By Jody Treter

February 2007

The Motherland of Coffee

The soils of Ethiopia (once known as Abyssinia) have been the setting for many of humankind's most pivotal evolutionary moments . Remains of our oldest human ancestors, including the beloved “Lucy” who lived 4.4 million years ago, were discovered in Ethiopia. Lucy and her descendants were some of the first animals to fashion and use tools, build fires to cook food, and domesticate plants and animals. Today, we can thank our ancestors from Ethiopia for propagating watermelon, sorghum and many other cereal grains. Yet, undeniably, coffee is Ethiopia's most influential gift to the world. The first deliberate planting and harvesting of a coffee seedling is said to have occurred around 800 BC in the Southern Ethiopian state of Oromo. Soon after, coffee became the most coveted elixir of wealthy European and Arabian traders and elites.

Coffee (Buna - pronounced boo-nah – in Oromefu) plays a central role in the lives of people in Ethiopia. Fifteen million people in Ethiopia depend upon the coffee industry for an income. Coffee accounts for over 50% of the nation's exports. According to Abeyna Alemu, who currently works for USAID in Ethiopia, of the 275,000 – 300,000 tons of coffee available for sale this year, about half of it will be consumed domestically. The rest, including the specialty grade coffee, is exported to buyers around the world through an auction in Addis Ababa. This coffee has often changed hands several times before it gets to auction, beginning with an intermediary who purchases the coffee at very low prices from farmers, sells it to a local coffee trading company, who may then sell the coffee at auction for $1.20 - $1.25/pound (Jan. 2007 prices) or sell it to another company who sells at auction.

Oxfam America asserts that in order for farmers to cover basic necessities after the “trickling down” of profits in this conventional trading system, buyers should be paying $2.00/lb for coffee. This is, of course, assuming the intermediaries in the coffee industry actually pay farmers a fair share of the profit, which is rarely the case. It takes only a brief visit to almost any coffee-growing region in the world to see that the Reagan/Thatcher free-market economic policy, which has dominated US foreign policy for the last 25 years, has failed for those who are at the bottom of the “trickle”.

In conventional coffee trading, the heated wagering on Wall Street is played out in the day-to-day lives of the coffee farming families living in rural Ethiopia. While traders are making upwards of $100,000.00 per year, farmers are working hard just to survive. If you have seen the acclaimed documentary “Black Gold” (www.blackgoldmovie.com), you surely noticed the disparity between the traders on the New York Stock exchange and the farmers in the fields in Ethiopia. As the second most actively traded commodity on the exchange (oil is number one), coffee is vital to the livelihoods of Ethiopia's 15 million coffee workers and many other small scale growers the world over. And, while stock traders and coffee brokers have the choice to leave the profession to find other work, coffee farmers without other options are at the mercy of the roller-coaster ups and downs of the world's market prices.

Coffee Unions and a New Future for Trade

On our recent visit to Ethiopia, we visited with farmers in Yrgacheffe and Harar to discuss the realities of the coffee industry. All of the farmers we spoke with, as well as officials at Oxfam and USAID, agreed that organizing into a union is the only assurance for small-scale farmers in Ethiopia to be guaranteed a decent wage for their high quality beans. Still, less than 3% of all of Ethiopia's coffee is currently being sold through farming unions. After several decades of forced membership in state-owned collectives that served to impoverish rural farmers while fattening the pockets of the ruling party, many farmers were understandably nervous about joining cooperatives.

Recently, the tide has turned as farmers in rural Ethiopia learn that they, themselves, may be legal owners of cooperatives. By forming a primary cooperative (usually comprised of several neighboring families) and then selling to an umbrella cooperative union, farmers not only receive a good price for their coffee but also dividends from profits and social premiums for the construction of community development projects. Based upon the recent growth of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU), from whom Higher Grounds Trading Co. purchases all of our Ethiopian coffees (organic and fair trade certified), more and more farmers are seeing the benefits of forming local co-ops and joining export unions.

The creation of OCFCU was monumental for the poor Oromo coffee farmers of rural Ethiopia. Not only was OCFCU the first coffee farming union to be formed in Ethiopia but also the first group allowed by the government to bypass the national auction to sell directly to international buyers. This allowed the unions to negotiate prices directly with buyers. During our visit in March of 2005, we learned OCFCU had an impressive 74 primary member cooperatives. In less than two years, the union has grown to 115 primary cooperatives with several more in the final stages of joining, representing a total of 115,000 small-scale farmers and their families. Since the inception of OCFCU in the late nineties, seven other coffee farming unions have formed in Ethiopia with the goal of replicating OCFCU's success. Tadesse Meskela - director of OCFCU – was proud to show us the award (a certificate and a new Dell computer) given to him one week earlier by Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, to recognize people who are helping to end the cycle of poverty in rural Ethiopia.

By partnering with OCFCU and others like them throughout the world, Higher Grounds Trading Co. is creating a more humane model for global trade. Basic to this new way of trading is the belief that all workers – farmers and their families, warehouse clerks, processing agents, mariners, roasters, etc - deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Besides paying the farmers a price well above the fair trade minimum, it is important to have open and honest conversations with the farmers and other stakeholders involved in the production of the coffee. While many companies are telling farmers how to tend the soil, plant the seeds and harvest the crops, we understand that the farmers are the experts. Rather than dictate farming practices to them, we spend time in Ethiopia and other coffee-growing countries listening and learning. This helps us to understand the intricacies of growing coffee; the different varieties of coffee and how they mature; the composting processes used in the fields; the reasons why shade trees produce a better cherry; and how this attention to detail results in some of the world's finest coffee.

