Today was our first visit to primary coffee producing cooperatives!  But allow me to back up for a minute.  Coffee is Ethiopia's biggest export and the conventional industry has individual brokers who buy from individual farmers and resell to exporters.  Due to a number of factors to be explored in an upcoming post (I think it will be titled 'The Benefits of Fair Trade') farmers formed cooperatives which they own.  They are called primary producer co-ops because they are owned directly by the farmers.  Oromia, the co-op that exports Fair Trade coffee from Ethiopia, is a secondary co-op - which means it is owned by many of the smaller primary producing co-ops.  Each primary co-op has about 300-500 member owner farmers in Ethiopia.  Look, here are some of them now:

This was at the first primary co-op we visited: Killense Mokonise.  Before we went out to explore their processing facility (more on that soon too!) we met with board members, employees, and member owner farmers of this primary cooperative.  Voila:

If you look closely, the bags that these co-opers are examining are Just Coffee bags.  We explained at each meeting with primary co-ops how Just Coffee markets their coffee and what our values are.  Right after this shot the chairman of this co-op's board stuck one of the Just Coffee stickers on their desk.

This cooperative has a structre very similar to co-ops in Madison (or elsewhere around the world): the members (in this case the coffee farmers) elect a Board of Directors once a year, and that board hires a General Manager to run the cooperative.  That General Manager then hires staff including accountants, drivers, quality improvement, security guards, etc.  The structure of another primary co-op we visited, Quilleensoo Rassaa, is shown to the right.

Like Just Coffee, these cooperatives and their owners strongly value transparency.  That is why that each of these co-ops we visited have their annual finances (including annual sales, annual coffee production, etc) posted right there on their walls.

Here is a view at the third and final cooperative we visited this day.  Each of these primary farmer cooperatives are made up of people from local Peasant Assocations.  Peasant Associations are the smallest form of government in rural Ethiopia, and not everyone in a Peasant Association is in the primary farmer co-op - about 20% are.  This co-op we visited listed their 4 Peasant Associations their member owner farmers belonged to.  Notice the gender balance between men (Dhiraa) and women (Dhala).

As you can see, almost everyone present are men.  This was the rule for all of the cooperatives we visited. While the transparency here is appreciated, the presence of women in these cooperatives was quite low.  Especially so in this case.  Other cooperatives had more women participating, and we asked Djipo (on the right) about the challenges women face in her cooperative and her community.  She said that while only 10-20% of cooperative member-owners were women, that women were forming co-ops and other businesses in the community and becoming more involved in the coffee co-op as time goes on.  She (and others) also explained their household structure.

In the Oromo region of Ethiopia, there is a variety in religion - Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, Protestant Christian, Muslim, and non believers, but the household structure of a family remains the same.  While all family members work to produce the coffee, the head of the household (traditionally the man) is the person who has the vote with the cooperative.  Households in the primary co-ops that are headed by women are usually so because the man has died or left. All of the cooperatives we visited, however, had at least one woman on their Board of Directors.

Well dear readers, get ready to learn about the local benefits of Fair Trade and the production methods, as well as some other nice surprises!  Coming up as soon as the internet is back...