Poor Farmer

Product is tasty, but labor is back-breaking Although there is no running water in Jimma. Ethiopia, and electricity arrived only recently, there is plenty of coffee for everyone. By Colleen Mastony / MCT Etho Online APRIL 4, 2007 JIMMA, Ethiopia — Inside the coffee plant's corrugated metal fence, men look more like mules as they lug 100-pound sacks of coffee on their backs. But as midday nears, a heavenly scent wafts from the corner, where Ahmed Achoumeto, 25, pounds a pile of black coffee beans in preparation for the noontime break. "I am terribly addicted. If I don't get coffee, I can't see properly," he said, standing barefoot in the dirt, grinding the beans with a primitive 3-foot-long wooden pestle and a mortar made of a hollowed tree stump. "Almost everyone here is addicted." Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. And in this caffeine-addled corner of the world, coffee is a blessing and a curse swirled together in a cup. Amid the lush hills and mi...

UPDATE ~ Starbucks’ infamous video was brought down yesterday. The message on YouTube says: “This video has been removed by the user." Starbucks Senior VP Dub Hay said on the video that Ethiopia's coffee trademark attempts are illegal. Bob Winter of Arnold and Porter LLP responded, also on YouTube , saying that Hay's claim was totally absurd. The company never admitted its mistakes publicly except the comment on YouTube which read, “When we posted that video we felt the information was correct & since we've learned a lot & realized the information about the legality of the trademark was not accurate.” -------------- Starbucks Met Ethiopian Ambassador, No Agreement Again The Ethiopian Ambassador to Washington, Samuel Assefa was in Seattle yesterday to meet senior Starbucks' executives, it w as learned. Credible sources confirmed that the meeting between Starbucks and the Ambassador took place here in Seattle yesterday, April 3, but no specific agreeme...

Tarjei Kidd Olsen Inter Press Service News Agency April 3, 2007 OSLO, Norway (IPS) - Ethiopia is looking to trademark coffees in the EU to benefit its poor farmers, in the face of opposition from Starbucks in the U.S. The Ethiopian move provides lessons for an African market that could be worth billions of dollars. Coffee originated in Ethiopia today accounts for significant exports. Yet, in Ethiopian regions such as Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe, familiar names to coffee fans around the world, coffee farmers live in abject poverty. Most Ethiopians earn less than two dollars a day, and coffee farmers receive only a fraction of the price that their prestigious coffee fetches in cafés and shops in the developed world. The Ethiopian government filed applications in 2005 to trademark Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe as coffee brands in the European Union, Canada, Japan and the U.S. "Ethiopia wants more control over the distribution of fine coffee. Ultimately prices will get better,"...

As a small African nation recovers from genocide, Google, Starbucks and Costco lend a hand. By Marc Gunther , Fortune senior writer March 29 2007 NEW YORK ( Fortune ) -- It's not every day that an African head of state delivers a corporate endorsement at an annual shareholder meeting. But Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, did just that last week at Starbucks' meeting in Seattle. Starbucks' chief executive, Jim Donald, introduced Kagame, who praised the $8-billion-a-year company. "Starbucks and Rwanda are extended family, very closely linked by the business we do together and the passion we share," Kagame said. His comments delivered welcome relief from the criticism aimed at Starbucks over a recent trademark dispute with Ethiopian coffee growers. Best known today for the 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 of its people, Rwanda is, thanks to Kagame, quietly building a new reputation in corporate America - as a business-friendly nation that wants to become a mod...

By Mike Slocombe Digital Lifestyles 2 April, 2007 If you travel around the UK a lot and find the homogenisation of High Streets into identical rows of bland coffeeshop multinationals a deeply depressing experience, you may find delocator.org.uk the perfect site for your needs. Bearing a passing resemblance to the ’store locator’ seen on the Starbuck’s site, the delocator lets you type in a UK post code and find the nearest ‘non corporate cafe’ near you, with a drop-down menu for selecting the distance range to search, from 1km to 15km. The site’s still in early days and because it relies on users to input recommended cafes, the coverage isn’t as complete as it might be, but the author told Digital Lifestyles that he intends to add more functionality ‘in the Spring’ (he’s also asked for help in running this site - contact him here. ) Despite this, we still managed to find two non-corporate cafes within a 1km of us, with the results displayed in a text box containing a description of th...

“The retailer brags about supporting global clean-water projects - it donates 5 cents for every bottle of its Ethos water sold - but it quietly helped kill an expansion of the nickel-per-bottle deposit law right here in New York. Starbucks sells Ethos for $1.80 per 23.6-ounce bottle. Starbucks, however, donates less than 3 percent of the purchase price, while using huge amounts of fossil fuel to create and ship Ethos bottles.” – New York Post By CATHERINE CURAN New York Post April 1, 2007 Java giant Starbucks this weekend is fending off criticism that it is serving up cupfulls of hypocrisy along with its popular coffee. The retailer brags about supporting global clean-water projects - it donates 5 cents for every bottle of its Ethos water sold - but it quietly helped kill an expansion of the nickel-per-bottle deposit law right here in New York. The result of the unexpanded bottle bill is millions of plastic water bottles filling landfills, littering the streets and harming marine life,...

By Melissa Allison Seattle Times April 1, 2007 Jim Donald rarely slows down. Starbucks' chief executive thinks fast, talks fast and moves fast — all good qualities for the person in charge of making sure Seattle's best-known coffee-shop chain opens six or seven new stores a day. After two years on the job, the former grocery-store executive says Starbucks has a faster pace than his previous companies. He spends nearly half his time traveling, but that doesn't keep him from running and playing basketball and sending tens of thousands of hand-signed notes to employees each year. In an interview the day after Starbucks' annual meeting last month, Donald, 52, talked about Starbucks' international growth and his role at a company that has gotten negative attention lately. With a hint of a Southern accent that might come from Tampa, where he grew up, Donald conveyed both urgency and sincerity about keeping Starbucks' original character even as it aims for 40,000 store...