Coffee, Culture and Intellectual Property Rights: The Case of Ethiopia

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC good afternoon everyone good afternoon good afternoon everyone I'm Peggy Pearlstein head of the Hebraic section here in the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress and I'm going to tell you a little bit about today's program and then introduce you to phantom two Runa who's responsible for the Herrick and two grimian collections here at the library today's speaker dr. herons erika Burhan will be talking about coffee culture and intellectual property rights the case of ethiopia and it will be followed by a coffee tasting in our conference room following her lecture those of us here in the division had some samples the other day and so we highly recommend that you stay and taste some ethiopian coffee if you will be part of the question-and-answer that follows the presentation please be advised that you are consenting to your participation in today's program and it will be webcast by the library and available on its website at all times I also want to alert you to a program that we're having on Monday here in our reading room it will be a presentation about a new Passover Haggadah which is the booklet that's recited at the Seder meal on the eve of Passover and there are more Flyers up in the front by the information desk and now I would like to introduce you to senior reference library - Roman Thank You Peggy you all make me feel excited about today's show I welcome you all on behalf of the African Middle Eastern Division before I go into the introducing the main speaker I would like to introduce well I have two announcements and the first one is about the coffee ceremony that we're going to have and serendipity somehow played a part and we were having sort of a to show when one event I would like to introduce ababa Callahan miss Albert alum please come over Bob Rotella horn is a culinary expert and she has done a lot of shows on coffee and food all over the United States but she happened to call when I was in need of someone to help me with the coffee service she just called on time and then I happen to mention to her that we are having this events on Thursday and she volunteered today to be the master of ceremony for today's and not only that that she has brought all the stuff and she has mobilized her husband we just happened to come from California and and she's just a lot of she's given us a lot of love and she brought the coffee from home and she has fixed bread Ethiopian style I think and you're going to enjoy a whole nother show today so thank you very much this give her hand the second announcement is about what dr. Harun wrote and it's in reference to what she's lecturing today we have about fifteen to twenty fifteen about seventeen articles issues of or paid copies of her article and you can it's going to be given out on a first come first serve basis and she will be happy to sign that article for you and now I will introduce speaker dr. here on and she has I think agreed with me that I call her doctor here on Sarah gaybraham I don't know if you want to call her Sarah Abraham means dawn of light dr. heron Sarah gaybraham was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick s / de Center for the Study of the longer-range future and visiting researcher at the African Studies Center of Boston University today's lecture is a result of her research work in this university after earning her doctorate in African history from Michigan State University in 2002 she has initiated and participated in projects that combined her interest in historical research with her passion for the arts and culture including art exhibitions performances and publications on the arts she spent four years in Ethiopia where she worked as academic director for the school for the International training study abroad program she is currently working as a research and development associate at the Ethiopian Community Development Council in Arlington Virginia between 2005 and 2006 she was an assistant professor at the Institute of European studies in the Ottawa University dr. Haran has written numerous conference papers and made several presentations and talk shows among her notable works is the most recent issue than the special issue of the journal of Ethiopian studies that she edited in honor the honor of Professor Richard Pankhurst and her and his spouse Richard Rita Pankhurst my testimony of dr. Haran is that she is a very very loving person I have not seen many that have combined knowledge with humility and love please welcome dr. Herod good afternoon ladies and gentlemen thank you so much fun that was a very moving introduction and thank you for the organizers Peggy everybody who's been working on this and abhava my goodness I wouldn't have been the person to make coffee I don't even know how to make coffee the right way and coffee puts me to sleep so I can't drink it so thank you very very much for doing this this study was conducted last 2009-2010 and the year that I was in Boston at Boston University and it was part of a year-long theme on Africa titled Africa 2060 which considered sort of the future of Africa possibilities challenges and opportunities 850 years into the future and then a conference at the end of this also happened titled Africa 2060 the good news from Africa which sounds suspiciously like a religious gathering but it was it was a very very strong and influential conference on positive outcomes things that are happening in Africa today that we can talk about my own introduction to the issue of intellectual property kind of came through the back door I was working on a CD recording with a friend of mine who was a poet and some musicians and the central idea - it was a little bit experimental it was about musicians actually listening to words they never do so if you sing the song musicians don't know the lyrics they don't