a transfer, from everyone who holds birr to everyone who earns dollars. The exporter earns dollars. The farmer earns birr. The household pays in birr. That is where the arithmetic becomes political.

The currency moved sharply: official birr/US-dollar exchange rate, June 2024 to June 2025

Handle the inflation honestly, in both directions. It came down hard from the worst years, which the government has earned the right to claim. But across 2021 to 2025, consumer prices still rose by something close to two hundred percent in total, so the cost of living nearly tripled in five years, and lately the relief has reversed. The Statistical Service put year-on-year inflation at 13.4 percent in May 2026, up from 9.4 percent as recently as March and 11.7 in April, with food alone running near 15. So when an official tells me cherry prices tripled this season, I do not hear a tripled income. I hear a price running hard to stay in place. The household told to celebrate a record is the same household that paid triple for cooking oil while doing it.

Everything returns to the figure the government does not publish. The Authority reports revenue at the port. It does not publish a consistent series, region by region and year by year, showing what the grower received per kilogram of cherry and what that money could still buy. Until it does, I will read the record as a fact about buyers in Jeddah, Hamburg, and Shanghai, and not yet as a fact about a household in Gedeo, Jimma, Guji, or Sidama. The people holding the farm-gate data carry the burden of proof, and so far they have answered it with a press release.

The missing series is the point: export revenue and inflation are reported, farm-gate income is not

A note on timing. Ethiopia's fiscal year closes on July 7, and the final revenue figure is not yet in. The questions in this series do not wait on that press release. The world price has already begun to fall, the cost of moving coffee has already risen, and the farmer's share remains unreported. When the final number lands, read it against those facts, not instead of them.

Source note: USDA FAS, Ethiopia: Coffee Annual (May 2026) | ICO, Coffee Market Report, February 2025 and May 2026 | IMF, Ethiopia Fourth Review (2026) | Ethiopian Statistical Service, May 2026 Inflation Release

Next in the series, Part 2: Who is in charge of coffee?

A Record Is Not Enough: A Series Beginning Tomorrow

2026-06-25T19:21:53.511-07:00

A Record Is Not Enough

A Five-Part Series Beginning Tomorrow

It has been a long time since I wrote here.

A lot has happened in Ethiopia since I last wrote regularly about coffee. War. Displacement. Debt. Inflation. A currency that no longer buys what it did. And a government that came promising reform, prosperity, and a different future.

I have been quiet, but I have not stopped paying attention.

I started this blog because Ethiopian coffee was always being discussed in terms of exports, brands, buyers, and big promises. The farmer was usually somewhere at the end of the story, if she appeared at all.

That was true before the Commodity Exchange. It was true during the fight over Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harar. It was true when the government said the Exchange would fix the trade. And it is true again now, as Ethiopia celebrates a record coffee year.

The record is real. Ethiopia earned more from coffee. The country exported more. The reforms in the sector have done some real things.

But a number announced at the port is not the same thing as an answer at the farm.

What did the grower receive? What did that money buy after inflation, devaluation, transport costs, fertilizer, food, and debt? Who had the cash to buy cherry when prices rose? Who benefits when coffee is traced, branded, exported directly, or planted on newly allocated land? And when the world price falls again, who carries the loss?

Those are the questions I will take up beginning tomorrow in a five-part series: A Record Is Not Enough.

The first posts will look at the export record itself, the institutions now governing coffee, the coffee Ethiopians still cannot freely buy in birr, and the changes taking place in the trees and the land beneath them.

The final post will return to the question that matters most: what the farmer keeps.

The coffee year is nearing its close. There will be another official number, another announcement, and probably another celebration.

Before that happens, it is worth knowing what to ask.

Part 1 begins tomorrow: “The Record, and the Arithmetic Behind It.”

Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Authority Relaxes Coffee Export Restrictions

2020-11-18T07:13:00.000-08:00

Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Authority Relaxes Coffee Export Restrictions

Addis Fortune

November 14, 2020

Coffee traders can now send all grades of coffee beans to the global market, in contrast to the previous law that allowed them only to export the top four grades of coffee, according to a new directive issued by the Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Authority. Farmers and exporters can also directly ship the beans without going through the trading floors of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX).

The new scheme allows fifth grade and under grade (UG) coffee beans, which up until now have only been supplied to the local market, to be exported. Coffee quality experts at respective regional offices of the Authority will determine the grade of the coffee. The Authority at its head office issues permits to the exporters every year, while regional offices are delegated to grant export permit to farmers who have at least two hectares of farmland. The Authority sets standard prices on a weekly basis.

The change is aimed at boosting export volume and foreign currency earnings, according to Hairu Nuru, market information & regulatory director at the Authority, which plans for the commodity to bring in 1.7 billion dollars from the export of 312,000tn of coffee this year. In the past fiscal year, the exported 271,000tn of coffee generated 854 million dollars, over one-fourth of the total export earnings of the country.

"There is a demand even for the lowest Ethiopian coffee grades in the international market," said Hairu. "We've been receiving repeated calls from exporters."

In a country that has 418 licensed exporters, 5.5 million household growers, and is known to be the origin of coffee, the commodity had not been benefiting the economy as much as expected due to quality problems.

The coffee bean that reaches the central market at the ECX has been mixed and loses its quality and traceability, according to Hairu.

"Letting all of the export of coffee pass through the ECX has also inflicted negative impacts on the sector in terms of the quality and price of export coffee," he said. "The price of Ethiopian coffee on the international market was declining since the coffee changed from a specialty into a commodity at the ECX."

Netsanet Tesfaye, corporate communications manager at the ECX, disputed this, saying that they do inspections to make sure the coffee is traceable and that no coffee is mixed at the warehouses.

"The specialty of coffee might be lost when the coffee has passed out of the ECX," he said.

