Coffee Monitor: Ethiopia
Independent evidence on Ethiopia's coffee economy · Seattle, Washington
Method
Everything on this page is a first draft, published so that it can be attacked. The strongest attack wins. Revisions are dated, and superseded versions stay reachable.
One thing only: whether a public account exists for a given figure, for a given crop year, as of a stated review date. It does not measure statistical quality, institutional capacity, honesty, or performance. It does not rank Ethiopia against other countries and it is not designed to.
A row marked no public series identified means that Coffee Monitor searched and did not find a recurring national publication. It does not mean that no ministry, regional bureau, cooperative union, research institute, or price desk collects the figure. Establishing the absence of any collection anywhere is not something an independent publication can do, and this index does not pretend to.
Equally, a low position on the ladder is not an accusation. A figure can be entirely accurate and still have no reproducible public account behind it. Publication and truth are different properties, and conflating them is the error this site exists to correct.
Under review is a sixth marker but it is not a rung on this ladder. It flags a figure whose state cannot yet be established, either because the evidence is incomplete or because it depends on a figure that is itself undocumented. It carries no position, high or low.
A written publication, attributable to the institution responsible for the figure, that a third party can retrieve and cite. A press report of a speech is a record of the speech, not of the figure. A ministerial statement, a parliamentary transcript, a video, and a press briefing are all evidence that a claim was made. None of them is an account of how the number was produced.
They are the minimum set required to answer one question: what share of Ethiopia's coffee export earnings reached the people who grew the coffee? Two describe what left the country. One is derived from those two. One describes what the state already collects. Two describe what the grower received. Remove any of the six and the question cannot be answered. Additional rows will be added when they are needed to answer the question, not to lengthen the index.
Because weighting would require a judgment about which absence matters more, and that judgment would be mine rather than a finding. The headline figure is a count, not a composite score: how many of the six rows are published as a series with a stated method. A count of zero is a factual statement under the definitions above. It is not a grade.
Send the publication. A single retrievable citation moves any row, and the change is logged in the corrections log with the source credited. This is the fastest way to be right about Ethiopian coffee data, and it is offered in earnest.
The price actually received by the grower at the point where the coffee leaves the grower's control, net of any deduction taken at that point. Recorded with a date, a location, a form of coffee, a unit of weight, and the class of counterparty. It is not the price a buyer says was offered, and it is not the price at the next node up the chain.
The definition matters more than the sampling. A weak sample of a well-defined quantity can be improved. A large sample of an undefined quantity cannot.
The farm-gate price expressed as a proportion of the free-on-board export price for comparable coffee in the same crop year, adjusted for the conversion ratio between the form sold at the farm gate and the form exported. Two inputs, one ratio, one period.
It has never been published for Ethiopian coffee because the first input has never been published. The obstacle has never been arithmetic.
The farm-gate price below which continued production stops being rational for a typical smallholder in a given region, given local labour and input costs. A threshold, not a target, and it will differ by region. It is the trigger the second window of the proposed fund would use. See Beyond the Coffee Record.
Why publish a method at all
Asking an institution to publish a number is easy to say. It carries weight only if you have published your own definitions first, tried to collect the number yourself, and stated honestly how far you got and where you failed. That is the standard this page holds itself to, and it is the standard it asks of others.
An independent collection effort is under way, using a standard instrument and a small number of cooperating growers and cooperatives. It will not produce a national series and is not intended to. It is intended to demonstrate that a national series is buildable, and to make the cost of not building one explicit.
Results will be published here with the sample size, the regions covered, the collection dates, and the confidence a sample of that size can honestly carry. If the collection produces nothing usable, that will be published too, with the reasons.
Growers, cooperatives, unions, and exporters willing to report a price: the instrument and the reporting terms are available on request. Individual respondents are not identified. Write to poorfarmer@gmail.com.