know where in the song that word is so I threw out the challenge to some friends musician friends and we put together a CD with poetry and really good jazz and music and then we set about trying to copy the CD we produce it and sell it and everything came to a standstill the choices were very few the first was we had their paid for the printing and reproduction up front ourselves or we dealt with distributors who would take who would give us a one-time payment and there was no room for renegotiating more you know market circumstances to renegotiate what was going on later on and and or the third the third trace was to go in with a distributor half and half and that might or might not work so the project came to a standstill and I quickly realized that despite the fact that there was copyright laws and the artists had been you know advocating for copyrights the musicians especially in Ethiopia in a daily way in a way that made any sense that all this didn't have bearing on artists lives that this wasn't going to be something that artists looked to to kind of get their rights over their works protected or that they would even have an income anything that that was a use for them from their works so this kind of set off a set of questions in my in my mind as to who owns what so I mean the first question of course was you know the muse might come and go but but creativity seldom happens in a in a vacuum so who ultimately owns a creative idea was one of my questions and then I thought about all the different areas specialized knowledge that's been passed from generation to generation in areas like medicinal plants and artisanal crafts and sacred performances the list is very long agricultural cultivation who owns those ideas is it the community that produces it and and has custody over it or is that the companies that invest and and in the research and development part and then they transform that body of knowledge into goods and services so all of these questions were buzzing around in my head and from there it kind of took more formal shape for poor Africa that I thought was interesting to investigate so the two questions that I kind of wanted to address was can Africa be positioned to benefit from this knowledge production in any way and then eventually can Africa compete with the Internet in Indian to international arena of cultural knowledge production big questions and so parts of these parts of the answer was going to lie in sort of examining the relationship between intellectual property like rights and Africa in relation to culture I'm sure most of you know this but but this is a very new area for me so I you know sort of came up with a working definition of what intellectual property meant and intellectual property IP it refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized with corresponding areas of the law being applicable and they resemble in many ways property rights and in this case the owners are granted rights over intangible assets so it could be artistic works literary works musical works words phrases symbols designs and the like the main aim of intellectual property rights the basic purposes is threefold in its most simplified form first it protects the investor the the inventors or the creators of the idea from counterfeit users second it Awards them some kind of moral rights over their works so they decide whether they want to sell it or not sell it or reproduce it and put it out there they decide and then the third is somehow to make these creations available to the wider public and arguably I think these three things have even within the legal framework have some kind of tension between them between protecting the the artists rights and then making it available and and so these there is a lot of literature on short of the ethical stance of these for these three different purposes the legal and economic and policy implications there's a whole lot of literature on that what I discovered was the areas of IP law intellectual property law patents industrial designs trade secrets copyrights and trademarks were very different in the way that they were the law was was had developed over the years and the legal principles evolved in different ways and and these legal fields were extremely specialized so one of the people that I ended up interviewing really cautioned me against mixing these areas you know intellectual property trademark mix that mix those issues with intellectual property copyright issues don't don't mix those issues because these are very specialized areas of the legal field so they're seldom seen as a package holistically they're almost never are so but but if they were one can conceivably argue the case that the overall the overall effect of these laws is a monopoly of knowledge production and access and that's provocative unto itself right but if one ever was able to consider and I'm not a legal legal I don't have legal background so I wouldn't know the intricacies of this but I kind of arrived at this that if we were to consider these holistically can we argue that as a whole they there was some monopoly of knowledge and product knowledge production and access through IP laws the legal principles behind the notions of intellectual property evolved over many centuries and it wasn't until the 19th century that the term itself came into use it became even more commonplace in the 20th century here in the US and people point to the British statute of Anne from 1710 and the statute of monopolies in 1623 which are seen sort of as the origins of copyright and patent law respectively these two conventions international conventions are very important as sort of the beginning of formalizing intellectual property laws I won't get into them in much detail the first one was signed in 1883 and it sort of deals with industrial property in its widest sense which includes patents smart industrial designs trade names geographical indications