The new system is also aimed at driving intermediaries out of the value chain by shortening it, according to Hairu, who said that the farmers had not been benefiting much from their product. He stated that the farmers got only 40pc of the total revenues generated from the coffee sector, and the remainder was going to intermediaries.

So far, 41 farmers have registered and secured licenses to send their coffee directly to the international market.

Intermediaries such as coffee collectors, suppliers, the EXC, wholesalers, and exporters were involved in transactions, making the value chain very long, according to Hairu.

"This hurts the farmers," said Hairu, "and led coffee exports to decline."

Gizat Worku, general manager at the Ethiopian Coffee Exporters Association, appreciated the move, saying that there will be slightly more coffee supply for export. But he alerted the Authority to work on the quality of the coffee.

"Most of the exporters send their coffee to the international market based on the preferences of their customers," he said, "and there will likely not be much interest from exporters in presenting lower grades of coffee."

The export of high-quality coffee was hit hard by the pandemic, since most of the big global cafes and coffee shops were closed due to lockdowns, according to Gizat.

He also cited delayed delivery time, lack of traceability, the lower level of research and development in the sector, and poor federal-regional coordination as additional bottlenecks the sector faces.

Eden Abebe, a coffee export consultant at O-Link International Business Agent & Consultancy, argues that there will be more exporters and that the coffee export volume of the country will grow. She explained that since the Authority has allowed all grades for export, small and medium exporters with limited financial capabilities will be able to engage in coffee export.

Eden remarked that there is a high demand for lower-grade coffee in the international market as buyers mix and create their own brands by cleaning the coffee and adding value.

She urged the Authority to enforce strict inspection on the quality and grade of export coffee as exporters might mix the lower grade coffee in with the higher grades for increased payouts.

"The authorities should make sure that the quality of their coffee is as per the certificate and should inspect the purity and taste," she said. "They should focus on cleaning coffee to raise its quality."

Ethiopia: New coffee directive sets strict minimum price

2020-01-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

Prioritizes regulation of under invoicing, contract defaults

By Birhanu Fikade

The Reporter

January 4, 2020

The Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority has issued a new directive to regulate exportable coffees' minimum price on the grounds of the global weighted average, The Reporter has learnt.

The new directive termed: “Export Coffee Contract Administration” will determine the minimum selling price of coffees through everyday price analysis that involves both the Authority and the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE).

Heiru Nuru, director of Market Information and Regulation Directorate with the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority, told The Reporter that the directive which solely seeks to abate illegal transactions done through under invoicing and contracts defaults, will also weight the trends of global coffee prices on a daily basis. Hence, the global weighted average will be the benchmark used to set out the minimum prices so that exporters should adhere to the set of minimum prices. Selling coffee below the minimum price is now a punishable offense.

According to the director, those who fail to comply with directive shall receive penalties depending on the degree and occurrences. A first time offense will produce a written warning. When that same offender manipulates and breaks the law for the second time, they will receive a one year ban from performing any coffee related business undertakings. A third time offense produces a complete ban from the sector and will result in criminal charges.

However, the ultimate objective of the directive is to prevent under invoicing and contract defaults that keep hampering the performance of the coffee export sector.

According to Adugna Debella (PhD), general director of the Authority, the new directive takes effect from January 10, 2020 and sanctions exporters to report within 24 hours of completing a deal stating the volume, value and the graded quality of coffee, the sellers have agreed to deliver to the buyer. Once the contract is concluded, the coffee is expected to be shipped out within 90 days and the value shall be deposited in the coffers of NBE. This way both defaulters and under invoicing will be checked, he says.

Previously, some 80 market offenders have received serious warnings and 16 were banned from the export lane. Out of those suspects, a few have ended up criminally charged, Neiru said.

In a related news, a new national coffee brand is about to be unveiled during the International Coffee Conference and Exhibition that will be attended by 1,500 participants including 500 foreign coffee buyers, roasters, experts and the like. At the venue, a coffee park will feature Ethiopia’s coffee culture and biodiversity. It is thought that Ethiopia is home to some 6,000 coffee species. Coffee is claimed to provide a livelihood to some 30 percent out of the total population and represent some 35 percent of Ethiopia's export.

Climate-hit Ethiopia shifts coffee uphill

2018-06-04T11:57:00.001-07:00

Caffeine high? Climate-hit Ethiopia shifts coffee uphill

Elias Gebreselassie

Thomson Reuters Foundation

June 3, 2018

HAMBELA, Ethiopia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Few countries take coffee as seriously as Ethiopia - and that’s not only because it prides itself as being the source of the prized Arabica bean.

But rising temperatures and worsening drought linked to climate change are now hitting production - and fixing that may require moving many Ethiopian coffee fields uphill, experts say.

Aside from its cultural value, coffee is Ethiopia’s single largest source of export revenue, worth more than $860 million in the 2016-2017 production year.

But coffee-growing areas in eastern Ethiopia have seen the average temperature climb 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past three decades, according to the Environment, Climate Change and Coffee Forest Forum (ECCCFF), an Ethiopian non-governmental organization.

That has caused stronger drought and - given that coffee is a crop sensitive to both moisture and temperature - a worsening of diseases that afflict coffee berries.

As a result, thousands of hectares of coffee plants are being lost each year in traditional growing areas, which is raising fears about the future of Ethiopia’s coffee production.

The country’s government is now encouraging farmers to grow coffee at higher elevations - up to 3,200 meters (10,500 ft) above sea level, about 1,000 meters above the norm.

That could help mitigate some of the climate change pressures Ethiopia faces, said Birhanu Tsegaye, who heads extension services for coffee, tea and spices for the Ethiopia Coffee and Tea Development Marketing Authority (ECTDMA), a government body tasked with overseeing the sector.

