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A Record Is Not Enough: A Series Beginning Tomorrow

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 a number announced at the port is not the same thing as an answer at the farm.

What did the grower receive? What did that money buy after inflation, devaluation, transport costs, fertilizer, food, and debt? Who had the cash to buy cherry when prices rose? Who benefits when coffee is traced, branded, exported directly, or planted on newly allocated land? And when the world price falls again, who carries the loss?

Those are the questions I will take up beginning tomorrow in a five-part series: A Record Is Not Enough.

The first posts will look at the export record itself, the institutions now governing coffee, the coffee Ethiopians still cannot freely buy in birr, and the changes taking place in the trees and the land beneath them.

The final post will return to the question that matters most: what the farmer keeps.

The coffee year is nearing its close. There will be another official number, another announcement, and probably another celebration.

Before that happens, it is worth knowing what to ask.

Part 1 begins tomorrow: “The Record, and the Arithmetic Behind It.”

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