and it lay down sort of the common rule that member states all member states signatory member states would follow the Berne Convention deals more particularly with copyright over for works of authors and this one established a system of equal treatment that internationalized copyrights among signatory states and it also put into place the idea of fair use for copyrighted works in publications and broadcasts now the nature of product protection varied very much from country to country and it was adapted as seen for a particular needs towards the end of World War two Western innovations and radio television and satellite technology laid a very new foundation of knowledge economy and instead of agricultural production goods and services became the basis of wealth and the competitive edge in this knowledge economy depended very much on innovative qualities that these goods and services exhibited so IP laws were created and strengthened to protect these innovative qualities furthermore later on improvements in production and distribution systems they led to greater trade activities in Western economies which in turn exposed the risk of increase the risk of exposing these innovative qualities to copying in counterfeiting which ultimately would rob them of their competitive edge so this lack of uniform protection over innovative qualities led Western interest groups to push for the integration of trade and intellectual property laws to better protect wealth created from intellectual property so now intellectual property becomes intertwined with trade and these two pieces are very important in in the international arena the first is the establish of establishment of the World Trade Organization and then the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights that administers which really strengthened the link between IP and trade the world trade organization is was formed late in 1995 basically to supervise a liberalize international trade and it has different frameworks for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements and a dispute resolution process as well trips is a very active set of rules that is their their objective of it is to support and promote innovation and creativity to the mutual advantage of users and creators and it sets the requirement standard for copyright rights it was introduced trips was introduced it introduced IP law into Internet the international trade system for the first time and it remains the most comprehensive international agreement on IP to date as it pertains to Africa and development issues the views are very mixed there are those that argue for it there are those that argue against it those against it argue that there is already an uneven set of advantages that are built into the IP system Africa is not recognized as a significant contributor to the production of knowledge and if Africa is recognized at all the originators of knowledge are quickly factored out of a value chain which Awards the research and development investments through the benefits of trade they also argue that developing economies are already on the margins of the of global trade relations and observing any kind of intellectual property rights will only entrench the continent even further into those margins those that argue for the case of observing intellectual property rights claim that it would eventually decrease Africa's dependency on agricultural products and commodities and Africa is largely relegated to this - this production of commodities and agricultural products and this is vulnerable to market changes and environmental factors and Africa's is always suffering from that kind of vulnerability those four it also argue that it will allow eventually Africa to the developing economies in Africa to bypass traditional market arrangements and eventually leapfrog into generating higher import higher export incomes through using intellectual property tools and the debates rages on there is no consensus really one advocate of using these intellectual property tools to benefit African economies based here in DC is a development group known as light years IP and this group what this group stands for did was was it recognized early on the importance of the intangible value of products in general and generating corporate income in the US and they define intangible value as non physical characteristics of products such as uniqueness reputation or tradition and here in the US commonly this is represented in company in a company's IP portfolio and this includes technological know-how brands trademarks patents and other forms intangible assets over the years have become the greater part of the company's income and the importance has shifted from being solely a legal issue to being a core part of overall business strategy small and large businesses in the US seek profitable licensing programs and market niches through design and packaging and so light here's IP suggests that transposing these standard practices to international exports trade will help develop will help developing countries seeking to capture higher returns from their products and so the countries can therefore focus from increasing production of commodities to ink to using IP tools to enhance their intangible value determined by uniqueness reputation and tradition and I mentioned light-years IP because they were the group that eventually advised the Ethiopian that was that was that began this initiative for trademark for for coffee in terms of coffee itself the the world trade in coffee has changed over the years and as early as the sixth century Abyssinia the area that Ethiopia now is in was the principal region that was supplying the Arabic world and supplies reached Yemen currently what's Yemen today around the 15th century or earlier from there it went to Southeast Asia as far as Cylon and Sumatra then the Duchess East Indies soon became an important region for coffee production and