Ethiopia: the First Bird Friendly® Coffee Producer in Africa

Announcing the First Bird Friendly Coffee from Africa!

By Menkeli Kanaa

March 17, 2008

Ethiopia – Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) has announced that Anfilo Specialty Coffee Enterprises (ASCE) has been certified bird friendly - the first in Africa to obtain this certification.

SMBC’s first bird friendly certified coffee from Africa comes from two woredas (sub sections), of western Wellega, surrounding the Gerjeda Forest Reserve. The areas include some 600 hectares of undisturbed wild coffees that are self- sown, and grow under the full coverage of natural forests. The coffee is grown at an altitude of 1800 to 2400 meters above sea level (5905 – 7874ft). Those two weredas, Anfilo and Gidami, are among other important coffee producing weredas that also surround this forest reserve.

The growing trend in today’s coffee market is for certification programs, which assure consumers that their purchases are grown under environmentally and socially responsible conditions

Bird friendly certified coffees require a certain number of shade trees to meet sustainability and migratory bird diversity criteria. According to smbc’s website, "Bird Friendly® coffees are the only coffees on the market that are certified as 100% shade-grown and organic, meaning that they are grown without the use of chemical pesticides that poison the environment.”

The fact that environmentally conscious consumers are willing to pay more for bird friendly certified coffee in exchange for the guarantee that they are positively affecting the environment is a valuable point that Ethiopian farmers can tap into, as their harvests derive from the same forests that every cultivated Arabica coffee plant around the world originates from, and where production methods still remain environmentally friendly.

The extra income that will come from certification will not only promote the preservation of the indigenous coffee gene pools in their natural habitat, but will also aid farmers to finally reap the rewards their product commands.

But paradoxically, those facts are lost on the smallholder farmers who populate those coffee growing regions, because the eager market that shows appreciation for their organic products are far from their reach.

More than 95% of coffee produced in Ethiopia comes from smallholder farmers in home gardens and semi-forest and forest coffee production systems. Samson Guma, owner and managing director of ASCE, explains that because certification has to be obtained at the farm level, the expenses involved in obtaining it are usually prohibitive for the average farmer. He adds, “That makes a lot of farmers who are not taking advantage of the fastest growing market trend in the coffee industry.”

His passion for coffee comes through as he describes his relationship to it, “As everyone knows, coffee is an integral part of people’s lives here in Ethiopia. Its indigenous aura and aroma has nourished our bodies and souls for decades. It is not only a means of making a living.”

Besides the large role coffee plays in Ethiopia’s culture, as is evident in the daily amount of the population’s ritualized consumption of the beverage, coffee is also Ethiopia’s most important export commodity. It accounts for about 45% of its foreign exchange earnings, and about 25% of the Ethiopian population depends directly or indirectly on coffee related businesses, making the coffee sector the highest employer.

Samson ponders those statistics and ends by saying, “…so the pervasiveness of poverty rooted in the daily lives of those who are the custodians of our most prized possession, is ironic.”

In his zeal to help break the poverty cycle of farmers in Anfilo and Gidami, Samson successfully recruited 118 of the area’s 603 farmers and created an association, which collectively became the first in Africa to obtain Smithsonian’s bird friendly certification.

“This represents an achievement,” he says, “it quantifies the actual impact of all the steps taken to get here: the voices of advocates who have brought much needed attention to the farmers’ plight, the Ethiopian government’s much publicized efforts to help increase coffee farmers’ income, and a lot of on-the-ground hard work.”

Things are beginning to fall into place for Ethiopia’s coffee industry. New policies that streamline the export procedure, shortening the supply chain and thereby making it easier for coffees with certification to bypass the old auction processes, have replaced the coffee sector’s previous obscure atmosphere, with one of hope and empowerment.

Samson Guma, who was a resident of Seattle, a city famously dubbed as America’s coffee capital, before he moved back to his roots and coffee’s birthplace, says that his familiarity with the specialty coffee market on one end, and the problems farmers face on the other, has given him a distinctive role. He intends to be the bridge that connects these two divergent worlds.

ASCE’s strategy of linking sustainability to the market place will improve the lives of the smallholder forest coffee farmers, while responding to the increasing demand for coffees that meet sustainability criteria - a winning recipe that can be replicated in other growing regions.