As temperatures rise, “even areas not (formerly) suitable for coffee growing have become suitable, presenting an opportunity for the country to cope with climate change,” he said.

Pressures from warming conditions have been noticed in other parts of the country too.

Aman Adinew, chief executive of Metad Agricultural Development, which manages two large plantations in Oromia and SNNP regional states, said changing weather patterns in the country’s south had affected exports.

The annual harvest, which normally takes place in November and December at his Hambela and Gedeb coffee farms, was delayed by a month because the beans had not ripened, he said.

“Since the coffee beans were still green by the beginning of 2018 due to a shortage of rain, it led to a delay in coffee processing and export, effectively meaning breach of contract with our North American, Asian and European customers,” he said.

SMALL FARMS, BIG BUSINESS

Around 90 percent of Ethiopia’s coffee-growers are small-scale farmers, and the industry directly and indirectly employs up to 20 percent of Ethiopia’s 100 million population, ECTDMA said.

Exports in the 2016-2017 production year totaled just over 220,000 tonnes, figures from the trade ministry show.

Coffee exports have fluctuated over the last five years, making it difficult to discern any downward trend, Tsegaye told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But with the country adding tens of thousands of coffee hectares in new growing areas each year, that is offsetting many of the losses in traditional areas, he said.

Tsegaye said the government also was working to combat the effects of climate change in traditional coffee growing areas by offering small-scale farmers training on using shade trees to help hold down temperatures, and on irrigation and better crop handling after harvest.

He said the authority was also introducing hardier varieties of coffee, resistant to diseases and weather extremes.

However, Tsegaye admitted that current levels of assistance to traditional small-scale coffee farmers might not be enough to save the industry in those areas, which is why the coffee marketing authority is looking at growing coffee at higher altitudes.

SHIFTING COFFEE CULTURE

Tadese Woldemariam, a technical advisor at the Environment, Climate Change and Coffee Forest Forum, said growing coffee in areas previously unfamiliar with the crop could work, but it needed to be done carefully - and could have side effects.

“When traditional coffee-producing areas disappear, thousands of years of coffee-growing culture disappear,” he said.

“Highland areas of Ethiopia with little history of coffee production can be an alternative only if there are agricultural extension packages that make growing high-quality coffee sustainable,” he said.

He said Ethiopia was racing against time to save its coffee sector.

The areas of the country suitable for coffee production are shifting higher each year, he said, which means “by the end of the century most coffee-growing areas, especially those below 1,500 meters above sea level, will no longer be suitable for coffee production.”

In places that has already happened, with some traditional coffee-growing areas, especially in the east, now covered in khat trees. The plant’s leaves, chewed by millions in the Horn of Africa, contain a psychoactive drug that is used as a mild stimulant.

While coffee is usually harvested once a year, khat - which is drought-tolerant - can be harvested three times a year.

Woldemariam said 60 percent of Ethiopia’s traditional coffee-producing regions might lose the crop in the coming decades if climate change remains unchecked.

He urged quick action to save the crop, though warned shifting production to new areas could affect the quality and taste of the coffee.

The government is looking at how to begin selling to new markets as new coffee varieties are planted and begin to fill the gaps created by what may be the gradual disappearance of some Ethiopian varieties.

“Harar” coffee, a highly sought-after variety from eastern Ethiopia, is particularly at risk, he said.

ECTDMA “is currently working to create a niche market for Ethiopian coffee in the world’s most populous nation, China, focusing on young Chinese who hopefully will be regular drinkers of Ethiopian coffee soon”, Tsegaye said.

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Reporting by Elias Gebreselassie. Editing by James Baer, Robert Carmichael and Laurie Goering. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit news.trust.org/climate

ECX Assigns Former Cooperative Bank’s Head as CEO

2017-11-06T11:00:00.002-08:00

Addis Fortune

November 06, 2017

Wondimagegnehu Negera, the newly elected CEO of ECX, former president of Cooperative Bank of Oromia.

The Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (ECX) gets its thrid Chief Executive Officer (CEO) since its founadation in 2008. Wondimagegnehu Negera, former president of the Cooperative Bank of Oromia (CBO), has been appointed today by the Board of Directors of the ECX as a new chief, replacing Ermias Eshetu.

Ermias had served the Exchange for two and half years before he resigned two months ago, citing personal reasons. Belay Gorfu has been filling in as Acting CEO during the transition.

Wondimagegnehu, who has over two decades of experience in the banking industry, has been working as head of the Oromia Regional Trade & Market Development Bureau for the past one year. He had served the CBO for four years as president until he was dismissed by the central bank on September, 2015. He was blamed for mishandling foreign currency transactions, an allegation put on along with his deputies and the then board chairman of the Bank.

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PUBLISHED ON NOV 06,2017 [ VOL 18 ,NO 915]

Towards a Balanced Sustainability Vision for the Coffee Industry

2017-09-18T10:33:00.002-07:00

By Luis F. Samper and Xiomara F. Quiñones-Ruiz

Source: MDPI - Publisher of Open Access Journals

CONCLUSION

The debate over how to best achieve sustainability in general and in the coffee industry in particular is wide open. The coffee industry has been the leader in implementing VSS, influencing other industries along the way. Certainly, literature shows that positive effects have been identified since VSS started. However, the time has come to re-evaluate the current model, not with the objective of doing away with what it has achieved, but to look for new ways to approach sustainability and obtain a bigger and wider effect that more closely reflects the complex reality of coffee growing.

Available studies show that impact of the current model varies according to the specific context. There is no “silver bullet” standard to improve sustainability indicators. Furthermore, VSS has not altered the value chain governance. In addition, it appears that VSS will have difficulty growing and achieving at a larger scale as the business case for sustainability investment is becoming more dubious from a grower’s perspective due to the reduced economic incentives and excess supply of sustainable certified coffees.

