Political economy of the coffee filiere in Ethiopia

In this thesis the coffee filiere in Ethiopia is studied from a historical and institutionalist perspective. Although it may also be regarded as part of a global commodity chain, the French concept of a filiere. which addresses social and institutional contextualisation, offers deeper insight into the characteristics and origins of a national marketing structure. Accordingly, the current marketing structure of coffee in Ethiopia is the end result of an evolution in which the various agents, regulations and controls are derived not only from sector specific history, dating back mainly from post-1941, but also from their setting, or embedding, in a state system which has itself evolved in a centralising and controlling fashion. The latter owes much to the prolonged period of rule by Haile Selassie, effectively from 1918 to 1974, in which consolidation of the Ethiopian state was confirmed against politicised ethnic and factional opposition, in a pattern distinct from that of former European colonies in Africa. This influence of the past is not so much a legacy as a continuing process in which pressures to centralise, to control, and to subvert regional opposition remain dominant. This has taken different forms through the three principal regimes of the last hundred years: the Imperial under Haile Sellassie (1918-74), the Revolutionary (1974-91), and the present dominated by the Tigrai People's Liberation Front. The tendency is pervasive and is manifest in the institutions of the coffee filiere which derive substantially from the decades of the 1950s to 1970s. These continue to retain the essential structure of that period, reflecting also the continued small-holding nature of production, despite the introduction of federalism and the concentration of the country's coffee production in the two states of Oromia and SNNP. Although a class analysis of the current situation is difficult a Marxian type of political economy, which addresses the issues of political and economic power, is shown to be a more relevant approach to understanding this process, and its links with the global coffee chain than that of schools of thought associated with the New Institutional Economics, Rational Choice Analysis or a more conventional historical institutionalism.