World

Coffee Wars: Ethiopia Vs. Starbucks

by publicreader | April 3, 2007 at 09:43 am

1057 views | 5 Recommendations | 3 comments

The Ethiopian government filed patent applications in 2005 to trademark the names of their world-famous coffee, and this week Ethiopia announced it would issue invitations to build a distribution network of distributors and promoters. The government claims that having the trademark will allow groups of growers to negotiate with buyers directly. Starbucks has been enthusiastically trying to hold on to the right to bargain with individual farmers. The combination trademark/union Ethiopian plan could change the way many commodity producers, some of the poorest people in the world, do business:

Ethiopia is looking to trademark coffees in the EU to benefit its poor farmers, in the face of opposition from Starbucks in the U.S.

The Ethiopian move provides lessons for an African market that could be worth billions of dollars.

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Kaitlin

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:20 on April 3rd, 2007

This struggle is very interesting, and could change Starbucks indefinitely. Thanks for posting it!

Jordan Yerman

at 16:11 on April 4th, 2007

Coffee connoisseurs, unite! Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe are regions, as publicreader highlighted earlier, and Ethiopia wants control of the name of that region-- makes sense to me! Sort of like how Champagne denotes a sparkling wine grown in a certain place in a certain way, and not just one company's brand of hooch. This is also about the larger issue of western exploitation of African resources, fuelled by an ugly undercurrent of "they should take whatever we deign to offer them and consider themselves lucky". Nope, the region belongs to Ethiopia!

matte

at 04:35 on April 5th, 2007

Good on Ethiopia and down with the capitalist Starbucks who just wants to screw individual growers. Heck, we have enough of that with the main supermarket chains here in Australia, screwing down on individual grower contracts