After years of working to make Ethiopian coffee some of the most sought after coffee on the planet, the government of Ethiopia has taken a giant step backward in an effort to step forward.
The Ethiopia Commodities Exchange, a government organization that is supposed to function rather like the Canadian Wheat Board, will provide warehouses where all the coffee in Ethiopia is to be collected and out of which it will be sold. This comes at about the same time India is dismantling a similar system which saw so much bad Indian coffee come into the market that I haven’t seen a Malibar or a Mysore on a specialty coffee menu for just about five years.
I suspect that, as with most government initiatives, the germ of the ECX was a good idea. The aim was probably to drive up the price of mediocre coffee by mixing it with higher quality coffee, and thereby get more money to more coffee farms. That’s a noble aim, but the actual effect is to drive roasters like us away from Ethiopian coffee.
Transparency is probably the single most important part of specialty coffee, and it’s certainly what sets specialty coffee apart from regular run-of-the-mill coffee. We work hard to develop relationships with farmers, to financially support farmers who produce outstanding crops. We’ll have no way to do this now.
Worse still, farmers who produce a bottom-rung crop may very well get the same amount of money for their beans as the farmers who produce top-quality coffees, which, let’s face it, is just absurd.
And finally, the only thing we’ll know about the coffee we get, if we order Ethiopian coffee (because all coffee farmers, except a few government owned farms, must sell their crops to the ECX) is that it came from the northern or the southern warehouses. That gives us no idea of its density (the higher altitude a coffee is grown the more dense and more sweet the bean tends to be), its process (washed coffees tend to have more citrus flavours and more clean body than sun-dried, for example), and will make profiling the roast more labourious. We also can’t be sure we’re actually getting a crop that is entirely new (as coffee ages it takes on the flavours of everything around it, including the jute bag it lives in).
In short, we can’t be sure we’re getting quality coffee and the efforts it will take to determine if we even want to roast and sell the coffee way overwhelm the pleasure of a moderately good but undependable sack of no-provenance Ethiopian coffee.
The fact is, we just won’t be buying Ethiopian coffee in the coming season. That’s a huge shame, because some Ethiopian farmers produce amazing coffee, coffee we’ve had before and coffee we’d like to have again.
I don’t understand why the government is standing in the way of the farmers and I don‘t understand how punishing farmers who’ve worked hard to produce amazing coffee is going to help Ethiopian coffee. If the government wants to help poor farmers with bad crops, could I suggest state-sponsored horticultural education rather than the ECX? The ECX is not only a good idea gone awry, it’s hearbreaking for coffee lovers, for roasters, and most of all, for farmers.
Edit: We’ve just heard from our brokers that some coffees that require transparency to be sold (like organic certified, for example) will still be able to keep their certification. This means there’s going to be at least a degree of transparency in the ECX. Better still, we’ve heard that farms that grow, process and export their own beans are exempt from the ECX, which means we might still be able to get single origin Ethiopian coffees, and that’s wonderful. It’s just too bad farmers like Bagersh, who’ve poured their money into growing and processing better coffee, and rely on an exporter, will be lumped, and probably lost, in the ECX.
