A study case on coffee (Coffea arabica): Limu Coffe - IRD

in the country, as the Jima Research Center responsible for the national coffee research
programme (Petit, 2007). The latter is leading coffee selection all around Ethiopia.
Producers
Coffee producers include small-scale coffee farmers, coffee farmers’ service
cooperatives, private investors, and state coffee producing enterprises.
Small-scale coffee farmers are estimated at 1.3 million producing 95% of total
Ethiopian coffee and are divided into poor, middle and better-off households. These
households are men headed but can be women headed. Some works, lead in Limu Kosa
woreda in the framework of a general coffee activities report (12 th June 2009), illustrate that
for 16,200 male households, 11 are female households.
Coffee labourers/workers (in pulperies, hulleries, transport, plantations, etc...) are a
heterogeneous category which doesn’t appear in any data. As it is in Mana and Goma
woredas (neighbouring Limu Kosa and which coffee is traded as Limu coffee through the
Ethiopia Commodity Exchange or by the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union),
during at least the period September to November, harvests of red coffee beans, maize, teff
and sorghum all take place generating a high labour demand. Migrant labourers from areas to
the south of Jima zone, particularly of the SNNPR come for work, as well as the local poor
(Save the children UK, 2003). Especially local students work as coffee labourers slashing
during school holidays in investors or state farms plantations. State farms labourers are almost
exclusively women and teenager girls (planting seedlings, slashing, pruning). Most of agroprocessing
employees are also women. During harvesting time, children are also picking
cherries in state farms. In Suntu State Farm, the daily labourer salary was 0.35 birr per kg of
red cherries picked in 10 th October 2009. One single labourer works about eight hours per
day, and harvests approximately 30 kg per day in October whereas, during high season in
November/December, the labourer picks between 50 and 60 kg per day.
Illustration 34: Daily labourers in state farm and investor farm (Bossolasco, August & October 2009)
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