Both the industry and the coffee growing communities, as well as consumer and NGO advocates have to come to terms and agree on what is important and a priority for the sustainability of the coffee industry as a whole. A top-down/bottom-up industry wide materiality assessment is urgently needed to focus on priorities, build effective alliances, achieve scale and provide effective tools for participation that can be adapted to different coffee growing realities. This new approach will imply the development of sustainability KPIs for individual coffee origins and the ability to provide farmers with economic upgrade opportunities.

In the current market context where single origin coffees are favored by third wave market trend-setters, the new sustainability framework should leverage this market opportunity by offering Origin coffees and GIs, leveraging differentiation from below opportunities that provide value to both farmers and downstream industry players by strengthening their quality and sustainability attributes. Likewise, Origin sustainability manifestos developed based on the experience of GRI, VSS, SAFA and/or SDG frameworks can become a useful tool to provide origin differentiation and credible data for other value chain actors. A desired competition on quality and sustainability can help to develop public private partnerships and long-term cooperation with those marketing given origins.

This origin-centric inclusive sustainability strategy will provide more authentic and credible content to consumers and stakeholders and upgrade opportunities to all, not limiting the system to convey differentiation opportunities for the marketing and distribution end of the value chain. As the model provides for regional differentiation, it coexists with and learns from the successful farm-specific and direct trade value creation processes that the third wave coffee segment has successfully positioned. It also reduces the implicit delocalization risks that are part of the VSS model. Consistent with the sustainable market transformation theory, it has the benefits of scale as whole origins are marketed and positioned. Lastly, it gives positive incentives for all supply chain actors that can create value along the chain.

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Full article is stored at https://www.scribd.com/document/359243886/Towards-a-Balanced-Sustainability-Vision-for-the-Coffee-Industry

Source: file:///C:/Users/wonmez/Downloads/resources-06-00017%20(1).pdf

Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) CEO resigns amid government scrutiny

2017-09-02T06:39:00.000-07:00

ECX Boss Resigns

By Dawit Taye

The Ethiopian Reporter

September 01, 2017

Ermias Eshetu, the CEO of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), has tendered his resignation letter to the board of directors of the trading enterprise.

The resignation of Ermias stunned many as it came at a time when the CEO was attempting to restructure ECX and introduce new trading services and working procedures. Though the resignation of the CEO is not yet made public reliable sources told The Reporter that the board of directors of ECX is holding an in-depth evaluation on the executive management including the CEO.

Sources said the rigorous evaluation has prompted the CEO to leave his position. According to sources, the board of directors of ECX has accepted the resignation letter of the CEO. However, Ermias would stay in office until the board finds a successor.

According to sources, the stringent evaluation held last week lasted until 5PM in the evening. “The evaluation dwelled on the performance of the trading floor (ECX) and on the issue of who should leave and who should remain in office. The CEO tendered his resignation letter in the wake of the in-depth evaluation,” sources told The Reporter.

The management of ECX declined to comment on the matter. The Reporter’s repeated attempts to reach Ermias could not be successful.

Ermias’s decision took many by surprise as he was publicising the new working procedures he was planning to introduce in ECX. Sources said the board’s in-depth evaluation aimed at reforming the ECX. According to sources, the evaluation is part of the board’s efforts to identify the weaknesses of ECX and reform the organization.

ECX was established by the acclaimed entrepreneur and intellectual Elleni Gebremedihn (PhD) in 2008. After the first CEO left her position Anteneh Abraham, former vice president of Abyssinia Bank, managed ECX for a short period of the time. Anteneh resigned due to illness.

Ermias replaced Anteneh three years ago. Ermias, 42, previously served Zemen Bank as vice president. Ermias is a returnee from the UK, where he lived for 20 years. In the UK, he served global IT giants including IBM and Alcatel.

Hip Coffee at $4 a Cup Revives African Industry Left Behind

2017-08-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

-- Africa became a niche producer as Vietnam, Brazil expanded

-- Urbanization, staple crops a threat to African arabica output

By Innocent Anguyo and Isis Almeida

Bloomberg Markets

August 2, 2017

Julien Ochala can’t live without his morning cup of Joe.

But not just any coffee will do. For the past five years, the 37-year-old physiology lecturer at King’s College London has visited the same store every week to grab a pack of his beloved Kenyan brew. And he’s not put off by the cost: at 37 pounds a kilogram ($22 a pound), it’s more than double a similar supermarket product.

"I take Kenyan coffee every morning," said Ochala, who buys his beans from Monmouth Coffee Company in Borough Market. "I love it because of the relatively higher acidity level. It keeps me active in the afternoons."

Customers willing to pay a premium for African brews, known for their floral, fruity flavors, are driving purchases of coffee from the continent where the drink is said to have originated. One legend has it that Ethiopian goat herders discovered the plant more than a thousand years ago. Today, a cup of Kenyan coffee at Monmouth costs roughly $4, compared with about $3 for a standard Americano from Starbucks Corp. in London.

The renewed interest may be a blessing for farmers in Africa, where output is about three-quarters of what it was four decades ago. Growers of robusta, the cheaper variety favored for instant drinks, have found it hard to compete as major producer Vietnam boosted output at much lower cost. Brazil also provided more competition for medium-quality arabica beans.

“Ethiopian beans have been known in the West for a long time, but now we are seeing more Rwandan, Kenyan and even beans coming from Burundi, Uganda and Congo,” said Karl Weyrauch, the founder of Seattle-based Coffee Rwanda, a supplier of Rwandan beans to the American market. “African beans may also seem exotic to some coffee drinkers and that piques their curiosity.”

