2009 Travel and News

19 March, 2009

It's been a busy year so far. In January I was in El Salvador. Then in February I went back to Ethiopia. Next month it's off to the SCAA conference in Atlanta and later there's the Roasters Guild retreat. Of course, there's still coffee to roast every day. Yesterday we got another shipment of our usual Colombian and Costa Rican coffees and recently we've received some really nice coffee from Bolivia that people started buying before it even got to the shelves.

I was invited to Ethiopia to attend the Harar Renaissance Roundtable Conference in Dire Dawa. There were several good presentations during the conference and I was able to see the current situation in Ethiopia in person.

In past years, there were basically two ways to sell coffee to the international market in Ethiopia. You could send your coffee to the Central Liquoring Unit (CLU) either in Addis Ababa or (if the coffee is from Harar) Dire Dawa where the coffee would be evaluated and then sold through an auction to registered exporters. You could also sell the coffee to a cooperative and the cooperative union that cooperative belongs to could market and export that coffee directly. As of August, 2008, the rules have changed. Anybody interested in the specific legalese of this can read Proclamation No. 602/2008.

Under the new rules, most coffee is sold through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). This is a very efficient exchange similar to the NYBOT C. The major problem with it is that it is a commodity exchange. As the coffee comes in, it is evaluated and marked as one of about 200 different categories based on where the coffee was grown and the quality of that coffee. The coffee is then sold in standard contracts of 30 bags. Coffees from small producers are almost certain to be blended together in order to produce these standard contracts (which is problematic in itself as blending multiple coffees of similarly high quality does not always yield an equally high quality result) and there is absolutely no tracability for exchange traded coffee. There is a provision for producers to export coffee, however as of this writing everybody I've spoken to on the matter is telling me that the papers needed to allow the coffee to ship are not getting signed. At the same time, exporters are not confident they can get the qualities they want out of the ECX and have only purchased about 30% of the available coffee. I've also heard that producers for the specialty market have been holding back coffee due to lack of confidence in the new system. The result of this is that while the ECX has been running out of warehouse space, I saw exporter facilities that were nearly empty at a time when they would normally be very active. If the Ethiopian government can't figure out how to let people sell specialty coffee soon we may have to go without coffee from this origin. This would be unfortunate as Ethiopia produces some of the finest and most interesting coffees in the world.

Aside from the conference, I was also able to spend some time being a tourist in Harar, wandering around the old city and the like. Some of you who were in the shop while I was gone may have heard that I would see hyena feeding. The hyenas are fed for tourists every evening and as a result they've gotten very fat. The eagle feeding was much cooler.