Chapter 1: A new co-operative For teachers' ETHIOPIA IS THE LARGEST PRODUCER OF COFFEE IN AFRICA. MORE THAN 15 MILLION PEOPLE DEPEND ON COFFEE FARMING TO SURVIVE. Tadesse Meskela is a large, friendly man. He grew up in the countryside outside Ethiopia s capital city, Addis Ababa. His family were farmers. Tadesse remembers walking to school without shoes. His parents were too poor to buy him any. It was a long journey: two hours there, and two hours back. To escape this life, Tadesse worked very hard at school. He passed his exams and won a place at university. After university, he worked as a top advisor in Ethiopia s Agricultural Bureau*. It was a very good job. But it wasn t enough. There was something more important Tadesse wanted to do. He wanted to help his country s farmers get a fair price for their coffee. But how could they do this? One answer was to sell straight to the coffee buyers themselves, without using middlemen. To do this, they needed to work together. They needed to form a co-operative. But a co-operative needs a manager. This gave Tadesse his next big idea. In 1999, he went to Japan to study how co-operatives work. He returned home later that year and started the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union. * A government office that manages farming. 9

There are now 101 co-operatives in Tadesse s Union, with more than 74,000 farmers. The idea of a co-operative is for people to help themselves by working together. Tadesse knows they won t achieve success if they are careless. This is a point he makes to the workers in the Export Processing Centre in Addis Ababa. Coffee is processed here before it is sent to customers. I m not pleased with the quality of these sacks, Tadesse says to a group of workers. They don t look clean. Were they washed? The workers don t reply. They turn away, looking uncomfortable. Tadesse picks some coffee beans from one of the sacks. These are Harar beans, he explains. He smells the beans. Harar is one of the best coffees in the world. Our co-operative also produces Sidamo and Yirgacheffe coffees. All three are of the highest quality. No coffee in the world is better, but we are getting a very low price. This doesn t help our people. He points to sacks and sacks 10

FACT FILE For teachers' A HISTORY Coffee is probably the most popular drink in the world. How did coffee drinking begin? How did café culture develop? The discovery of coffee We don t know for sure how coffee was discovered. Here are two possible stories. Coffee berries An Ethiopian boy called Kaldi discovered coffee by chance. He noticed that his goats became lively after eating some red berries from a tree. He tried the berries himself and felt the same. The berries were the fruit of the coffee tree. A man from Yemen called Gemaleddin was in the port of Aden when some Chinese ships arrived. He saw the Chinese drinking tea and watched carefully as they made it. Tea didn t grow in Yemen so he tried the leaves of other plants. Nothing worked so he went to Ethiopia and brought back the leaves and fruit of the coffee tree. The leaves weren t successful but Gemaleddin noticed a great change in the coffee beans when they were roasted. They changed colour and smelt wonderful. He put the roasted beans in water and coffee as a drink was born! The coffee trade begins Coffee soon became the accepted drink of the Arab world. For a long time, it was traded locally. In 1555, it was introduced to the city of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). It was a great success. Within ten years, the city had more than 600 coffee houses. Café culture had begun. A coffee house in Constantinople By the early seventeenth century, Italian traders had introduced coffee to the West. Other countries soon followed 54

OF COFFEE Italy s example. As the coffee trade grew, traders moved nearer to the coffeeproducing countries. Mocha on the coast of Yemen became the centre of the world s coffee trade for 150 years. Coffee in Europe In 1645, Italy became the first European country to open a coffee house. Soon other countries were doing the same. In England, the first coffee house opened in Oxford, in 1651. A year later, an Armenian called Pasqua Rosée opened the first coffee house in London. By 1739, London Café culture today Many countries today still have their own café culture, but there is also now a world coffee-shop culture. It began in North America and its home is the city of Seattle in the USA. These modern coffee shops are generally owned by large international companies like Starbucks. They are friendly, comfortable places that usually offer a very wide choice of coffees. Many do now offer Fair Trade coffees, but are the big chains really doing enough to help coffee farmers in developing countries? London s first coffee house had 551 coffee houses. For the English, a coffee house was much more than just a place to drink coffee with friends. Scientists, writers, artists and politicians all met there to discuss important subjects. Do you ever go to coffee shops? Why do you think they are so popular? What do these words mean? You can use a dictionary. goat berry port culture 55