Coffee Monitor: Ethiopia
Independent evidence on Ethiopia's coffee economy · Seattle, Washington
The record at the port. The account at the farm gate.
Coffee Monitor examines what the country's coffee figures mean across the value chain: what is reported, what remains undocumented, what can be calculated from what exists, and which policies would close the gap.
An announcement is a claim. A public series with definitions and a method is an account. The distinction is the discipline of this site, and the coverage index below is where it is applied.
Six figures describe Ethiopia's coffee year. None of them is currently published as a series with definitions and a stated method. Two have been announced by officials without a written account. One is collected daily and held inside two institutions. One is derived from the first two and cannot be assessed until they are documented. And two, the two that would tell you whether any of this reached a farmer, have no public series that Coffee Monitor has been able to locate.
This is a finding about publication, not about truth. A figure can be entirely accurate and still have no reproducible public account behind it.
The index measures whether a public account exists for each figure, as of the review date. It does not rank countries, it is not weighted, and it does not claim that data which is unpublished does not exist. Read how it is built, then tell me where it is wrong. Every row is sourced on The Record.
One
Every consequential public claim about Ethiopian coffee, dated, attributed, linked to its exact source, and marked according to whether a reproducible account sits behind it. Corrections are logged rather than absorbed.
Two
A farm-gate price series and a farmer-share calculation are not difficult to define. They have simply never been defined in public for Ethiopia. The definitions are here, and they are open to attack.
Three
What was announced. What was documented. What can be calculated from what exists. What remains unknown. Most argument about Ethiopian coffee collapses these four, and the collapse is where the farmer disappears.
A Ministry of Agriculture programme restates the same 900 to 2,100 kilogramme per hectare target the Authority gave on 27 June, but on ten years instead of five, with the six billion dollar export target unchanged. The Authority's production claim is also more than double the USDA estimate, and inconsistent with the Ministry's own hectares and yield.
Entry →Reported by Addis Fortune: the Coffee and Tea Authority is preparing a fund to cushion price shocks and replace ageing trees. The open question is where the trigger sits. A fund that pays through the buyer does not, by itself, reach the grower or record a farm-gate price. One that pays direct to grower accounts does both.
Entry →The National Bank reports coffee export volume falling against the previous year and coffee export earnings improving significantly, across the same eight months, with no figure for either. Read together they indicate the year was carried by price rather than by quantity.
Entry →The Prime Minister told the House of Peoples' Representatives that coffee exports earned 3.1 billion dollars in 2025/26, against 2.65 billion the year before. The figure has been repeated worldwide. No written close-of-year release has been located.
Entry →A framework for farm-gate accounting and coffee income protection. What the Authority's planned Coffee Fund needs in order to reach growers: prices collected at the farm gate, payment direct to verified accounts, and a trigger that starts at the farm rather than the buyer. The paper is posted and distributed on SSRN. Both are available on the Research page.
Research →The argument for an international readership: the world's coffee statistics are precise about what leaves the port and silent about what reaches the farm. Free to read.
Read →Starbucks and the trademark dispute, the founding and the record of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, traceability, domestic market policy, farmer income. Indexed here, published at Poor Farmer.
Index →