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.
Part 4: The trees, and the land under them
Scheduled Sunday, July 5, 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
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