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. ...
A hundred years before Ethiopia fought Starbucks over the names Harar and Sidama (trademarked as Sidamo, a name many Sidama consider derogatory), Americans argued over a different name: whether coffee from Harar could be sold as Mocha. In the summer of 1906, while the pure food bill was before the House of Representatives, James R. Mann of Illinois turned the space in front of the Speaker's desk into a grocery store. A syndicated story that ran in July, in papers from Michigan to Indian Territory, described the show. Mann scattered "pepper" across his desk and told the members it was ground olive pits. He dipped a white cloth into a bottle of cherries that had been bleached and dyed red with coal tar, and the cloth came out red. He held up a bottle of "honey" with a real bee in it, which the paper said had never been near a hive. Coffee came near the end. Mann said that a quarter of all the coffee used in the United States, about 250 million pounds a year, was...