Coffee Monitor: Ethiopia
Independent evidence on Ethiopia's coffee economy · Seattle, Washington
The record at the port. The account at the farm gate.
Nor does almost anywhere else. The same six-row test is applied to 51 coffee-producing origins in the Observatory: what each one reports, what remains undocumented, and what an outsider could actually reconstruct from public records. Ethiopia is assessed by that standard, not by one written for it.
An announcement is a claim. A public series with definitions and a method is an account. The coverage index below applies that distinction to Ethiopia; the Observatory applies it to the rest of the world.
Six figures describe Ethiopia's coffee year. Five remain unrated; farmer share is closed at state one. That is not because the information is absent. Official export information exists and is distributed across the National Bank and Customs, the Coffee and Tea Authority, and the national planning system. It is fragmented rather than missing, and it fails this index on definition rather than on existence: no tariff scope is named, units are undeclared and mixed between rows, and the adjustment between customs value and reported export value is not explained. Three export rows are being re-adjudicated against that material. One is open pending adjudication of a published benchmark price. One awaits a search record. One, farmer share, is closed at state one.
Ethiopia carries no count while a row remains open. A count would treat unfinished checking as a finding of absence, and those are different things. The same rule applies to all 51 origins in the Observatory.
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 an outsider could reconstruct each figure from public records, as of the review date. It is not weighted, and it does not claim that data which is unpublished does not exist. Ethiopia is assessed here by the same standard applied to every origin in the Observatory. 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 a price effect rather than a volume one, over those eight months.
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 →"Europe Needs the Plot, Ethiopia Needs the Price" in Addis Fortune, on why a traceability system that reaches the plot is the cheapest place a farm-gate price record will ever be built. "Ethiopia Counts Coffee at the Wrong End" in African Arguments, on why the world's coffee statistics are precise about the port and silent about the farm.
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 →