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...
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 questio...