Ethiopia’s Coffee: Big Claims, Little Accountability

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. I’m tired of the announcements, the unanswered questions, and the expectation that the public should simply take officials at their word.

On July 7, the Prime Minister announced $3.1 billion in coffee export earnings for 2025/26. Days earlier, the director general of the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority (ECTA) had announced about $3 billion at a press briefing. On July 15, the Authority’s Telegram channel, summarizing an internal management review, reported 440,000 tons exported for $3.13 billion and called it the highest result in the country’s history. That volume fell 160,000 tons short of the government’s own 600,000-tonne target, a miss of more than a quarter that the celebratory post did not mention.

If the earnings figure is accurate, the credit belongs first to the farmers who grew the coffee. Nearly four months after the fiscal year closed, the public still cannot examine the complete account behind it. What coffee was counted, under which product definitions, on what valuation basis and over which reporting period? So far, the public has been given a speech in Parliament, a post on Telegram and the Ministry of Agriculture repeating the same number. Repetition is not verification. Publish the account.

What did the farmer get?

The National Bank reported the previous year’s coffee exports to the nearest ten kilograms. The Coffee and Tea Authority sets a minimum export price every week. Yet Ethiopia still lacks a regular, nationally comparable public account of what growers actually receive, by region and season, alongside production costs. The government measures coffee at the border with precision. Why does that precision disappear when the money is traced back to the farmer?

Ask what share of export value reaches the grower and the answers are 40, 60 or 80 percent, depending on the source. Where is the reproducible calculation? The frequently repeated 60 percent figure traces through a 2019 paper to an older TechnoServe business case. The paper’s lead author confirmed to me in writing that he had not calculated it independently. These percentages cannot replace actual transaction records.

A state that weighs its coffee to ten kilograms at the border has no excuse for leaving what farmers were paid out of the public account.

A record beyond the farmer’s reach

From December 30, large and medium operators placing coffee on the European market must demonstrate that it is traceable, legally produced and not linked to deforestation after 2020. Ethiopia has built a national traceability system with German support and tested it in Sidama. Other coffee-producing countries are building such systems too. The difference lies in what the public is told.

In an undated procurement document, Uganda’s agriculture ministry reports 1.6 million coffee farms mapped out of an estimated 2.8 million. The only Ethiopian national figure I have found comes secondhand, from a foreign government: the US Department of Agriculture reported in May that, according to the Coffee and Tea Authority, “hundreds of thousands” of plots had been mapped and registered.

Hundreds of thousands out of how many? ECTA’s figure of 5.9 million coffee growers does not answer that: growers and plots are different units. In July, the director general declared data gathering complete. On October 25, according to Capital, the Authority said that more than 99 percent of Ethiopia’s coffee farms are deforestation-free, and that European buyers in five countries have been given access to data to verify their supply chains. That is the Authority’s word for it. How can it vouch for 99 percent of farms when it has not said how many it has mapped? Weeks before that claim, new research from the Rift Valley Institute found that “neither the ECTA nor regional governments are well prepared” for the EU rule, citing a lack of technical capacity, “especially in the geo-location of coffee farms.” Publish the count, the denominator, the districts and the coffee volume supported by a verified plot-to-export chain.

Since the Authority has not published a national map of its claimed mapped plots, I made a map of what an outsider can establish. It shows every zone where Ethiopia’s 2021/22 agricultural survey recorded smallholder coffee growers, and the places where specific mapping activity is publicly documented. It does not identify every mapped plot or claim to locate unmapped plots. The national system was tested in Shebedino, Sidama. A Farm Africa/Farmforce pilot in Bale and Illubabor mapped 3,619 farms. Farmforce reported that transferring the pilot data to the national system was paused at the time of its account. Whether that transfer has since been completed is not established.

What this map cannot show is the very information the Authority should make public: where national coverage is complete, where gaps remain and how much coffee is affected.

Every zone where the 2021/22 national agricultural survey recorded smallholder coffee growers, and places where plot mapping is publicly documented. Sources are printed on the map.

In ECTA’s published registration guide, the individual farmer is a source of coffee, not one of the six categories permitted to open an account. Those categories are exporters, warehouses, suppliers, unions, cooperatives and primary industry. I have found no published procedure telling a farmer how to see the record attached to her plot or get it corrected when it is wrong.

ECTA says foreign buyers have access to the data. So an importer in Germany can check where a farmer’s coffee was grown, while the farmer has no published way to look at the same record, let alone correct it. If a correction procedure exists, it is one of the best-kept secrets in Ethiopian coffee.

The consequences can begin at the collection point. Where verified origin carries a premium, a sebsabi has an incentive to offer less for coffee from a plot without usable documentation. No national transaction series establishes how often that happens or the size of any discount. That is precisely why the missing record of actual farm-gate prices matters.

A farmer may have preserved forest cover for decades and still face a lower offer because a plot was not mapped or its record cannot travel through the system. She did not build the databases and has no say in how they connect. Why should she pay when they fail?