Since we are citizens of the United States and we have more than enough financial wealth to share, our model of trade also incorporates “solidarity” partnerships. Very simply, we raise money by selling coffee and organizing fund-raising events. Then we donate the money to infrastructure development projects in coffee growing communities. Our focus is to provide for basic needs where, all too often, the government has failed to deliver. All projects are based upon requests from communities. During our recent trip to Ethiopia, we delivered nearly $10,000 USD from Higher Grounds Trading Co. coffee sales via the Oromia Photo Project (http://highergroundstrading.com/photos-from-ethiopia.html), local community and several private donors to be used in the construction of a secondary school and library in the community of Afursa Waro. Presently, children wishing to continue from elementary education to secondary must walk two hours to the closest secondary school.

Busho and Beyenne – A bright future for Ethiopia

We spent two days in the large community of Afursa Waro on our recent trip to Ethiopia. In keeping with Ethiopian tradition, we were hosted to a coffee ceremony overlooking the wet processing station at the Negele Gorbitu cooperative in the Yirgacheffe region of Southern Ethiopian. Fifteen year- old Kibinish Edo (affectionately nicknamed Busho) was serious and quiet as she went about preparing the coffee ceremony. First, she spread out a layer of grass, then she arranged a low-sitting charcoal stove,a flat roasting pan, a round-bottom black clay pitcher and a mortar with makeshift pestle on the grass bed. She perched herself in a small, short wooden bench next to the charcoal stove and began to roast the beans on the flat pan.

As the smell of freshly roasting coffee wafted around us, we chatted with the farmers about the year's harvest, the coffee processing, the new school and library we're helping to fund. Busho, never saying a word, kept pushing the beans around the flat pan with a large-mouthed spoon. We continued chatting while the coffee continued roasting. The farmers asked us questions about what we do, thanked us profusely for being concerned about their plight and coming to visit for a second time. They proudly showed us their accounting records (how much coffee they produce, how many members participate in the cooperative, how much each member is paid, etc). After 30 minutes or so, Busho offered the roasted beans to each of us for a whiff, which is customary after roasting, and we all took a deep breath of the roasted beans, exclaiming how wonderful they smelled, which is the proper thing to do and comes quite naturally. She transferred the roasted beans into the mortar and spent several minutes pounding the coffee with a heavy iron pestle. She proceeded to boil the water in the clay pot, add the grounds and, eventually, poured each of us three small porcelain cups of coffee (with a heaping teaspoon of sugar). She served each one of us - the visitors - and then the elders and then the younger men. Although, I don't remember Busho speaking an entire word during the coffee ceremony, it was clear that she was communicating a very important ritual to us. And the coffee tasted heavenly.

One of the highlights of the trip to Yirgacheffe was meeting Beyenne – a young man equipped with a camera, motorcycle and laptop – who spends six days per week braving muddy ruts and steep inclines to photograph and interview people from Busho's community of Afursa Waro for the Oromia Photo Project. At midnight everyday (when the internet has the most bandwidth available), Beyenne sends his compiled interviews and photos to the project founder, Gongogo in Minneapolis, and then on to Higher Grounds TC. Beyenne's work was initially created to expose US-consumers to the realities of life in the Ethiopian countryside. After nine months of regular visits to Afursa Waro, Beyenne has become a local celebrity there. On top of his duties as a journalist, which he seems to enjoy immensely, he told us that the families of Afusawaro depend on him for advise and news from outside the community.

So we looked to Beyenne – who speaks good English - when we were curious to learn more about the significance of the coffee ceremony, specifically to the farmers in Afursa Waro who grow our exceptional Yirgacheffe beans. Beyenne shared this interview with Busho, which he completed recently, “Rural people are very far from information therefore the coffee ceremony is used to close the gap and keep the society informed . . . For sure a person who doesn't drink coffee is like a person who has no ear because of a lack of communication, no greeting, he/she is outside of the society.”

Beyenne told us that Busho learned to prepare the coffee ceremony by watching her mother. She told Beyenne that at first she over-roasted the beans or sometimes added too much water but, after lots of practice, now she is an expert. Busho is from a large family with eleven children and, at fifteen years old, is in the fourth grade at the “fair trade” school, the local elementary school built with fair trade premiums. It is not uncommon to be married at this age in rural Ethiopia so when we asked Beyenne about Busho's prospects for marriage, Beyenne replied with a chuckle “She is in training”. Because there is not a local secondary or high school nearby, most of the children won't continue in school past the 4th grade. The most adept students, whose families can afford for them not to work, may walk the hour or so path to the secondary school and the very best will actually re-locate to attend high school. But most teenagers in rural Ethiopia will begin their adult lives, consumed with farming, ranching, marriage and families.

A visit to the coffee growing areas of Ethiopia, leaves one to wonder whether Ethiopia's gift to the world – coffee – was a blessing or a curse for her own people. Wealth and decision-making power has been hoarded in the hands of too few for far too long. Yet change is in the air. The unions are building much needed rural schools, health clinics and potable water projects. The farmers we met are insistent in their demands for a better life and committed to educating their children, which they deem to be the road to change in rural Ethiopia. With intelligent and compassionate youth like Busho and Beyenne leading the way, Ethiopia's coffee farmers are sure to be freed from the economic injustice that has plagued them for so long.