Is it moral to boycott a (poor) producing country in a war zone?
This has been eating away at me, since the summer. There has been a growing group of people in the coffee world that have used the big question of morality, for what I feel is shrowding the less obvious.
Ethiopia is still the motherland of coffee, or the cradle if you prefer. The conflict in the North is far away from where our coffee is grown in the South and South Western Areas. This doesn’t mean that the
upheaval and deaths don’t matter. In a completely unpolitical way, we feel that it is right to keep supporting producers. Not buying coffee, albeit more expensive this year helps no one apart from maybe
an accounts department somewhere.
There is a good write-up on the situation by the BBC here.
In the meantime, we celebrate just how great Ethiopian coffee can be. So much more palatable than humanity at the moment.
