Poor Farmer

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...

A Record Is Not Enough A Five-Part Series Beginning Tomorrow It has been a long time since I wrote here. A lot has happened in Ethiopia since I last wrote regularly about coffee. War. Displacement. Debt. Inflation. A currency that no longer buys what it did. And a government that came promising reform, prosperity, and a different future. I have been quiet, but I have not stopped paying attention. I started this blog because Ethiopian coffee was always being discussed in terms of exports, brands, buyers, and big promises. The farmer was usually somewhere at the end of the story, if she appeared at all. That was true before the Commodity Exchange. It was true during the fight over Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harar. It was true when the government said the Exchange would fix the trade. And it is true again now, as Ethiopia celebrates a record coffee year. The record is real. Ethiopia earned more from coffee. The country exported more. The reforms in the sector have done some real things. But...