Coffee's coming home

The slogan for the European Championship football tournament held in England in 1996 was "Football's coming home". Well, the global love affair with coffee is coming home to East Africa where, with the honourable exception of Ethiopia, consumption of the region's most famous indigenous export crop has been very low.

For many years, it was quite hard to get a good cup of coffee in East Africa, outside the major hotels, high-end restaurants and tourist lodges. Instant coffee prevailed, more often than not in the shape of the tasteless brown powder of the Africafe brand. Now, there are a slew of entrepreneurs establishing coffee houses and chains in the major cities across East Africa. The trend started with the hugely successful Java brand in Nairobi, followed by Dormans (also Nairobi), Good African Coffee (Kampala) and my own personal favourite, the beautifully-branded Msumbi Coffee (Arusha and Dar). Better still, coffee prices to the farmer for both arabica and robusta are shooting through the roof, providing farmers with the incentive needed to invest in replanting their coffee fields with higher-yielding seedlings. The picture above shows a coffee nursery in the prime coffee-growing area close to Kilimanjaro.

Five years ago, I attended the East Africa Fine Coffee Association (http://www.eafca.org/) annual conference in Addis. It was a cheerful and friendly event, which provided plenty of opportunity to enjoy the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony and discuss the prospects for the industry in the region. Back then, only the most optimistic could have foreseen the market growth in the region and the price growth on international exchanges. I'm very sorry not to be attending this year's EAFCA renewal back in Addis, where coffee aficionados will again be coming home under far more celebratory circumstances.