Poor Farmer

By Kathy McLaughlin The Wall Street Journal February 1. 2012 After years of convincing the nation's coffee drinkers that dark-roasted brews are the classiest thing to fill a mug or takeout cup, Starbucks, Peet's, and a new wave of high-end chains are rolling out the exact opposite: light-roasted coffee. The target customers for the new style of coffee are people like Jackie Russell, a retired school administrator in Los Angeles. Ms. Russell's son Ted Russell is something of a coffee connoisseur, who has shared his passion for Peet's dark-roasted coffee with his mother. Only problem: She hates it. "It's really just a terrible taste to me. It almost tastes like something that has burned," says Ms. Russell. To capture customers like Ms. Russell, Starbucks Corp. in January introduced Blonde Roast, a light-roasted blend now sold in the chain's 10,787 U.S. stores and which will be stocked in grocery stores this week. Peet's Coffee...

By Hadra Ahmed Addis Fortune Published on January 29, 2012 January 30, 2012 Ethiopia’s flagship export item, coffee, has fallen into a troubling state of affairs after the nation’s exporters have failed to pack out even one fourth of the quantity expected to be sold in this fiscal year. Only a little over 20pc of the 270,000tn of coffee that federal authorities had planned for export in the current fiscal year has been shipped out, despite two quarters’ time already having passed, industry sources disclosed to Fortune. Alarmed by such a drastic shortfall compared to the export target, Kebede Chane, minister of Trade (MoT), and Yacob Yala, state minister, called an urgent meeting with leaders of the Ethiopian Coffee Exporters Association on Thursday afternoon, January 26, 2012, held inside the Ministry’s meeting hall on Tito street, also attended by Elleni G. Madhin (PhD), chief executive officer of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). “The meeting aimed to...

Peter Temba Tanzania Daily News (Dar es Salaam) January 25, 2012 The Eastern Africa Fine Coffees Association (EAFCA) holds a yearly National Taste of Harvest Competition, which recognizes specialty coffee, in one of its eleven member states, namely Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe. Recently, EAFCA in partnership with Tanzania National Taste of Harvest Committee, Tanzania Coffee Board and the US-based Coffee Quality Institute, through USAID - COMPETE Programme, held the annual Taste of Harvest Coffee Competition at Sal Salnero Hotel in Moshi. The annual Taste of Harvest (TOH) was then held at Mazao / City Coffee Facility through their generous venue sponsorship, under the tutelage of highly trained and experienced facilitators from Coffee Quality Institute Coffee Corps and the Coordinator from EAFCA, Ms Mbula Mutahi. According to the Executive Secretary of Tan...

Wondwossen's Note :   Apparently, this unclassified cable, labeled April 9, 2009, was released on the same day I published my first assessment of the situation in Ethiopia's coffee sector: " Coffee Brews Feud, Drowns Out Voices ".  Since then, I have published multiple commentaries on the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) and the state of the coffee sector. Those commentaries, including updates and news articles from other sources, can be accessed through the standalone page dedicated in this blog and named " ECX Watch ". This cable also puts to rest the points of contention addressed in " Straightening out coffee facts for the record ", which was a rebuttal of the arguments of Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin, CEO of the ECX. The contents of the cable can be summarized in the following broad categories: 1.      The Government of Ethiopia (GoE) passed the coffee law in order to control the domestic coffee sector 2.      ECX had...