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. ...
Before the First World War, a sack of Harar coffee could reach New York under its own name, or it could go by way of Aden and arrive as Mocha. Three accounts from those years follow it on the road, and record what was taken from it along the way. William Ukers wrote All About Coffee for buyers, and his pages on Ethiopia read like directions for getting coffee out of Harar. They are also as close as these old documents come to the people who grew it. Most of the coffee around Harar, he wrote in 1922, came from small plots of fifty to a hundred trees, owned mostly by Hararis, Oromo and other Ethiopians, with a few Greek, German and French planters among them. Near the town, the women of farming families carried the coffee in long, shallow baskets on their heads to the brokers. Farther out, the farmer waited for the broker to come to him. The only grower Ukers shows us in those pages is in a photograph, captioned as a coffee grower and his helper in his grove of young trees near Harar. ...