But output isn’t what it once was. In 1975, four African nations were among the world’s 10 biggest producers. Now, only Ethiopia and Uganda make the list.

“African production is under threat,” said Keith Flury, head of coffee research at Volcafe Ltd., one of the world’s top coffee traders. "In countries like Kenya, Nairobi is urbanizing fast and expanding into areas that were previously used for coffee. In other countries such as Rwanda and Burundi, coffee is being replaced with subsistence crops as population grows."

Younger Africans are shunning coffee farming for more profitable careers, according to the International Coffee Organization. It pegs the average age of an African coffee grower at 60. Political conflicts have also made farming difficult. Nestle SA’s Nespresso brand last year halted operations in South Sudan due to the civil war.

In Nairobi, farmers can make more money selling their land for property development than working the coffee trees, said Martin Maraka, program manager at the African Fine Coffees Association. Population growth and urbanization show little signs of slowing - the continent will account for more than half of the world’s population growth by 2050, adding 1.3 billion people, according to the United Nations.

While demand is rising, Africa’s coffee exports have mostly been flat since the early 2000s. In comparison, global shipments jumped about 37 percent in the period as world consumption grew by a similar amount.

Robusta coffee futures have climbed 17 percent in London in the past year to $2,132 a metric ton. Arabica, the type favored for specialty drinks such as those made by Starbucks, has declined 2.3 percent in New York to $1.3805 a pound.

Demand for African beans used in blends -- the regular products sold in supermarkets that are a mix of supplies from anywhere in the world -- has largely been steady, and the prospects for growth lie in so-called single-origin coffees that only use beans from one specific place.

That potential for niche brews is attracting trading houses to African markets, where margins are much wider than in Brazil or Vietnam. Singapore’s Olam International Ltd., one of the largest food merchants, last year paid $7.5 million for East African coffee specialist Schluter S.A., which had been family-owned since the 19th century. Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Volcafe, Louis Dreyfus Co. and Ecom Agroindustrial Corp. are present in Africa.

Higher demand from western consumers for some African products is evident to Lars Pilengrim, who buys coffee for Swedish roaster Johan & Nystrom.

“The African taste profiles are very popular in and around Scandinavia,” Pilengrim said. “We are seeing growing interests for coffee from Africa and not only the classic origins such as Ethiopia and Kenya. We are increasing our presence and buying in and from Burundi.”

High-tech, low impact: Ethiopia’s state-of-the-art commodity exchange

2017-02-03T11:11:00.002-08:00

Not as transformative as its founders hoped

The Economist

Feb 4th 2017 | ADDIS ABABA

ON THE walls of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) in Addis Ababa, the capital, hang glossy black-and-white photographs of provincial market towns and rustic life. For the merchants and brokers striding across its high-tech trading floor they serve as a reminder that the ECX, sub-Saharan Africa’s most modern commodity exchange outside Johannesburg, exists for a simple, practical purpose: to transform Ethiopian agriculture.

It has some way to go. By connecting smallholder farmers to global markets, the exchange, launched with a fanfare in 2008, was supposed to help reduce hunger. The hope was it would reduce price volatility and incentivise farmers to plant crops. But staple foods such as haricot beans today account for less than 10% of its trade. Its annual turnover—worth about $1bn—is dominated instead by two export crops, coffee and sesame seeds. In 2015, despite a dire drought, Ethiopia did avoid famine, but the ECX played little role: its maize and wheat contracts had lapsed by then because of concerns that exports would jeopardise domestic food supplies. Cutting out middlemen seems not to have done much for smallholders: studies suggest that the share of international prices received by coffee farmers has barely budged over the past decade. Exporters complain about government price-meddling.

The ECX’s founder, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who left the exchange in 2012, worries that momentum has been lost. The exchange remains restricted to simple spot-trading. Futures contracts, which help traders manage price fluctuations, were supposed to be introduced within five years, but are still some way off.

In July 2015 the ECX did, however, introduce electronic transactions, now used for almost all trades. Bespoke software is built in-house by Ethiopian engineers. Payments the day after purchase are guaranteed. The ECX can also boast never to have seen a default, in a country known for suicides by indebted farmers whose buyers have welshed. Ethiopia has shown that it is possible for an exchange to prompt the physical infrastructure of commodities markets: the ECX oversaw a burst in warehouse construction.

Fledgling exchanges dotted around Africa often visit Addis Ababa to study the ECX. But experts doubt it is a helpful model. The government made it viable by mandating that almost all trade in coffee and some other commodities go through the exchange. This might not be possible elsewhere. A monopoly imposed by fiat makes it more like a state marketing board than an exchange, says Thomas Jayne, an economist at Michigan State University.

Another model might be the Agricultural Commodity Exchange for Africa in Malawi, which was set up privately in 2006 at the request of an association of smallholder farmers. But its volumes remain low. And its concentration on staple foods such as maize and soya leaves it vulnerable to the sort of government interventions that can sink exchanges. Trading in staples tends to be politically sensitive in times of food scarcity.

Setting up national exchanges may be the wrong approach. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange plans to introduce a regional contract for Zambian white maize later this year. For lucrative export crops like coffee, well-established offshore exchanges may make more sense than starting from scratch at home. Better a functioning exchange somewhere else than a disappointing one on the doorstep.

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This article appeared in the Finance and economics section of the print edition under the headline “High-tech, low impact”

Ethiopia’s vulnerable tropical forests are key to securing future of wild coffee

2016-03-23T07:52:00.001-07:00

The Conversation

March 23, 2016

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form. The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a “water tower” for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest. Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became “open access” – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect “forest management groups”, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest. Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

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Author: Fiona Hesselden - Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield

Contributor: Adrian Wood - Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield

Disclosure statement

Fiona Hesselden receives funding for the WCC Project from the EU Delegation to Ethiopia, The Darwin Initiative (UK Government) and the Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre. The authors are soley responsible for the views expressed in this article and they do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

Adrian Wood is receives funding from the EU and the Darwin Initiative (UK government) and HOAREC.

