Ethiopia: humble home of the coffee industry

Global coffee production for the current crop year, 2015-2016, will reach around 143 million 60kg bags, based on current estimates. That makes coffee the second highest traded commodity after petroleum, worth billions of dollars. And it all started deep in southwestern Ethiopia - in Bonga, to be more precise.

Despite being the birthplace of high-quality Arabica coffee, Bonga is a name rarely encountered. The global coffee industry passed Bonga by, as it only produces small amounts of coffee. Today this little town, shrouded in mists early in the morning, sits quietly in 500 square kilometers of subtropical cloud forests brimming with coffee trees and wild honey.

Legend has it that in the the sixth century a goatherd called Kaldi spotted his goats eating red berries off a shrub he’d never seen before. Afterwards they became excitable, so Kaldi tried the berries himself, discovering the coffee bean and forever changing breakfast time. The term coffee is said to derive from Kaffa, the ancient name for the present-day Oromia region in which Bonga lies.

The majority of Ethiopian coffee is produced by subsistence smallholder farmers. Unable to afford fertilizers or expensive equipment, they produce coffee that couldn’t be more organic or unadulterated. Ethiopia is Africa’s largest producer of coffee, with the livelihoods of over 15 million people depending on it. Ethiopia exported around 800 million euros worth of coffee in the year 2014/2015.

The forest’s varying topography, ranging from 500 to 3,300 meters in elevation, partly explains the high quality of its coffee berries, which grow best on land between 900 and 1,800 meters. Also, shade provided by forest trees means coffee develops more slowly, becoming more dense and flavorful as a result. Coffee trees don’t grow so high either, and so can be handpicked by locals.

The diversity of flora in the forests attracts honey bees. Farmers also often resort to prayer, beseeching the wild bees to stay in the hives and make honeycomb. It seems to work! Myriad stalls dotted around Bonga are stacked with tubs of varying colors of honey, from dark caramel yellow to marble-like white. Much of that honey goes toward making Ethiopia’s fabled honey wine, known as 'tej.'

"I would never move to the city and leave this behind," says local beekeeper Mirutse Habtemariam, gesturing to the forest around his village. He also pointed out forest cardamom and long green peppers growing among shrubbery beside dirt tracks, as well as banana trees, their purple flowers dangling incongruously, and a plant called 'enset,' also known as 'false banana.'

Another advantage of this rural existence is the prevalence of the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Raw green beans are roasted over hot coals, then ground with a wooden pestle and mortar, before finally being brewed in a clay boiling pot, called a 'jebena.' Coffee, which is called 'bunna' in a number of Ethiopia’s languages, doesn’t come much fresher than that.

Growing amid such rich biodiversity produces high-quality organic coffee in many scintillating varieties: coffee that tastes like a sweet wine, with hints of jasmine and orange; coffee with hints of raisin, violet and mango; coffee with shades of strawberry, cherry and lychee. It’s estimated Ethiopia could harbor about 6,000 varieties of coffee.

Last year Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn visited Bonga to inaugurate a new National Coffee Museum, part of efforts to help bring Bonga to people’s attention. Meanwhile, Ethiopia's coffee industry tries to catch up with the world market, and increase economic benefits from the caffeine-laden delight it introduced to the world over a millennium ago.