between the 16th and the 19th century other colonial powers introduced coffee into their territories coffee like other prime commodities suffers from overproduction which also results in very dramatic rises and falls of the price the market fluctuations and peculiarities are very specific to coffee I don't know how many of you may remember but between 1999 and 2004 was sort of the lowest decline of coffee prices in 30 years it was very dramatic and the international market created a global crisis pretty much and part of the reason for this crisis what what had happened was that there was an oversupply of coffee in the market and part of that was based on the policies of multinational financial institutions such as the IMF and the WTO that had offered loans to poorer countries in this case I think it was Vietnam and suddenly Vietnam went from being a small producer to the second-largest by 2000 and so this didn't unfortunately this didn't necessarily result in higher income or better livelihoods for the farmers themselves because the oversupply kept the kept the prices low this caused a crisis a huge crisis for coffee farmers and this is about we're talking about 30 to 60 million of the world's population and there was mass migration to urban centers those who decided to stay on their farm lands in Ethiopia a lot of them decided to grow chats instead of coffee this is a narcotic that's that's consumed widely in the Middle East and in the Horn of Africa and it's it's a kind of crop that doesn't even require much in terms of maintenance and immediately the fate of farmers changed because a bushel of add also known as @k qat could sell for as as high as nine dollars while coffee at that time would bring 0.01 cents so the math was very clear there are certain peculiarities to the coffee industry and the coffee market on the consumer side demand is never affected it's not affected very greatly by price change on the supply side farmers might be able to increase their yield short term by using fertilizers but there's a very cyclical nature to the coffee growing period it takes anywhere from three to five years to grow coffee for it to reach full production so this built-in lag time often results in overproduction and price in an in an LS in elasticity the other piece to this is that the New York coffee sugar cocoa exchange price which functions functions as the main futures priced reference right reference price it ultimately controls the price that's paid to farmers and and there at the New York coffee sugar and cocoa exchange the prices paid to farmers were very different in than prices paid to producers in exporting countries and the retail price is sorry let me say that again the prices paid to farmers were very different than the retail prices that were recorded by importing countries and between 1999 and 2001 the futures market price fell by 57% due to this oversupply yet during the same period the retail prices only fell by less than 10 percent between in this period between the 1990s to around 2004 the world coffee market was characterized by a boom in consumer countries and a corresponding crisis in producing countries what does this has been termed the Coffee paradox which marked a departure from the assumed economic model of supply and demand and there was this this huge difference between the global green coffee the price fell despite increased demand of coffee by consumers and developed countries part of the cause was that this coffee that was on the market was very low-quality robusta coffee and it was over supplied and it harmed the producers but it but it resulted in coffee roasters being able to raise their profit margins because international prices dipped to record-setting lows at the same time the consumer market of specialty coffee meant that this sector recorded increasing price premiums even during the crisis the specialty coffee industry was in dire need of white high quality coffee of the kind that Ethiopia produced here Cafe Harris Adamo and this could be easily geared towards the niche market there is this difference between commercial and specialty coffees I didn't know this I did this research but there are two very distinct sectors to coffee the industrial or commercial coffee is usually the canned and the instant blends and the specialty coffee or gourmet coffees are the kinds that those specialty distributors deal with and the u.s. is the highest consumer of world coffee followed by Germany then Japan and industrial coffees make particular use of robusta beans lesser grade beans coffee beans and their plants specialty coffees are generally much smaller in volume and they account only for about 10% of all coffee exports the price though is very very high the retail estimates in 2001 measured the total u.s. specialty markets at nearly 11 billion and even though growers were suffering in this period of the crisis international companies were reaping record profits by taking advantage of lower prices Ethiopia is and was then producing Arabica beans which is was very is very much sought after by the specialty industry and unfortunately though its selling price was pegged to the New York Coffee CSCS commodity price and so this discrepancy between the selling price and the commodity price was one of the key issues that the Ethiopian fine coffee initiative sought to address and I'll say a little bit more about that in a minute most of you know that the what the growing demand for the specialty coffee industry and how that kind of took off here in the 1970s what happened as a part of the coffee cartel between Africa Latin America and the US collapsing there was a cartel in place that dealt with stabilizing volatile prices and in some kind of aid to coffee-producing countries and fixing production quotas for coffee exports basically to to kind of stabilize the market but this cartel fell apart in nineteen eighty eighty nine and from that point on it