Brazil ditches standard jute coffee bags, leading move toward bulk

2015-12-20T21:49:00.001-08:00

Wondwossen's Note: In 2011, there was a failed attempt in Ethiopia to ship all coffees in bulk. Click here to read exactly what happened back then.

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Reese Ewing

Reuters

December 20, 2015

SANTOS, BRAZIL – The humble jute bag, long the distinctive packing for Brazil's coffee exports, is rapidly being edged out as traders and cooperatives face rising wage bills and borrowing costs, weak global prices and a deepening economic crisis at home.

By introducing massive plastic sacks to replace the 60-kg (132-lb) jute bags that have dominated coffee shipments for more than two centuries, firms are saving millions of dollars a year, in a move so successful it is expected to reshape the global industry.

Until a few years ago, the world's biggest coffee producer dispatched nearly all its exports in jute bags. Next year will see Brazil export more than half its green coffee in 1-tonne polypropylene 'super sacks' or 21.6-tonne polyethylene liners.

Dinamo, the largest coffee warehouse at the port of Santos, said super sacks accounted for 30 percent of its exports in 2015 and are growing by 5 percent a year. Brazil's biggest coffee cooperative Cooxupe has nearly eliminated jute.

"It's the future," said trader Mauricio Di Cunto at exporter Comexim, which ships half its coffee in bulk. "It lets us be more aggressive in offering discounts without the cost of jute."

The 60-kg jute bag has been a standard unit of measurement for coffee trading since Brazil started commercial production of the bean in the 18th century. The grains and sugar sectors long ago moved to bulk, but coffee has been a laggard.

National data on exports in super sacks is not yet available but exporters association Cecafe is due to start monitoring their use from January.

The growth in bulk handling reflects a plunge in manual laborers lifting coffee bags. Higher wages and stricter regulations, which expose industry to worker-injury lawsuits, are hastening the decline.

The calculation is compelling: one worker with a forklift can fill a container with super sacks in 25 minutes, while 9 men need nearly an hour with jute. Loading a liner is even faster as beans are dumped in loose.

It costs 22 to 40 centavos every time a worker hoists a 60-kg bag to fill a container or weigh it. Brazil produces 50-60 million bags of coffee a year.

On the cobble-stoned streets of Santos, a port that rose to fame with Brazil's coffee boom, a small team of lifters gathered recently in the morning light at the entrance of the Dinamo warehouse, one of two that still handles coffee at the port.

"We used to have 59 lifters on a shift, now we have nine," union leader and former lifter Carlos Roberto Lima reflected.

The move to bulk treatment of coffee is taking place as global raw materials prices fall with slower demand growth in emerging markets like China. The price of coffee, which is Brazil's sixth most valuable commodity export, has fallen by more than 60 percent from highs in 2011 to $1.17/lb.

SILVER LINERS

International Coffee Organization Executive Director Roberio Oliveira said the move to bulk is helping Brazil adapt to just-in-time logistics to manage stocks better as prices decline.

"This is still mostly a Brazilian development," Oliveira said, adding that he expects other exporters to follow.

Big roasters like Starbucks Corp, Folgers and Maxwell House were the first to receive lined containers almost a decade ago.

Since then, liners, which Cecafe has monitored since 2007, have grown to account for half of Brazil's green coffee exports, said the association's technical director Eduardo Heron Santos.

A lined 20-foot container holds 21.6 tonnes of coffee, while one with jute holds only 19.3 tonnes, said Alex Jairo Pinto, director at Dinamo. A container holds 20 tonnes in super sacks.

Whether jute or bulk, the cost of shipping the container is the same, he said. "That's one reason 60 percent of the coffee we ship is in liner and 30 percent in super sacks," said Pinto.

Cooxupe, which moves a tenth of Brazil's crop, was one of the first to shift to bulk bags a few years ago, president of the co-op, Carlos Paulino da Costa said.

"We have almost eliminated the jute bag," he said, adding it saves the co-op 18 million reais ($4.7 million) a year.

Jute costs 4 reais ($1) a bag, plus a real to sew it up for reuse. The one-tonne super sack at 50-to-150 reais costs almost the same, equalizing for weights, but lasts twice as long.

HARD HABITS

Savings are still imperceptible for consumers as much of what constitutes retail prices comes after beans leave traders' hands, as costs for roasting, marketing and preparation. But they will get a better product, as plastic protects coffee better from the elements than jute.

"The bulk bags help preserve coffee's favor," said Daniel Wolthers at trader Wolthers & Associates in Santos. "You won't get the taste of the jute."

Super sacks, however, will not topple the 60-kg bag any time soon as the basic measurement for coffee, just as the bushel remains relevant as a measure, even though grains are traded in bulk.

And the specialty coffee business, which reaps premiums for socially and environmentally differentiated beans, will be slow to shed its aesthetic attachment to jute, said Felipe Gurdian, green coffee buyer for Montreal-based Cooperative Coffees.

Earthy-colored jute bags, with their coarse grain and pastel-shaded stamps of origin, convey a sense of a traditional product that comes from the land.

"There's still reluctance to adopt bigger bags for a nuanced product like specialty coffees," Gurdian said.

---

(Editing by Daniel Flynn and Frances Kerry)

Ethiopian coffee: a gold mine on its last leg

2015-11-09T07:06:00.001-08:00

By Tarikua Getachew

Addis Standard

November 6, 2015

Ethiopian coffee, long representing close to 30% of the country's foreign exchange earnings, is suffering from neglect by a government that prides itself with achieving more than 10% GDP annual growth.

