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. ...
In 1962 the countries that grow coffee and the countries that drink it agreed to share out the market by quota. Ethiopia's first act under the new system was to dispute the figures it had been given, and it had good reason to. On September 28, 1962, the International Coffee Agreement was signed at the United Nations in New York, and President Kennedy put out a statement welcoming it. It is three short paragraphs. The United States bought half the world's coffee, he said, so the agreement could not take effect until the United States ratified it. Coffee was the main source of foreign income for many poor countries, "particularly in Latin America," and a fall of one cent a pound cost Latin American producers fifty million dollars, enough to undercut the Alliance for Progress. Africa is not mentioned. I do not read that as a slight. Kennedy was speaking to Americans about a Latin American policy, and Latin America grew most of the world's coffee. But it is an hone...