Poor Farmer

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.   Part 5: What the farmer keeps 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...

  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.   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...

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.   Part 3: The coffee we cannot buy in Birr 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 ca...

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.   Part 2: Who is in charge of coffee? 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 li...

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 trad...