was as though all countries could compete on on the market and most of them started focusing on quality production instead of quantity production and what this did was increased a variety of high quality beans that were available at lower cost the coffee revolution started up around the same time market coffees were being marketed in a very new way to a very new kind of consumer who had sort of environmental concerns environmental savvy and and fair trade was very knowledgeable about fair trade concerned concerns and eventually these consumers would seek high quality single origin coffees instead of blends and and mixed beans from unknown locations the the leader of this coffee the specialty coffee industry was Starbucks and they said open you've probably noticed if you've been in a Starbucks lately that they are celebrating their 40th year it's opened in 1971 the first coffee shop in Seattle and it grew in popularity very very fast and but the Starbucks institutional demeanor I guess is sort of a more a gentler kind of global business with good corporate citizenship and social responsibility at its core and to its credits Starbucks was among the first in the industry to introduce and package single origin coffees that served to promote products and their sources to consumers so it's kind of ironic that in the actual initiative Starbucks became the enemy for a short time but that was resolved fortunately the slide that you see here has different shades of Maroons and browns I think three different shades the R stands for robusta coffee the blend coffees the a stands for the Arabic the red countries that produce Arabica coffee and the M is for mixed Arabica and uh coffees now when we come to Ethiopia the origins of coffee and Ethiopian and I don't know anyone who knows about this legend anymore where it came from when it started but the story goes that a shepherd named Cal Dee took his goats up a hill and the goat started munching on beings and started getting very energetic and and so he decided to try some of this since they had all this energy to spare and and from there he was very inspired to share this finding with some priests nearby and the priests tried it and they stayed up all night praying so that's helped and and for those of you may have visited Ethiopia lately you know that there's a chain named Cal DS that's kind of fashioned after Starbucks that's doing very well a coffee coffee cafe chain over the ages practicing the practice of drinking coffee has been at times banned and at times accepted by both Christianity and Islam in the beginning in Ethiopia coffee was strongly associated with Islam and indigenous religious practices so it's made its the consumption was sort of taboo among its Christian Christian population nobody would admit to this today but that's actually how it had happened and we know this because travelers to Ethiopia from the 19th century sort of observed this this version I would seem to have lessened towards the latter half of the of the century maybe because and I don't know how true this is but Egyptian our bones were then who the head of the Ethiopian church at the time consumed this coffee and so it kind of became a little bit more accepted and then by the first half of the 20th century there are reports of nobility drinking drinking coffee and it's available to the in the homes that hosts these travelers now Ethiopia's an equal equip locally recognized as the birthplace of coffee and some even regard the name itself to have been derived from a region in the southwest named kava its coffee still grows wild in mountain forests in Ethiopia and one of the strongest reasons why there is this belief that coffee originated in Ethiopia is that there is a very vast gene variation of coffee in Ethiopia no there are local gene banks there one is the Juma Agricultural Research Center and the Institute of biodiversity conservation and Limu and they've recorded a variety of about 6,000 beam's so far and Counting there's still more one such variety that I've heard of has been taken to Brazil and during the Emperor's time Brazilian delegation came and they were offered this type of bean and it's now become the most natural decaffeinated coffee that's available on the market so this wealth of diversity attests to Ethiopia's claim that the origins and links of as the origins the origins of coffee are there and that the links of the survival of the world's largest genetic pool really depends on adequate conservation in Ethiopia cultural significance it's you know a daily activity in most homes in Ethiopia the economics to this was that Ethiopia is considered the older the oldest exporter of coffee in 2005 and I'm sure there are figures from since then but Ethiopia was the sixth largest coffee producer and the set the largest exporter worldwide it this kind of gives you a sense of why it's important as a commodity but not so much the cultural background to this coffee preparation and consumption is included in most religious festivals for Islam and Christianity and it's also serves as a key element in sacred ceremonies and rituals connected to indigenous religions in the in auto mode traditional belief systems coffee is assigned ceremonial roles as part of ritual of a ritual meal and is sought to bring blessings through invocations and prayer and parts of one law coffee is thought to have spiritual powers to protect household the households and and it's very venerated in certain areas and women's ritual known as a tea tea coffee is used as a symbol of penance for offenses that have been committed and then in possession cults known collectively as believed to have originated in the northern highlands of Ethiopia coffee is used to read people have afflicted other flexions and unwanted spirits and and it's used to stimulate recitations and prayers beyond this religious context modern modern Ethiopian coffee ceremony borrows some pieces from these