Fifteen million Ethiopians, 20% of the population, depend on coffee production and coffee-related activities, and coffee is cultivated by close to 3.8 million smallholder farming households. But to understand the state of Ethiopian coffee today one will have to imagine Switzerland without its banks and its watch makers.

Production of the green Arabica bean in the country is almost exclusively situated in the two regions of Oromia and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNPR). Figures also show that the country is the leading producer in Africa of this variety and in 2014 was the seventh largest supplier of green beans in the world. In 2014, Ethiopia earned almost US$889 million in export of raw coffee, which represented around 26% of its total export earnings.

But these figures hide an inglorious story.

Neglect of the land

Between 2000 and 2014, the coffee harvested area doubled from 250,000 hectares to 520,000 hectares. Approximately 460,000 hectares of this is found in Oromia regional state.

A number of factors explain this dramatic speedy increase in coffee cultivated area none of which correlate to a greater attention to the crop. Population growth is of course a major factor since in the same period the number of Ethiopians went from 67 million to over 90 million.

Deforestation is another main cause for the expansion in size. Various sources put the rate of deforestation at differing degrees of alarm due to poor baselines. "However, despite the slightly different estimates for deforestation in different regions of Ethiopia - given deforestation rates remain the same and the country will have lost its last tree of high forests within about 27 years - with it will go the world's only original wild populations of Coffea arabica." And in monetary terms, the economic loss of that genetic resource ranges between US$0.4 and 1.5 billion per year, according to FAO.

Of course deforestation is closely linked to security in land tenure; studies have time and again demonstrated that state ownership of land is a disincentive to land conservation. Coffee, a shade loving crop, bears the blunt twice as hard as a growing population puts pressure on the natural resources by spreading out the production area, leaving only a minimum of trees and destroying the biodiversity which had kept the Arabica variety resistant to diseases and droughts for hundreds of years.

In addition, coffee trees do not begin to produce full yield until their sixth year even if they continue prime production for about ten years. Such long term cultivation is only possible with secure land tenure. Left without title deeds to their land over the past two decades, smallholders had uprooted thousands of hectares and with it vast forest covers in favour of short term food crops. Recent efforts initiated by NGOs and only later taken by the government to provide what is known has "green papers" have been able to curb the alarming deforestation rate but the ecological damage will last for many more decades.

Neglect of the soil

Such unplanned and wrongly executed growth in coffee production area has only managed to result in the proliferation of small holdings with nearly no increase in volume of coffee produced. In fact Ethiopia remains the seventh supplier in the world market and its share thereof is stagnant at just three per cent. So any increase in amount of export earnings is due to external factors linked to changes in international prices and not at all to improved production. And this contradiction is explained by the yield.

Indeed for all the doubling in size of harvest area and in the same period between 2000 and 2014, the yield has actually decreased by more than 50%. Between 1990 and 2000 when the cultivated area remained at 250,000 hectares the yield in hectograms per hectare had actually improved by 2000 hg going from 7200 hg to 9200 hg.

Within fourteen years since 2000, the yield decreased by over 4000 hg parachuting from 9200 hg/ha to just 5100 hg/ha. Put against the growth rate of cultivated land mass this amounts to a rate of loss in yield of 1,6% per each hectare.

Arabica is a very finicky variety and grows best at high altitudes in rich soil. There is very little research in Ethiopia on soil quality to allow a good overview of the loss in yield due to lowering quality of soil. However, a clear correlation can be made with the increasing patchiness of the vegetation.

Alongside droughts and other natural causes, the poor agricultural practice of coffee growing smallholder farmers is exacerbating the situation. A lack of erosion protection, excessive nutrient removal and improper use of fertilisers impair soil fertility. This causes soil to be more easily washed away or blown away by the wind - nutrient stores and humus are lost, reducing soil quality. Each year, an estimated 30,000 hectares of soil are lost from all of Ethiopia.

Neglect of the governance

This brings us to the heart of the problem. Ethiopian coffee today is left in the hands of too many but at the same time no strong players. As mentioned earlier 95% of the coffee producers are smallholders. Large coffee holdings only represent less than 7000 hectares. In terms of productivity these are in no better situation.

Since the dismantling of the Coffee and Tea Authority set up by the Derg regime, the overall supervision of the sector has been left practically in the hands of NGOs and cooperatives with no harmonized and even contradicting policies and visions. There is only one under-resourced and nearly unknown public institution at the federal level for coffee called the Ethiopian Coffee Plant Organisation and its mandate is quite limited if clear at all. The large and complex structure of the Ministry of Agriculture which counts three state ministers, 20 directorates and nine accountable institutions does not have one structure for the crop which makes up more than 25% of its foreign exchange earnings.

Since the relaxation of the rules allowing for the establishment of cooperatives and cooperative unions (due to the fall in international prices) four exclusive Coffee Farmer Cooperative Unions were established of which the Oromia Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union is the largest with 311 cooperatives representing 288,201 members. Hence the majority of growers remain outside unions and even outside cooperatives. But the Cooperative Unions themselves indicate that they are challenged with lack of finance and inadequate access to risk management services, low levels of production and productivity, limited agro-entrepreneurship skills and inadequate organisational and management skills at primary cooperative level.

Extension services which the government says is expanding and one of its priorities are neither adapted nor offer specialised services for the coffee sector. While public spending on agricultural research (including Official Development Assistance) was estimated at US$18.8 million in the three years between 2005 and 2007 for example, the share of coffee research is nearly non-existent - less than 0.2%.

Neglect of the market/trade

In a study undertaken in 2013, among the solutions proposed (important to note here that less than 10 pages were dedicated to solutions in this 80 pages study) none involve the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. In fact the ECX has not impacted production and value chain processes as a whole and may even have contributed to creating problems.

