Around Ethiopia in seven days...

An email from Justin Purser, Trade Aid's food buyer.

Around Ethiopia in seven days...

I’m back in Addis Ababa after an epic week visiting coffee farmers here in Ethiopia, travelling with three hardy Kiwi coffee roasters. With no domestic air travel options, and with the various coffee growing regions here being spread so far apart, we’ve spent a long time on the road and have driven for more than 50 hours in the past seven days.

Travelling at ground level has its advantages; we’ve seen thousands of kilometres of scenes from everyday Ethiopian life and have viewed countless images of goats and sheep being herded, dense crops of tef (a local grain) and sorghum waving in the breeze, and thousands of women and children carrying water home from a distant well (with or without the help of donkeys). We’ve seen street vendors selling a bewildering array of goods, mostly locally-produced products like broad beans and chat, firewood and charcoal. We’ve passed white flamingos feeding in shining Rift Valley lakes, and have driven past herds of dromedary camels grazing by the roadside under the watchful eyes of their AK47-toting nomadic masters. Yesterday we visited the ancient walled city of Harrar and walked through its intriguing and beautiful twisting alleyways.

We’ve also met with seven different coffee co-operatives who are all part of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, the producer partner from whom Trade Aid buys more product than any other. It’s been a big week.

I’ve been covering a lot of familiar ground; in late 2005 I met with farmers in the regions of Yirgacheffe and Harrar and heard from them how much benefit they were getting then from selling coffee to fair trade buyers, and now four years later I’ve been to catch up with their co-ops and also with some of their neighbouring co-ops who also now sell coffee to fair traders like us.

These people blow me away. Trapped for so long receiving a pittance for their cash crops, and living in areas so remote that even by Ethiopian standards they receive few government-provided social services, they have grasped the opportunity higher coffee prices has provided them with both hands.

A serious and pressing problem in rural Ethiopia is the lack of access to education, in an age where farms are becoming so small when passed from generation to generation that they no longer provide a viable income to families. But with the support of Trade Aid and other like-minded traders, the groups we visited here have received community funding which they have used to build dozens of new classrooms which together provide schooling for many thousands of extra students (the Ethiopian government had agreed to a deal where they provide teachers for every new privately-funded classroom). At the same time, the number of students per class is being actively reduced, to improve the quality of lessons; it’s not uncommon to see 150 kids or more crammed into a single room here, and the dream is to one day reduce the average pupil to teacher ratio down to 70.

These students have big dreams; they typically wish to help their community by becoming teachers, nurses, or doctors. Not all the students are so young; we visited a newly-built grade 7 class and found the age range was from 12 to 28. One of the 28 year-olds, who is hoping to become a doctor, has a son studying at grade 5 level in another classroom at the same school. Until this year, the father had not had a chance to continue studying towards his dream job.

Even from my visit just four years ago, the change I have seen has been staggering. Where a co-op then boasted several new classrooms that they had built, now they can also show me additional classrooms which are educating people up to higher grade levels, whole other new schools that they have constructed, new wells they have bored, and additional coffee processing facilities that they have funded.
Coffee prices for farmers have more than doubled in some regions from four years ago, partly thanks to Oromia fair trade co-operatives pushing up payments of farmers who are turning in coffee to them in their area which is driving higher prices received by other farmers from local traders as well.

But while fair trade coffee farmers here are themselves a little staggered by the improvements they have seen, I can see that there is so much more work that they must do just to provide even basic opportunities for their families; kids will need schooling opportunities all the way through to tertiary level if they are to become fully trained for their dream professions, children are still dying from easily treatable water-borne diseases, many of the rural roads are in badly rutted condition and will need to be better surfaced if these farmers ever hope to move beyond donkeys as transport for their many tonnes of coffee.

As one mother put it yesterday when I asked what she would do with extra income if coffee prices were higher still, she replied: ‘I’d feed my children better. Now I can only offer them basic vegetables like maize and sorghum, and they often only get to eat twice a day. I’d like to at least feed them some of the eggs that our chickens produce but that we currently have to sell at market to supplement our income’.