A site that asks for transparency has to go first.

Coffee Monitor currently has no commercial position in coffee and receives no payment from any participant in the Ethiopian coffee value chain. Funding, commissioned work, institutional affiliations, and material conflicts will be disclosed on this page before the publication they relate to, not after.

In detail, as of the date above:

• Trading position: none. Coffee Monitor does not broker, trade, import, export, roast, or hold inventory, and takes no commission on any transaction in the chain.
• Paid clients in coffee: none. No government, exporter, cooperative, union, importer, roaster, retailer, or development agency pays for this work or reviews it before publication.
• Funding: none. The work is unpaid and self-financed.
• Other professional work. The author runs a risk and compliance advisory practice serving financial institutions in the United States. It has no clients in coffee, agriculture, or commodities, and no connection to the subject of this site.

If any of this changes, this page changes first. That is the commitment, and it is a more useful one than a promise never to be funded.

• Claims are attributed to a named source, a date, and a retrievable citation. Where the only source is a spoken statement, the entry says so.
• Definitions are published before the data is. Anything on the Method page can be attacked, and the strongest attack wins.
• Corrections are made in public, the original is struck rather than deleted, and the correction is credited. See Corrections.
• Absence is described honestly. The site reports what it could not find, not what it has concluded does not exist.

Wondwossen Mezlekia has followed the Ethiopian coffee trade since 2006, through the Ethiopia and Starbucks trademark dispute, the founding and the record of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, and the export figures announced in every year since. He holds a B.Sc. in Agricultural Economics from Alemaya University and has spent fifteen years in operational risk, fraud prevention, and data governance across banking and insurance. He is a Certified Fraud Examiner. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

The professional background is not incidental to this site. The discipline it applies to Ethiopian coffee data is the same one applied to a control environment: establish what was asserted, establish what was evidenced, and do not let anyone confuse the two.