Power to the people in rural Ethiopia

I’ve just been travelling in Ethiopia for the third time and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to make repeat visits to a number of the coffee co-operatives with whom we trade. Signs of progress are plain to see; in rural Ethiopia, where government investment is extremely limited, coffee farmers are using the extra money they receive from fair trade for projects such as building more classrooms, putting in more power lines, and building better roads for themselves and their communities. It’s extremely satisfying to see how Kiwis paying a few cents more for their coffee can have such an impact in a country where a little money goes a very long way.

I do find my work challenging though. I arrived in Ethiopia conscious that prices for the coffee we import from this country have climbed sharply in recent years and that a number of the roasters who buy Ethiopian coffee from Trade Aid are starting to buy less of it as a result. On the other side, I've been talking with coffee farmers who still (barely) illuminate their homes with tiny diesel-fuelled lamps. They dream of the day when they would have electricity, could flick on a switch and enjoy the brightness of a light bulb, and could save critical income by not having to regularly buy new batteries to power their radios.

Our trip ended on a high with us making the first trip by any coffee western coffee buyers down to the village of Mummicha, which is in one of the main coffee-producing valleys west of Harrar. We borrowed tents from the Oromia co-operative's office in Addis Ababa and were humbled to find on pitching them that in remote parts of Harrar such accommodation is deemed to be very luxurious. Cooking our dinner over an open fire, it felt very much like a typical camping experience in New Zealand but for us it was an adventure, and not our everyday routine. In this village, like so many others in rural Ethiopia, there was no electricity to light the way that night. We all came home with a slightly deeper appreciation of how life is for millions in rural Ethiopia when the sun goes down.

Head winds on the mountain

Just outside the town of Mbale, rolling countryside abruptly gives way to the hulking shape of Mount Elgon. An extinct volcano, Elgon looms above the surrounding plains and reaches over 4000m in altitude before extending many kilometres eastwards and downwards into neighbouring Kenya.

The lower slopes of Elgon are excellent coffee-growing land, and a large coffee industry was established on the Ugandan side of the mountain during the British colonial era. Tragically, this industry largely collapsed during Idi Amin’s 1970s reign of terror, a time in which trade became nearly impossible. Many coffee farms were abandoned during that time and remain untended today.

Visiting Mbale in late 2009 I spent several days with the Gumutindo co-operative and left feeling very positive about the future of coffee farming on Mount Elgon, as I discussed in this previous post. Now, less than two years later, my optimism for Gumutindo’s future is badly shaken. What could have changed there so suddenly?

The problems that have arisen have not been due to failings on the part of the co-operative, which continues to strive hard to build a sustainable business model and which this year took the bold step of constructing its own processing mill to cut production costs and improve coffee quality.

The problem has been the weather.

Although farmers in the Mount Elgon region had already experienced difficulties as a result of changes to their weather patterns, two significant events have recently impacted on them in quick succession.

In March 2010, torrential rains brought down a number of landslides on the largely deforested flanks of Elgon, destroying many buildings and claiming more than 300 lives. In helping its farmers to recover from this disaster Gumutindo set up a landslide fund to help out as best it could, and has provided support to those who lost family members, land, crops, and buildings.

One year later, an enormous new challenge has emerged. Leaf rust disease has spread rapidly through Elgon’s coffee trees, destroying much of the latest harvest. The disease was spreading anyway due to increasing temperatures, which have allowed rust-bearing organisms to rapidly multiply, but the past year has seen an explosion in the number of diseases and pests.

Faced with this fresh disaster, Gumutindo is again responding as best it can. Understanding the rise in local temperatures to be a symptom of global climate change, they have put resources into a climate change awareness-raising program. They have launched a tree planting initiative and have distributed tens of thousands of seedlings to their members this year, as well as providing training to farmers on tree conservation, protection of watersheds, keeping of wetlands and better land management.

What has really alarmed me has been the scale of these two weather-related problems, and the amount of damage each has caused. If the exceptional rains of early 2010 and the coffee leaf rust explosion of 2010-11 would both be symptoms of a changing climate, they highlight the challenges that even well-resourced coffee farmers would face if they would be capable of effectively combating this phenomenon. New tree seedlings take decades to grow, disease-resistant coffee strains take many years to develop and use.

Trade Aid remains committed to its trade with Gumutindo, but we are under no illusions that the strength and longevity of our trade may ultimately be dictated by weather conditions that we can do little to influence. As Gumutindo explain, their weather has changed and it is severely testing them:

“The rains do not arrive at known times and even when they come, they are unpredictable and fall so heavily in a very short time or they are so little that crop production cannot be sustained in the way we know”.