Trade Aid’s coffee buyer, Justin Purser, visited Ethiopia in December and reports on his experiences there. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee is used in Trade Aid’s Organic Espresso Blend. 

Before Band Aid very few in the outside world had an image of Ethiopia, the forgotten land – it was an inland island. Untroubled by the tides of global change through a quirk of geography and history, the people of Abyssinia have plotted a largely unique course through much of the last 2000 years. Ethiopia is a predominantly Christian nation largely untouched, unlike the rest of northern Africa, by the tide of Islam that spread from just across the Red Sea.  Having adopted the Julian calendar, Ethiopians saw no need for the Gregorian upgrade, gave that one a miss, and they’re now seven years behind the rest of us. They also keep time to a clock which is six hours out of step with every other country in the world.

Finally, an image of Ethiopia emerged. The 1984 famine badly affected parts of the country, and the international response that followed threw the country into the spotlight. Images of a parched and hostile land largely peopled by bald-headed children with pencil-thin limbs, bloated bellies and fly-covered faces, were burned into our memories. Along with the words of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Ethiopia is still, in the minds of most, a land of crippling drought and emergency food drops, a land where ‘nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow’.

cherries waiting to be pulped

Which is such a pity, because the Ethiopia you are likely to find if you’re lucky or smart enough to visit will be one filled with friendly people, beautiful landscapes and, if you stick to the highlands, blessedly cool days. For coffee lovers, there’s an added bonus – the excellent espresso you will find wherever you go (this is the birthplace of coffee, after all…) And coffee was the reason for our visit. We wanted to meet with Tadesse Meskela, the manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Co-operative Union, and to visit the two famed Ethiopian growing regions - Yirgacheffe and Harrar – from where we buy via Oromia containerloads of fair trade coffee.

A smooth, six-hour drive south from Addis Ababa across the Great Rift Valley took us past lakes, camel markets, oxen threshing grain, and more heavily-laden donkey carts than you can shake a stick at. Towards the end of our journey the road climbed into lushly vegetated highlands and past the first of many, many coffee trees.

sorting coffee

Eventually, in the heart of the Yirgacheffe growing region, we came to the office and wet processing mill of the Negele Gorbitu coffee co-operative. It was late in the afternoon, and the day’s harvest was making it’s way towards the weighing station, either on donkeyback or else in bags perched on peoples’ heads. The mill enjoys a fabulous location, looking out across a grassy valley towards densely forested hills.

Meeting with senior members of the co-op, we were pleased to have the chance to tell them face-to-face that their coffee is highly regarded by roasters in New Zealand, and it was great to be able to assure them that in our country there are many people who are committed to supporting fair trade coffee and thus ensure that we can continue to pay them the fairest possible price for their wonderful coffee. 

classroom at Negele Gorbitu

We were showed with great pride the two latest additions to the area’s infrastructure – a primary school, and a gleaming new medical centre. With the community premiums the co-operative is now earning through fair trade, dream projects such as the building of a school or a clinic are now being turned into reality. Before the school was constructed, the 150 local children who attended classes had to travel 10 kilometres in each direction every day, fording a river along the way. Now that they have their own classrooms within easy reach, 550 local children are enrolled and are starting to work their way up through the grades. The children in the Grade 1 class we sat in on were anything from five to 15 years old.

Before leaving the area we met with several growers selling to the co-operative, to try to get a sense as to whether the sale of their coffee at fair trade prices to buyers such as Trade Aid had yet made any material difference to their lives. We saw enough evidence of recently-purchased sheep, cows, and tin roofing to be confident that it has. Prices for these farmers are more than double the rates of just two years ago.

Travelling north to Harrar, we encountered our only traffic hold-up – a crash that had entirely blocked the road. Fortunately, Tadesse was able to enlist the help of a goods smuggler who was able to direct us along the labyrinthine tiny back roads until we were able to join the main road further along!

drinking water

Harrar is a much drier region than Yirgacheffe, but the rolling countryside can still support crops such as sorghum, chat and maize in lower regions and coffee higher up. Arriving at the Illili Darartu co-operative, we soon learned just how precious water is in the region – the round trip to collect tea-coloured water takes six hours.

Illili Darartu Co-operative

Here, too, we saw that construction of classrooms had been deemed the highest priority for use of their fair trade premium – three classrooms had been built and a fourth was nearing completion. Growers I interviewed in Harrar all stressed the same point – an education was the greatest gift they could offer their children, given the opportunity. Several only half-joked when they hoped that their children might one day become water experts, and solve their water access problems. One man also spoke of his gratitude at how he now earned enough money thanks to his higher income from fair trade to feed himself and his family adequately for all twelve months of the year.

Back in Addis Ababa, we visited the national coffee auction and the immense government coffee warehouses, where we found a shipment of fair trade coffee bound for Trade Aid waiting to be taken to the port at Djibouti and shipped to Christchurch.  This was a graphic reminder of our role – the more coffee we can sell in New Zealand, the bigger the impact we know we can have on communities such as those at Negele Gorbitu and Illili Darartu. These coffee farmers have really only seen the benefits of fair trade for the past two or three years - we know we all can, in time, make a world of difference for these deserving people.