Promises in the farmer’s name

In July, the Coffee and Tea Authority described plans for a Coffee Fund to cushion price shocks and help replace ageing trees. Farmers have needed that protection for years. Where does the Fund stand today? What has been approved, what remains undecided and when will it become operational? Nothing published answers any of it.

The Authority’s deputy director publicly described compensating suppliers who have bought coffee when falling world prices cause exporters to stop buying. That may protect traders from losses. For farmers, he offered only that the Fund would train and support them when they face market losses or production problems. But what does it pay the farmer whose price has fallen? Who qualifies, what triggers a payment and how will anyone establish that assistance reached the grower, directly or through an intermediary?

A family that uproots its old trees loses that income for years while the new ones grow. What is it supposed to live on in the meantime? The Authority has published no rules on income support, no financing plan and no timetable.

Oromia, meanwhile, has introduced a levy in farmers’ name. Last December, Addis Fortune reported a five-percent charge on coffee bought for export, assessed on half its market value, with proceeds intended for farmer training, quality and rural infrastructure. An Oromia Trade Bureau notice reproduced in Rift Valley Institute research specifies collection at five birr per kilogram. Which formula governs actual collections? The public should not have to untangle two different descriptions of a charge that is already being collected.

The coffee industry association negotiated concessions, including tax deductibility. Its chairman publicly worried about what rising prices in farmers’ markets would mean for exporters. What voice did smallholders have in those negotiations? An expert quoted by Fortune warned that exporters could pass losses on to suppliers and farmers through lower prices. The new Rift Valley Institute study of the Jimma belt raises the same pass-through concern about the levy.

How much has Oromia collected? Which zones paid it? Where has the money gone? Who benefited?

The same Fortune report mentioned a regional study suggesting that green coffee sold below 100 birr a kilogram was not viable for most farmers. Publish that study. Publish the levy’s receipts, spending and results. Show whether farmers benefited or bore yet another cost.

Money collected in farmers’ names cannot be accountable only to those who collect it.

The problem goes deeper than missing records and unanswered letters. The Rift Valley Institute’s 2026 synthesis of three major coffee belts finds that “corruption is widespread in the coffee sector, involving cooperative leaders, local officials and state institutions,” among them law enforcement and customs. It finds that “patronage and clientelism heavily influence licensing, land grants and coffee marketing,” and that smallholders “continue to receive little benefit for their participation.” These are research findings, not court rulings against particular individuals. But they call for an independent investigation, not another round of official reassurance. In 2022, when a national anti-corruption committee was set up, the Prime Minister called corruption “a termite that hollows a country” and asked citizens to help expose it. Independent researchers now say the termites are at work in coffee. What is his government going to do about it?

Who will answer?

Between August 17 and October 5, I sent six written requests to the Coffee and Tea Authority, the National Bank and the Ministry of Planning and Development. The questions concerned the export account, the figures behind official claims and how the national traceability system works.

The requests and review dates are publicly logged. None of the three institutions answered by the review dates, and none has answered since. A foreign development partner answered within days and pointed me to the responsible office at ECTA. That office has ignored both of my letters.

A public export account, the rules of a public fund and an explanation of a public traceability platform should not depend on knowing the right person. If these institutions will not answer a researcher with a public log and a newspaper column, what chance does a farmer have of correcting a boundary, challenging a price or finding out whether promised support will ever arrive?

Many Ethiopians gave this government the benefit of the doubt. Its leaders promised openness, invited criticism and called for dialogue rather than confrontation. On July 7, the same day the Prime Minister announced the coffee earnings, he told Parliament that he had led more than 225 public dialogue forums. Dialogue, it seems, does not extend to answering letters.

Transparency cannot stop at the podium. It must reach the ministries, authorities, regional bureaus and local offices where figures are recorded, money collected, decisions made and people turned away. A citizen invited to dialogue but denied the evidence has been invited only to applaud.

What angers me is the casual treatment of these failures as paperwork. They concern what farmers are paid, whether their coffee can command its full value, whether a household can receive protection and where money collected in communities’ names goes. Farmers carry these risks in real life while officials issue reassuring statements.

Publish the complete 2025/26 coffee export account, including its scope, method, volume, value and performance against targets. Publish actual farm-gate prices and production costs by region and season. Publish validated plot counts against a national plot total, by district, and show which records are connected to the national system.

Give farmers a way to inspect and correct their own records. Tell the public the Coffee Fund’s status and publish its financing, eligibility and payment rules. Account for Oromia’s levy, birr by birr. Investigate the governance failures identified in independent research. Answer the questions.

The farmers have delivered the coffee. The government owes them an account.

Supporting records: Coffee Monitor Questions · Coffee Monitor Research · ECTA July 15 statement · Capital October 25 report · Rift Valley Institute synthesis · RVI Jimma study. Map sources are printed on the figure.