What did revolution do to Ethiopia's coffee?

On 30 April 1974, staff at the Ethiopian Coffee Board joined workers from the electricity authority, the Commercial Bank and several other state agencies in demanding the right to form a trade union. That same day, the Coffee Board's staff and those of three other agencies went on strike (Andargachew Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution).

It was a small moment in a much bigger upheaval. Within five months, Emperor Haile Selassie had been deposed. Within a year, every piece of rural land in Ethiopia, including the coffee farms, belonged to the state. What followed would reshape who grew Ethiopia's coffee, who sold it, and who decided what it was worth.

Coffee under the emperor

By the 1970s, coffee was the backbone of Ethiopia's economy. It grew mostly in the south-west and was by far the country's most important source of foreign exchange, though its productivity didn't rise noticeably through the 1960s and 70s (Tiruneh). During the 1970s, coffee made up 50 to 60% of the value of all Ethiopia's exports (Library of Congress).

The trade itself had grown up largely in private hands. From the 1950s, coffee was collected by brokers and collectors in the growing regions and sold through mostly privately owned auction centres in Dire Dawa and Addis Ababa. A National Coffee Board took over oversight in 1957, and in 1972 a new auction system created a central reference price for Ethiopian coffee (DRWakefield).

Land was the bigger problem. Much farmland was worked by tenants under agreements with landlords, and the imperial government kept putting off reform. In the late 1960s, a drive to commercialise farming, backed by international funding, actually led to thousands of tenants and poor farmers being evicted (Tiruneh).

Revolution, and the land reform of 1975

On 12 September 1974, a group of junior officers and soldiers known as the Derg deposed Haile Selassie and suspended the constitution. On 20 December, it announced its programme of "Ethiopian Socialism", and in early 1975 it nationalised the country's banks and insurance companies (Tiruneh).

Then came the biggest change of all. On 4 March 1975, Proclamation 31 declared all rural land the collective property of the Ethiopian people. Privately owned land was to be shared out among people willing to farm it themselves, while large private farms could be run as state farms or turned into cooperatives. Farmers now had the right to work their plot and keep what it produced, but they no longer owned it and couldn't sell it or pass it on (Tiruneh).

Farmers were organised into peasant associations, each covering up to 800 hectares, which shared out the land among their members. Tenants, landless people, farm workers and anyone owning less than 10 hectares could join straight away. It was the Derg's most popular measure, met with almost universal acclaim, and unlike many earlier laws, it was actually carried out.

What the Derg did to coffee

The big commercial estates weren't broken up. They were kept as state farms. In Limmu, in the south-west, the Derg nationalised most of the coffee plantations owned by landlords and former government officials, and they became the Limmu Coffee Plantation Corporation.

The market changed too. The auction system set up in 1972 came under state control, with prices and the flow of coffee increasingly shaped by government policy rather than competition (DRWakefield). In the 1980s, the government created a Ministry of Coffee and Tea Development, responsible for both production and marketing (Library of Congress).

The upheaval hit exports hard at first. In the disruption after the revolution, coffee's share of Ethiopia's export earnings fell to 25%, but it recovered by 1976. In the five years to 1988/89, coffee made up about 63% of the value of Ethiopia's exports and provided about 20% of government revenue, and around a quarter of the population depended on it, directly or indirectly (Library of Congress).

And for all the state's ambitions, Ethiopia's coffee stayed in the hands of smallholders. About 98% was grown by peasants on plots of under a hectare, with just 2% from state farms, and some estimates suggested the peasants' yields were higher. Even so, the government's ten-year plan aimed to more than triple the area of state coffee farms, from 14,000–15,000 hectares to 50,000 hectares by 1994 (Library of Congress).

Quotas, resettlement and the end of the Derg

The peasant associations that had handed out land soon became tools of the state. Tiruneh describes how they were used to collect grain quotas from their members, sold to the government at below market prices. They also helped move hundreds of thousands of peasants from drought-hit areas in the north to the south, and herded millions more from scattered hamlets into villages (Tiruneh).

Some of that resettlement led straight to coffee country. Historian Gebru Tareke records that between 1984 and 1986, almost 600,000 people were forcibly moved from the highlands of Shewa, Tigray and Wello to the lowlands of Gojjam, Illubabor, Kafa and Wellega (quoted by Christopher Feran). Kafa is home to the forests where wild coffee still grows.

Then the money started to run out. World coffee prices began falling in 1987, and in 1989 the price of a kilogram of coffee fell from US$0.58 to US$0.32 in a matter of months. Mengistu Haile Mariam warned his party congress that year that foreign exchange earnings from coffee would fall by 240 million birr (Library of Congress). Two years later, in 1991, the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (Feran).

What the revolution left behind

The Derg fell, but its biggest reform didn't. Ethiopia's 1995 constitution kept land in the hands of "the State and the peoples of Ethiopia". Farmers and companies can lease land from the government for up to 99 years, but the right to use it still isn't the same as owning it (Feran).

Smallholders are still the heart of Ethiopian coffee, just as they were under the Derg. Around 4 million smallholders grow more than 95% of the country's coffee, and in 1999 the government created cooperative unions to export coffee on behalf of cooperatives that lacked the staff and logistics to do it themselves (Feran).

So when you roast one of our Ethiopian coffees, you're roasting coffee from a country where, by law, the land still belongs to the state and the people: a legacy of the revolution of 1974.