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

1.3) Quality seen by the value chain actors
As distinctiveness factor, the quality parameter plays a major role alongside the
historical depth but often gets wrongly interpreted because of its strong linkages with origin,
environmental, traditional, etc. aspects. The aim of this section is to point out what is called
quality concerning coffee production.
There are many differing views on what constitutes quality but, as told me a breeding
expert of the Jima Research Center, the coffee quality comes from a combination of the coffee
genotype, environment and processing. That means the botanical variety, topographical and
weather conditions, and the care taken during growing, harvesting, storing and transporting.
Botanical variety and topographical conditions are constant and dominate the inherent
character of a coffee whereas weather conditions are variable and cannot be influenced. Only
growing, processing, storage, export preparation and transport can be influenced involving
human beings interventions (ITC, 2002); in this way, Ethiopian government incites producers
to follow normalised practices through a quality system considering uniformity and origin of
these coffees.
It is generally not known whether the distinctive nature of a provenance is due to the
genetic make-up of the coffee trees involved, to environmental factors in the place of
production, or to cultivation practices or processing of the harvest. As far as coffee growing
goes, there does not seem to be much difference indeed from one producing area to another,
nor are practices particularly homogenous within growing regions. Commercially speaking,
the preferred treatment is wet processing (washing), a recently introduced process that does
not stem from local tradition (Verdeaux and Roussel, 2007).
The product’s qualification and the productive rules implementation are concretely an
agreements’ creation between coffee actors upon the product characteristics and the ways to
get it. In this way, as it has been formerly written, regulations tend to a normalisation of
agricultural practices, a technologies and skills control and large scale traceability more than
the establishment of exact producer books of requirements as it could be found in certification
frameworks. The latter only concerns producers who are indeed members of any certification
(organic, fair trade) project and in a lesser way those who are directly in contact with the
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