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. ...

ECX's upcoming procurement bid By Wondwossen Mezlekia November 28, 2012 The Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) is currently conducting a high-ticket international procurement - the first of its kind since a multi-million dollar bid was busted in 2010 due to alleged fraud and corruption during the bidding process. The bid for the supply, installation, and maintenance of a futures trading software that ECX floated back in 2010 was marred by dishonest maneuvering, seemingly to favor the Sri Lanka based company, Millennium IT, and World Bank withdrew ECX's award proposal and cancelled the loan. The loan was part of what the government had borrowed from International Development Association (IDA) for the purposes of financing the Rural Capacity Building project. [1] Strangely, the said futures trading software was not needed to begin with and would have been running idle today had ECX purchased it in 2010, because the government is, as it has always been, decidedly...

Note from Wondwossen : As a matter of disclosure, t he following report was apparently posted online on May 20, 2012, but was not brought to my attention until after I cross-posted agritrade's article titled, " High prices encourage coffee production in East Africa, but challenges remain ." Any resemblance between the facts and conclusions drawn by this report and the ones detailed in my recent piece titled, " Ethiopia’s coffee export nose-dives as government control backfires " and published on July 15, 2012 is entirely coincidental. --- Ethiopia Coffee Annual Report - public distribution Global Agricultural Information Network (GAIN) Report USDA Foreign Agricultural Service May 15, 2012 Report Highlights: Ethiopia is a major producer (the largest in Africa) and exporter of coffee.  Because of information not earlier available, estimates for Ethiopian coffee production have been revised upward substantially from earlier USDA estimates.  Ex...

By Wondwossen Mezlekia July 05, 2012 Ethiopia's coffee export continues to plummet due to chaotic government controls and enforcement of bad policies. The downward trending export that began falling in 2008/09 following the government's tightening of its grip on the sector continues to nose-dive in the face of favorable international prices that hit a 13-year high in 2010 and a 29% increase in total production. According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO), Ethiopia's production during the current crop year was 549,745 tons and domestic consumption is estimated at 223,747 tons. Based on available cumulative data, the current year's export is forecast to be about 143,442 tons - a decline by about 30% from last year's 199,871 tons. 1 In the four years since Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) began trading coffee (2008/09-2011/12), the country's net export has declined by about 9% to an average of 164,735 tons per year from the pre...