Impacts of Trademarking on Export and Producer Prices in Ethiopian Coffee

Like some developing countries, Ethiopia, with the help of Oxfam public campaign, managed to obtain trademark protection of many western countries for three of its fine coffees: Yirgachefe, Harar and Sidama coffee types. The main goal of the trademarking initiative was to help smallholder producers capture price premia for their fine coffee. This paper examines the effects of the trademark protection on FOB and producer prices of trademarked coffee by comparing with non-trademarked Ethiopian coffee. We found that trademark protection has improved both the level and trend of FOB prices relative to the non-trademarked Ethiopian coffee. But producer farmers capture only small portion of this price premia. In addition, we also found the trademark protection is not compatible with the exclusive impersonlized and non-traceable transactions system introduced by Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. Acknowledgement : his was supported by Netherlands Initiative for capacity development in Higher Education (NICHE-ETH-019) as part of financing the PhD study