Update: Ethiopia and Starbucks Reach Agreement!

In last month’s Special Coffee Issue of the CRS Fair Trader, we told you about Ethiopia’s campaign to trademark the names of its coffee regions.  Today we are writing with happy news: after two days of meetings in Seattle earlier this week, the Ethiopian Government and Starbucks issued a joint press release announcing an agreement in principle on a licensing arrangement that will help Ethiopian farmers retain more of the value of the coffee they grow.  Sources from the Ethiopian government expect a final agreement will be signed within the next week or so…Stay tuned!

This agreement represents the culmination of years of work by government officials and coffee farmers from Ethiopia and their legal advisors and campaign supporters in the United States.  Ethiopia’s campaign has been an audacious enterprise — thousands of impoverished farmers in East Africa taking on one of the world’s leading brands — and represents a landmark in the ongoing efforts of disadvantaged producers overseas to achieve more equitable terms of trade with large multinational companies.

Background.  Ethiopia’s premier coffee-growing regions — Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe — are among the world’s most sought-after coffee origins, and coffee that bears these regional names commands significant premiums in the U.S. specialty coffee market.  The Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office and its legal advisors have been working for years to trademark the names of its coffee-growing regions in the United States so that the small-scale farmers who grow Ethiopia’s coveted heirloom coffees might capture more of their end-value.  Although they have succeeded in trademarking the terms Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe in 28 countries around the world, their campaign ran into resistance in the United States from industry groups, including the National Coffee Association, and from Starbucks.

But months of public campaiging by the Ethiopian government and a coalition of influential NGOs led by Oxfam America moved Starbucks to reconsider its position.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 and is filed under Coffee . Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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