Poor Farmer

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. ...

It is staggering to know 95 per cent. of the people who think they drink Mocha and Java every day have been deceived, and yet the facts seem to be rather plain. A GROCERY IN CONGRESS The Lowell Ledger (Lowell, Michigan), page 6; the same syndicated article ran in The Kiowa Breeze (Kiowa, Indian Territory) on July 27, 1906 July 26, 1906 REPRESENTATIVE MANN PLAYS SALESMAN AND DRUGGIST TO UNMASK FRAUDS. Short Weight and Fraudulent Foods the Lure of Many Department Stores and Mail Order Houses. Honest Dealers Handicapped by Deceptions. When the pure food bill was before the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, intense interest was displayed by the members of that body in a "grocery store" established by Representative Mann of Illinois. Mr. Mann had been given a special privilege by the House committee having the bill in charge to demonstrate the manner in which the ordinary food products of the country are adulterated, and how the consumer is defrauded. The space in fr...

The first treaty between Ethiopia and the United States never mentions coffee. The mission that negotiated it had a coffee errand all the same, and the treaty set the terms on which Americans would later buy Ethiopian coffee. On December 27, 1903, Robert P. Skinner, the American consul general at Marseille, signed a short commercial treaty with Emperor Menelik II in Addis Ababa. Theodore Roosevelt had sent him at the head of the first American mission to the Ethiopian court. The party came up from the coast by way of Harar, where, Skinner reported, their reception "had not been devoid of military pomp." Menelik had defeated an Italian army at Adwa seven years earlier, and the railway from Jibuti had reached Dire Dawa only the year before. Britain, France and Italy had all signed agreements with him in the 1890s. The Americans were late. The English text in the State Department's records has a small detail I like. It dates the treaty the "seventeenth day of December...

His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and the United States of America, having agreed to regulate the commercial relations between the two countries and develop them... TREATY OF COMMERCE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ETHIOPIA, WITH THE PROCLAMATION OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), Document 258, pages 298 to 300 Signed at Addis Ababa, December 27, 1903; proclaimed September 30, 1904 By the President of the United States of America. A PROCLAMATION. Whereas a treaty of commerce between the United States of America and His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, was concluded on the twenty-seventh day of December one thousand nine hundred and three, the original of which treaty, being in the Amharic and French languages, is word for word as follows: (Translation.) TREATY OF COMMERCE. His Majesty Menelik II, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and the United States of...

In 1855 it cost more to carry Harar coffee to the sea than to buy it. Thirty-two years later, a newspaper in New Zealand called the town a great emporium of the coffee trade. Neither tells us what the grower was paid. Richard Burton spent ten days in Harar in January 1855. By his own account he was the first European to enter the town. He met the Amir and spent most of his stay waiting for leave to go. Yet in the short chapter he wrote about the place, he stopped to record what a load of coffee cost. A parcel of twenty-seven pounds sold in Harar for a quarter of a dollar. To hire a camel to carry twelve of those parcels to Berbera, on the Somali coast, cost five dollars. Twelve parcels came to three dollars of coffee. The camel cost five. Burton did the sum in the same sentence and concluded that "the profit did not repay labour and risk." I keep returning to that sentence. Burton was a traveller repeating prices he was told, not a merchant keeping books, and the quarter d...

When I visited Harar, the price per parcel of twenty-seven pounds was a quarter of a dollar, and the hire of a camel carrying twelve parcels to Berberah was five dollars: the profit did not repay labour and risk. TEN DAYS AT HARAR: THE TRADE OF THE CITY Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa; or, An Exploration of Harar (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), Chapter VIII 1856 (describing January 1855) Harar is essentially a commercial town: its citizens live, like those of Zayla, by systematically defrauding the Galla Bedouins, and the Amir has made it a penal offence to buy by weight and scale. He receives, as octroi, from eight to fifteen cubits of Cutch canvass for every donkey-load passing the gates, consequently the beast is so burdened that it must be supported by the drivers. Cultivators are taxed ten per cent., the general and easy rate of this part of Africa, but they pay in kind, which considerably increases the Government share. The greatest merc...

It is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade. WAR IN SOMALI. ABYSSINIAN FORCES OCCUPY HARAR. The Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), page 5 January 26, 1887 HOME AND FOREIGN. [Reuter's Telegrams.] Received January 25th, 1.15 p.m. WAR IN SOMALI. Aden, January 24. News has been received from Somali that the Abyssinian forces attacked and completely routed the Ameer of Harar's troops. They then occupied the town of Harar. The Ameer, however, escaped. [Harar is a town of N.E. Africa, situate in lat. 6deg 20min N., long. 42deg 17min E. It was the ancient capital of the Hadyah. It is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade. It is situate about 5500 ft above the level of the sea, and has a population of 8000.] Editor's note. This is the whole of the item as printed, a Reuters telegram from Aden with the newspaper's own bracketed note. The battle it reports is Chelenqo, fought on January 6, 1887, after which Menelik's army entered Harar and Emir ...

A Record Is Not Enough Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate By Wondwossen Mezlekia A postscript to the series, six weeks after Part 5.   When Part 5 ran on July 7, Ethiopia's fiscal year had closed and the Prime Minister had told Parliament that coffee exports earned 3.1 billion dollars. One question was deliberately left open: what would the written close-of-year account show? The Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority had already offered an explanation for the record. Better grades, more specialty coffee, direct sales, new markets and tighter control of diversion had allowed Ethiopia to earn more even as the international reference price fell. I wrote then that the final account should show how much of the result came from price, how much from volume, how much from quality mix, and how much from stock drawdown and coffee carried over from earlier harvests. More than six weeks later, I still have not found that account. A volume fi...

A Record Is Not Enough Ethiopia's coffee windfall, and what reached the farm gate By Wondwossen Mezlekia The fifth and final post in the series.   The fiscal year has closed, and the Prime Minister says Ethiopia earned 3.1 billion dollars from coffee exports in 2025/26, up from 2.65 billion dollars the year before. It will be celebrated, and it should be. Ethiopia has announced a five-year plan to raise productivity and push coffee-export earnings toward six billion dollars. But a record at the port is not a farm-gate account. That is where this series began, and it is where it ends. Not with the question of whether Ethiopia earned more. It did. The question is whether the grower kept more after the cost of producing, moving, and living through the coffee year. The world price has already come down from its 2025 peak. Cherry prices rose to levels many washing stations could not finance. Costs remain high. And the one number that would settle the argument, wh...