ETHIOPIA. Blog 2 - 15/12/25.
I landed in Addis Ababa at 6 am local time, or 3am UK time. There is nothing pleasant about spending circa 7 hours on a plane. Unfolding myself from my seat and then fighting my way out of the aircraft with everyone else as if our lives depended on it is not good for the spirit.
The Airport although not immediately obvious has a very simple layout. You depart on one level, you go through security on another and finally you exit at ground level. In hindsight that all seems very straightforward until you discover that there is not one sign that tells you any of this!
To add to the complications I needed a visa to enter the country before I could exit the airport. After doing my 10,000 steps I eventually found immigration, a curiously bureaucratic place. Lots of bureaucrats but very few customers, in fact there was only me, faced by an army. I handed over my passport to one lady. She then marched off with it to another desk. I was then ushered to that desk. There they scanned my passport, asked me a couple of questions and then handed my passport to another individual. That individual then requested my credit card. After payment was taken another person was handed my passport and proceeded to stick my visa into my passport. Eventually I was handed back my passport, shown the exit and strolled out of the building because my next internal flight took off from a different building a few hundred metres down the road.
Upon arrival and some 3 hours ahead of my next flight I decided to sit down and have a coffee and some banana cake. This was my first experience of the Ethiopian coffee ceremony where coffee grounds and water are brewed in a Jebena, a distinctive clay pot with a spherical base, tall neck, handle, and spout. For the purest, there are no weighing scales, water temperature checks, grind controls. What comes out might be described as a “happy accident”, however it was tasty and full bodied.
I was then engaged in conversation by a guy a couple of tables away, he said he was a local judge with global ambitions, “how easy was it to set up in London?”. I wasn’t sure if he was serious or nuts.
I managed to break away and leave him speaking very loudly to someone on his mobile ‘phone. Soon, thankfully Guus appeared, he was my guide leading this expedition from D R Wakefield, a coffee broker we use extensively based in London. Guus is Dutch and based in Amsterdam. He had flown in from Yirgacheffe another coffee growing region of Ethiopia and was joining me on my visit to Jimma.
The internal flight was relatively quick and pain free, we were collected at Jimma airport by Teddy Yilak, the joint owner of BNT a major coffee exporter. He proceeded to take us to a local “resort” where we took the opportunity to have a meal ahead of our next 4 ½ hour ordeal.
As we sat down for a bite Guus spotted a Chinese delegation sat at another table. He mentioned to Teddy that these were the same people he’d seen earlier in the week whilst visiting another farm. It seems the Chinese are on a mission, to buy up as much coffee as possible and pay as little as possible whilst offering significant volumes. Traditionally there’s always been a separation between producers, exporters and buyers. Seems the Chinese are trying to tear up the rule book and grab as much of the added value as they can. Here is the red meat of raw market economics in all its unpalatable glory. Teddy introduced himself and they immediately started talking business. This isn’t about relationship building this is simply doing a deal and moving on. Makes my end of the market sound way too righteous. However our approach might just ensure we have a planet our children will be proud of and the workforce might just be able to make a sustainable living.
Even before the Chinese got stuck in there were 902 exporters of Ethiopian coffee exporting some 468,000 tons, so it’s an incredibly competitive market. Add to that the market volatility, the vagaries of the Bir / US dollar rate and Government intervention, no wonder Teddy is never off his ‘phone. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
The next 4 ½ hours took us into the coffee growing region and the town of Mizan Teferi. That’s when it hits you that you are in a completely different culture, a world a million miles away from the one I’d left 24 hours earlier. Having travelled to many coffee growing countries there’s something painfully familiar about what we would describe as poverty.
The word poverty is highly emotive and interestingly it coincided with a Jersey Evening Post headline that declared “New statistics reveal the Island’s “hidden poverty”. It referenced the “heat / eat debate”, and many other measures, but poverty is complicated and I would suggest that the vast majority of Ethiopians I was driving past would not describe themselves as “living in poverty”, poor, by western standards, yes, but can they put food on the table, do they mostly have a roof over their head?, yes. I truly believe that if we are to make any headway in this debate we really need to better define what we mean otherwise we will struggle to overcome the true inequity we find in today’s society. A poverty of ideas seems more appropriate.
By the time we’d reached our destination I’d been travelling for over 30 hours. The Hotel is weirdly upmarket given we’d just pulled in from a street bustling with traders and barely a light bulb between them.
We sat down with Teddy, our driver, the local farm manager and Guus for an “evening” meal. A goat stew that I pushed around my plate for a bit before giving up. Eating and travelling through different time zones is not something our bodies cope with very well. I find myself full when I should be hungry and hungry when I should be full. Time is almost a figment of the imagination. It was determined that we would set off at 7 am the following morning to make the most of the day which was to start with a 2 hour road trip. Bed beckons, actually lying flat is a blessed relief.