from these older practices and if your parent says one of two countries that in which consumption is also very high I think the other one is is Brazil and as you can see the woman sitting there sitting with a brazier with coal and there's grass on the ground a little bit of green that you see on the ground sometimes there's flowers strewn in there and she roasts the coffee up on top of the of the coal and then that's the coffee is ground and brewed in the Jamuna and the clay container on the right and it's enjoyed among neighbors friends people who drop in and it's brewed three times traditionally if you have that time to stick around it's they have the first the second and the third brewing progressively it gets weaker the coffee the first is the strongest yeah good enough and so there is quite a you know maybe one would liken it to Japanese tea ceremony or even Senegalese tea ceremony or Kenyan there's quite a bit of cultural significance for coffee and coffee proper preparation and there are regional variations to how it's done how its consumed sometimes it's consumed with butter sometimes with salt and also the Japanese have regional variations sometimes the necks are longer sometimes there's two spouts and you know there's all kinds of aesthetics involved in decorating the German as well there's also a lot of knowledge in Ethiopia about coffee cultivation and in different regions of Ethiopia and here we have German as showing the different regions produce distinct kinds of coffees such as the higher you've got your face Adamo coffees coffee is cultivated by small farmers so it's not a plantation activity and they have very rich traditional knowledge about its planting its harvesting and its processing generally coffee is shade-grown without fertilizer so it's organic and there are four kinds of production methods forests semi forest garden and plantation which is used to cultivate the coffee and so it's mostly entirely organic the way the coffee is produced and after its harvested the coffee can be processed in two different ways dry or wet and washed coffee receives higher markets price and but most of the Ethiopian coffee itself the exported coffees naturally sundried so coffee connoisseurs and there's a whole vocabulary to this just like a wine they describe harder your defense Adama coffees in very specific terms fruity citrusy aromatic clean and bright acidity so those those of you who are coffee drinkers might appreciate this or a coffee coffee with dark chocolate notes these are the areas there's more of places where coffee grows and you know with 6,000 varieties genetic varieties I'm sure we're going to discover a whole lot more in terms of the regions that grow specialized coffee beings needless to say a lot of people depend on coffee for their livelihoods and the estimate I've seen is close to 15 million or one person in every five depends directly or indirectly on coffee for income Ethiopia's Coffee is I mentioned Arabica and the this kind of coffee grows in drier climates in mountainous elevations of about a thousand meters or more above sea level it takes much longer to reach maturity three to five years and it's it's the retail price is quite high fifteen to twenty-five dollars per pound in the global market the robusta kind of coffee is more disease resistance so that's why it makes it much more easier to to grow and it grows in much less less time and in lower out altitudes and this is the coffee that's used in most blends I am running out of time okay let me say just a little bit about the initiative itself it's it's the initiative was begun by a group from Ethiopia the person that was at the center of it was IP law person in Ethiopia and the his name was get a tremendous day and it came out of the Ethiopian intellectual property office which was established in 2003 and he partnered with lightyears the group in Ethiopia partnered with light-years IP to examine this potential of the trademark possibility and basically they decided to take control of the brand by trademarking Haider Saddam oh and they've got a fake office there's a little bit of technical stuff there that maybe I'll skip over what they decided to use as a strategic approach why they decided for trademark versus geographical indicators it's a little bit technical so I'll skip over it for now but they did decide to pursue trademark and this was very hotly contested at the time Starbucks had already put in for a certain kind of coffee trademark and I think these two things were not related until they actually started butting heads the two initiatives and so when the Ethiopian initiative came up and they went to the Patent Office Starbucks had already applied for this trademark and so then that's when the problem began the initial response was that the coffee industry did not support the CTO peon registry they argued that the names had become generic terms for styles of coffee and the Ethiopian team realized very quickly that they couldn't push through this in a legal court system and they instead decided to go public with this and when they did they mobilized they sort of told the story to Oxfam and Oxfam was very well known for their you know decades-long advocacy in the fair trade movement and so Oxfam decided to make this a very public affair around the same time there was the film black gold had been produced that showed sort of the the state of farmers and their earnings and their lifestyle compared to sort of the coffee the coffee revolution and you know the way the coffee was being marketed on this side he's snapping his fingers at me should I stop there oh this is unfortunate okay let me stop shall I stop I'm stopping when maybe we compensate this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Keywords: library, congress, ethiopia

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Length: 45min 41sec (2741 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2011