Ethiopia Wins. Starbucks Wins. Farmers Win!

An update for those of you who have been following the progress of Ethiopia’s trademark campaign on our blog or in recent issues of the CRS Fair Trader: Starbucks has signed a licensing agreement with the government of Ethiopia!  Seth Petchers manages the coffee program at Oxfam America, which led a coalition of NGOs in support of Ethiopia’s campaign to control more of the wealth generated by the sale of that country’s extraordinary coffees.  On Wednesday, he sent an email sharing some good news:

“Starbucks and Ethiopia have signed an agreement which recognizes the rights of Ethiopians to control the use of their coffee names.  Though much work remains to be done to make the Ethiopian initiative a success, this development is historical and holds the potential to create a new paradigm that gives farmers around the world a fairer share of the retail profits that come from their products.”

Congratulations to the good folks at Oxfam and the other NGO allies who supported this campaign courageously — you had the vision and confidence to pour your energy into this campaign when there were plenty of doubters.  Congratulations to the Government of Ethiopia and its legal advisors – you are helping us to take a brave new step into a world where intellectual property rights serve the interests of poor and disadvantaged people.  But most of all, congratulations to the small-scale coffee farmers of Ethiopia – your toil and soil bring us some of the finest coffees on the planet, and I hope that this agreement brings you the reward and recognition you so richly deserve.  

Behind the Campaign.
The agreement signed earlier this week represents the culmination of a visionary and archly strategic public campaign that lasted the better part of a year and focused primarily on getting Starbucks to support the concept of Ethiopian coffee names for Ethiopians.  Back in early May, just a few days after a breakthrough in talks between Ethiopia’s government and Starbucks, I met with Seth and some of the other key players in the campaign, including Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union and star of the recent documentary film Black Gold, and some high-placed members of the Ethiopian community in Washington, DC. At that meeting, there was a lot of praise for Starbucks and its leadership in the coffee industry for committing to sign the agreement, which some people called a “black-and-white” issue. (More on that later.)

Fair enough.  Starbucks is THE coffee brand in the United States and beyond, and its business practices affect millions of coffee farmers around the world.  And in the end, Starbucks came through.  The company has won praise for this decision, and rightly so – it deserves credit for bringing its practices into closer alignment with the lofty narrative behind its “commitment to origins” publicity.

But the issue didn’t always seem so “black-and-white” to the coffee giant, which initially offered a fierce legal and PR counterattack.  Legally, it initially opposed the Ethiopian government’s application to U.S. authorities for a trademark on some of its leading coffee names.  The company’s lawyers argued that the trademark strategy was ill-conceived and illegal, even though there was plenty of precedent: the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office has registered dozens of similar trademarks in Europe and Asia, and in recent months has even succeeded in trademarking some of its coffee names in the United States.    On the PR front, it came hard-and-fast in the media, old and new.  In the “old media” category, the company ran beautiful full-page ads in the Sunday New York Times for weeks on end talking about the company’s commitment to coffee farmers.  On the “new media” front, Starbucks posted to YouTube a video of its chief coffee buyer talking about the strength of the company’s relationships with farmers.  And during this time, Starbucks also announced new commitments for increased coffee purchases from East Africa as well as significant new spending on social projects – welcome developments, of course, but not what the Ethiopians were asking for.
 
While all of this maneuvering was going on in the glare of the media spotlight, many of the companies we partner with in our Coffee Program signed the agreement with Ethiopia without much fanfare at all.  In fact, the very first companies to sign the agreement participate in the CRS Coffee Program.  That’s not to say they didn’t have legitimate concerns about signing onto an agreement whose implications were still unclear — they did!  But for them, the issue wasn’t hashed out in corporate board rooms by legal teams. Rather, it boiled down to their commitment to continue to seek new ways to divide the wealth created by international trade equitably among EVERYONE in the system, and the power of personal relationships.  In the end, they confided in their friend Tadesse: “We signed because Tadesse asked us to,” was the spirit if not necessarily the letter of the explanations offered to me by most of our partners.

To the careful lawyers and committed capitalists out there, this approach may seem uninformed or even foolish.  To me, it sounds inspiring in a broader context that seems hyper-litigious and profit-obsessed – evocative of the unimaginable ideal of fair-deal partnerships based on a handshake and mutual respect.  As Starbucks claims the headlines, I thought I would take this opportunity to let folks know where our partners stand on all this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 and is filed under Coffee, Fair Trade . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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