Learning the Truth on the Ground
18 January 2006
Since local farmers grow only one crop on this land, the price they receive for their coffee determines if and how often they feed their kids.
We had arrived in the incredibly lush community of Negele Gurbitu, part of the Oromia Farmers Cooperative Union, earlier that day. At first I never would have believed we were in Ethiopia. The southern part of the country, where coffee is grown, is green and almost tropical-looking. It looked nothing like the images of the dry, famine-ravaged land I had heard about.
Looking at the flourishing countryside, you would assume that several crops would grow well there. But the truth is people in these communities depend almost completely on coffee for their livelihoods. They don’t grow much of anything else because they need all the land they can get for their main crop. Since these farmers can’t feed their children coffee for breakfast, whole communities suffer when coffee prices are low and there isn’t enough money to buy food.
Over and over again, we heard the same problems. Lush countryside. No food. High-quality Ethiopian coffee. Farmers receiving “starving wages.” While I thought back on the images of those sweet children singing a welcome song to me in their new classroom, I couldn’t ignore the heartbreaking stories of the suffering and starvation that remained.
I had heard similar complaints from coffee farmers while traveling through Central America. But the severity of the problems was so much worse in Ethiopia, where families are large and share very small plots. Since local farmers grow only one crop on this land, the price they receive for their coffee determines if and how often they feed their kids.
