East Africa set for a bumper harvest

The home of coffee, Ethiopia, is set to record a stellar harvest for the 2015-16 growing season and in doing so boost the entire output of East Africa to new heights, if the latest market forecasts are to be believed.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Addis Ababa bureau has predicted that Ethiopia’s farmers are expected to harvest just over 6.5m bags of arabica this year, a record high.

However, as the old saying goes, you can’t please everybody: The Ethiopian government initially hoped that the figure would be somewhere in the region of 7.7m bags, a belief underpinned on the assumption that farmers would increase the ‘low’ yields of previous years.

This bump in production should help the Ethiopian coffee sector bring in more revenue from exports. Though it may not be as much as many would think; due to the rise in demand from domestic quarters, which is a nice problem to have when you come to think about it.

Overall for East Africa, the region is expected to produce a total of 12.46m bags of coffee, with 9.4m of those destined for foreign shores. If this calculation is correct then this plans to be the most fruitful harvest for the region since 1995-96 and the second highest since records began in 1961.

Alongside the predicted increase in Ethiopian harvests, the performance of Ugandan and Tanzanian farmers are also applauded in the report. Despite facing a number of problems, the US Department of Agriculture shifts to a more celebratory tone when discussing Uganda: After a troubling period of time they say that they have recovered remarkably well.

But it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

What could be worrying though, especially to purveyors of Yirgacheffe, Sidamo and Harar grown coffee, is that the US Department of Agriculture offered a warning about a potential dip in quality:

“The quality of the coffee crop might deteriorate somewhat due to the delayed Belg rains and the timing of the Meher rains.

“However at this stage, it is too early to tell what that overall impact on quality might be.”

Ethiopia is, currently, the fifth largest coffee producer in the world, behind the likes of Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and the mass-market driven fields of Vietnam,