Making the Origin Count: Two Coffees

• Author: Elizabeth March
• Position: WIPO Magazine Editorial Staff, Communications and Public Outreach Division

Representatives from two of the world's great coffee-producing nations, Ethiopia and Colombia, told their stories at WIPO's 2007 International Symposium on Geographical Indications in June. In this second article in our series on geographical indications, WIPO Magazine follows their experiences and the different paths they have explored in pursuit of similar goals.

Ethiopia and the Starbucks Story

Few readers can have missed the headlines which peppered the international press late last year: "Starbucks in Ethiopia coffee row - U.S. coffee chain is denying Ethiopia earnings of $88m a year, according to Oxfam" (BBC); "A Hot Cup of Money - Starbucks, Ethiopia, and the Coffee BrandingWars" (Spiegel online); and "Storm in a Coffee Cup" (The Economist). The image of coffees growers from one of the world's poorest countries struggling to defend their interests against the mighty American chain - whose revenues in 2005 equaled two thirds of Ethiopia's GDP - fired public sympathies and sparked a major lobbying campaign by Oxfam and other development organizations.

But Getachew Mengistie, the dynamic Director General of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office (EIPO) offers a more nuanced account than that of the show-down evoked in the press headlines. "It was not a matter of us winning against them, or them against us," he said in an interview on the margins of the WIPO Symposium. "We always stressed that our strategy was intended to allow Ethiopia to work with the industry to build the value of these coffee brands. This was in the interests of the farmers, the importers, the coffee roasters, the distributors, as well as the consumers."

The story began in 2004, when the EIPO began working with partners to identify a mechanism which would lead to a greater share for Ethiopia's coffee growers of the high retail prices fetched by their Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe coffees. Following extensive studies and consultations, a project proposal was developed to capture the intangible value of selected fine coffees. A consortium of stakeholders led by Mr. Mengistie was formed, including representatives of farmers' cooperatives, coffee exporters and government bodies. The key, they agreed, was to achieve wider recognition of the distinctive qualities of these coffees as brands and so position them strategically in the expanding specialty coffee market; while at the same time to protect Ethiopia's ownership of the names so as to prevent their misappropriation. The project secured financial support from the U.K.'s Department for International Development (DFID), technical advice from a Washington-based NGO, Light Years IP, and legal assistance from U.S. law firm, Arnold and Porter.

Sharing a bigger pie

The stakeholders opted for a trademark-based solution. The EIPO began filing applications to register the names Harrar/Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe as trademarks in key market countries. In a novel move, this was to be combined with the offer of royalty-free licenses to foreign coffee companies to create a network of licensed distributors, who, in return would actively promote Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe to consumers in the specialty coffee market. "The...