Alemayu Adola should be happy—his coffee plants are flourishing and this year he will have a good harvest. The rains came when they were supposed to come, there has been no frost or hail, and neither coffee berry disease nor coffee wilt disease have affected his crop. Best of all—coffee prices are rising. The bad news is that maize prices are sky high.

Alemayu Adola, a coffee farmer in Yirgalem has one hectare of land, and that makes him middle class in his area. Organic coffee is his main cash crop, but he also has some eucalyptus trees on his land that he cuts for firewood and sells on the local market. The maize, yam, papaya and ginger he plants are for his own consumption. Together with the enset—false banana—he grows, these crops supply more than half of the food his family consumes in a year. He has four cows, three sheep and a goat, which deliver milk and butter. Alemayu buys grass to feed his cattle, since there is no grazing land in his area. Other products he buys at the local market include clothes, salt, soap, and kerosene. A quarter of the household budget is spent on maize, the family’s single most important staple food.

This year maize is expensive, but since the coffee harvest and coffee prices are good, Alemayu will have enough money to buy this staple food for his family. Two years ago the situation was quite different. The coffee harvest was bad, international coffee prices dropped to a historic low, and—to make things worse—maize prices were high. Confronted with a low cash income and high expenditure on food, Alemayu was forced to sell one of his cows and two of his sheep, but still that wasn’t enough. In the end he also had to pull his children out of school. Those classified as poor in his area were much worse off. They had no work because there was no coffee to be picked. Alemayu remembers that many of them could not make ends meet; they faced hunger that year.
Alemayu lives in a mud house on his land with his wife and three young children. He wants to have a large family—six children at least. He knows that it will be difficult to provide enough land for all of them when they grow up. But he has other plans: “There are plenty of people who can be coffee farmers. My children will be educated. They will live in the city and be government employees. Maybe they will even go abroad.”