Firstly, the ECX has only managed to add the number of middlemen between farmer and export. Secondly, due to a multiple number of reasons related to warehousing, grading, conflict resolution mechanism, and poor infrastructure, there is "widespread distrust of ECX among the trade, regarding grading and underweight, and a perception that the authorized channels of complaint and redress are not fully effective".

The rate of "coffee flight", or coffee traded through unsupervised black market channels is impossible to measure but is still high. Just three weeks before going to print, nearly 10,000 quintals of coffee were seized at the border for example. This results in the decrease of the average value of the officially traded coffee.

Neglect of the industry

It is easy to get into a depressing enumeration of the multi-faceted negligence which Ethiopian coffee is suffering from. But none of the figures shown above depict the state as much as the following.

Various studies cite slightly differing percentages of the amount of coffee sold in the domestic market. (In fact this also shows the extent of the investment in data and research put in coffee.) But the figures are between 50 and 60% of the production.

There are some 10 (washed) coffee classes, as the quality grades are called, and are graded between 1 to 9 as well as an Under-graded category. Only the top 6 grades are exported while the rest are reserved for domestic market. This means that the largest production concerns coffee of the lowest classes.

Consider further figures. Up to the year 2000 Ethiopian coffee used to be among top 20 coffee price earners. By 2014, its coffee price has been thrown out of the top priced league. By a comparison, the United States, which produces less than 3 million tons of coffee per year, earns four times as much as Brazil, the coffee of which is the second highest priced. Therefore even by exporting its top class coffee Ethiopia's coffee is priced very low.

This relates to the problem of lagging behind the increasingly competitive and refined international coffee industry. This in turn has little to do with highly publicised coffee trademark issue - or only very remotely.

First it is about belonging to international specialty coffee markets - fair trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance are some of which with the possibility of double and triple certifications. Of the more than 311 coffee farmers who are members of the Oromia Cooperative Union, for example, only 41 have such certification with only 18 who have double certification (fair trade and organic) and just 6 with triple ones. It is true that the benefits of certifications for farmers is debatable but the net contribution to improving quality, productivity, sustainable use of natural resources and in particular international competitiveness is not.

In Brazil, for instance, the international certification is more than 80% and the country has now moved on to farm by farm specialty coffee production- which involves a much more rigorous quality checks.

International pricing also relates to degree of processing- the higher the supplier in the more or less ten levels of coffee production (from crop to cup) the greater the resilience to price fluctuations. Ethiopia, after years of coffee production history, still exports green coffee beans- roasted coffee amounts for less than US$200,000 in earnings. If the Ethiopian economy has, as the latest World Bank Ethiopia report claims, now counts an expansion of the "manufacturing" sector, it certainly has not benefited the coffee sector.

A real transformation of the Ethiopian economy will result in the enhancement of the coffee value chains - in terms of being small holder inclusive, upgrading the quality of production, improving productivity and even in the creation of rural non-farm jobs for the youth around coffee. Columbia for example exploits the coffee industry to the maximum with entire other industries such as tourism built around it. In the past 14 years when Ethiopian coffee was dying Vietnam went from producing just 900,000 tons in 2000 to becoming the world's second largest exporter and third highest priced in the world.

Ethiopian coffee is quickly on the verge of becoming as fantastical as the legend of the story of the discovery of coffee. Its story in effect mirrors that of the Ethiopian GDP growth- an increase in size which does not translate in quality or in productivity. While the producers remain smallholders and the sector remains in the hands of small good will hunters it is difficult to imagine its bright future.

Poor Farmer

Ethiopia’s Coffee: Big Claims, Little Accountability

What did the farmer get?

A record beyond the farmer’s reach

Promises in the farmer’s name

Who will answer?

Coffee in Retrospect: "A Grocery in Congress" (1906)

Coffee in Retrospect: What the 1903 treaty between Menelik II and the United States did and did not say

Coffee in Retrospect: The Treaty of Commerce between Menelik II and the United States (1903)

Coffee in Retrospect: The price of coffee and the cost of the road to Berbera

Coffee in Retrospect: Richard Burton on the coffee of Harar (1856)

Coffee in Retrospect: "A great emporium of the coffee trade" (1887)

Part 6: The Coffee Year Closed. The Account Did Not.

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 5: What the farmer keeps

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 4: The trees, and the land under them

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 3: The coffee we cannot buy in Birr

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 2: Who is in charge of coffee?

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 1: The record, and the arithmetic behind it

A Record Is Not Enough

Part 1: The record, and the arithmetic behind it

A Record Is Not Enough: A Series Beginning Tomorrow

A Record Is Not Enough

A Five-Part Series Beginning Tomorrow

Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Authority Relaxes Coffee Export Restrictions

Ethiopia: New coffee directive sets strict minimum price

Climate-hit Ethiopia shifts coffee uphill

Caffeine high? Climate-hit Ethiopia shifts coffee uphill

ECX Assigns Former Cooperative Bank’s Head as CEO

Towards a Balanced Sustainability Vision for the Coffee Industry

Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) CEO resigns amid government scrutiny

ECX Boss Resigns

Hip Coffee at $4 a Cup Revives African Industry Left Behind

-- Africa became a niche producer as Vietnam, Brazil expanded -- Urbanization, staple crops a threat to African arabica output

High-tech, low impact: Ethiopia’s state-of-the-art commodity exchange

Not as transformative as its founders hoped

Ethiopia’s vulnerable tropical forests are key to securing future of wild coffee

Brazil ditches standard jute coffee bags, leading move toward bulk

Ethiopian coffee: a gold mine on its last leg

-- Africa became a niche producer as Vietnam, Brazil expanded

-- Urbanization, staple crops a threat to African arabica output