It’s not certified fair trade, but coffee supplied by a small Northern Idaho company has helped transform the lives of poor farmers in Ethiopia.
Since 2002, Dominion Trading has partnered with families and growers in the country’s Yirgacheffe region not only to produce premium whole bean Arabica coffee, but to provide health care, education and other humanitarian aid to the people of Ethiopia.
“We want to build relationships in order to create solutions and change lives,” said Mike Stemm, general manager of Dominion Trading in Liberty Lake.
The business returns 60 percent of its net profits from coffee sales to Ethiopia through profit-sharing with coffee growers and also through the New Covenant Foundation, a nonprofit also established by Stemm. So in addition to paying farmers a higher price for their coffee, Dominion Trading and the New Covenant Foundation have focused on community health care, literacy, finance, church planting and other initiatives.
Many evangelical Christian families and congregations in the area are supporting this mission by drinking the company’s coffee.
Every Sunday, members of the region’s largest church, Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, consume about 3,500 cups of Dominion Trading coffee. The coffee is also served exclusively at about a dozen other congregations in Idaho, Washington, Arizona and Colorado. Members of these churches also buy the coffee to drink at home and at their offices.
Although not certified fair trade, Dominion Trading emphasizes the way it shares profits with growers and its “holistic” approach to helping the people of Ethiopia.
“That’s a broader scope of sustainability than just paying the fair-trade price,” said Stemm, who has traveled to Ethiopia 10 times in the last three years to meet with farmers.
Even before she comes back to Ethiopia, people all over are talking about Birtukan Medeksa, the CUD vice-President. She has certainly overshadowed the Chairman Hailu Shawel. I am sure the corruption inside Hailu’s camp has been one of the reasons for her success. Rumors of corruption as crazy as Hailu buying houses in America and wasting the money of innocent supporters of CUD party are spreading around. If these rumors are false, it is a saddening indication that Ethiopians have not stopped using character assassination as a political tool yet. If these rumors are true, how much worst can Hailu’s camp get??
Anyway, Birtukan is capturing the hearts of many people. Those who used to say Birtukan Medeksa is Oromo only in her name are now praising her because of her plans for an all-inclusiveness of her CUD party. Until now, some Oromo and other southern people were supporting her CUD party just because they hate the ruling party. But if Birtukan manages to change the one-ethnic face of CUD, her party will unquestionably win any election in Ethiopia. Her party’s Amharic name “Kinijit” meaning Unity has been seen as a unity between Amhara and Gurage ethnicities, but now it can become a unity among all ethnicities. At least that is what most people hope.
But there are many important questions to be answered. If her party moves forward to include more ethnicities and thus the interests of more ethnicities, then wouldn’t the foundation, manifesto and identity of the party change also? After all, a notable portion of the Ethiopian population deeply suppports groups like OFDM, ONLF, ONC, OLF and other ethnic based opposition groups. Even though all seek democracy and other common values, there are important specific policies that these ethnic organizations possess. And some of these policies are in deep contradiction to Birtukan’s CUD policies. So she must know that the current Birtukan-mania is growing in the anticipation of her party adopting some new policies that are accommodating for the above portion of the Ethiopian population.
American Jews stand at the forefront of the international campaign to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The coalition of conscience that the Jewish community helped build is pressuring Sudan’s patron, China, to put an end to the slaughter.
Next door in Ethiopia, meanwhile, another humanitarian crisis is unfolding. Ethiopian Woyanne troops are burning villages inhabited by ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden region — using the same scorched-earth tactics employed by the Sudanese regime in Darfur. But there are two crucial differences between Darfur and Ogaden: First, Ethiopia’s principal patron isn’t China — it’s the United States. Second, on the Ogaden issue, the American Jewish community has so far been silent.
Ethiopia claims that it’s conducting a counterinsurgency operation in Ogaden. Admittedly, the terrorist threat in the region is real. The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist group, murdered more than 70 people at a Chinese-run oil field in the region this past April. But Sudan is likewise facing a separatist rebellion in Darfur. That fact doesn’t justify Sudan’s slaughter of innocent civilians, and it doesn’t justify Ethiopia’s conduct either.
A farmer from Ogaden told a reporter that Ethiopian soldiers had strangled his wife to death with a rope; the wife had been nursing the couple’s one-year-old son when she was killed. A 25-year-old woman told The New York Times that Ethiopian soldiers visited her village each night and picked a new girl to be gang-raped. A staff member of Doctors Without Borders said she saw Ethiopian soldiers chasing women and children away from water-wells.
Ethiopia Woyanne has expelled Red Cross representatives from the region and prevented Doctors Without Borders from gaining access to villages. That makes it harder for food and medicine to reach the desperate population there — and harder for real-life horror stories from Ogaden to reach the West. But a U.N. team did visit the region, and its report — released September 19 — was sobering. The monitors said they had found evidence of “serious violations of human rights.”
The body count in Ogaden is still a tiny fraction of the death toll in Darfur. But even though Ogaden isn’t the bloodiest conflict in Africa, the bloodshed there stains our own hands.
Ethiopia has been a close American ally in the fight against Islamists in neighboring Somalia, and the United States doled out $284 million in non-humanitarian aid to Ethiopia for fiscal year 2007. President Bush has asked Congress to raise that figure to $481 million for fiscal year 2008. If that request is approved, American aid would represent well over a tenth of the Ethiopian central government’s annual budget. In other words, Ethiopia is utterly dependent on American aid. Ethiopia can continue its scorched-earth campaign in Ogaden only if America lets it.
A bill sponsored by Democratic Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey would halt the flow of nonessential aid to Ethiopia unless the government improves its human rights record and removes “undue restrictions” on aid workers. A House subcommittee approved the Payne bill on July 18; two days later, the Ethiopian government released 38 political prisoners from jails in the capital city of Addis Ababa. The timing of the prisoner release clearly shows that Ethiopia is responsive to American pressure. But while the House has pressed forward with human rights legislation, the Bush administration and the Senate have balked.
In early September, Bush’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, paid what Voice of America described as a “whirlwind” visit to Ogaden, an area larger than the state of Florida. In about a day’s time, Frazer concluded that allegations of human rights abuses there were “unsubstantiated.” She must not have looked all that hard: The U.N. fact-finders said that they had heard “direct accounts” of abuses — and numerous journalists have reported the same. Unfazed by Frazer’s statements, the House pressed on with its efforts: At the beginning of October, it passed the Payne bill by voice vote and referred the legislation to the Senate for action. But it’s been nearly a month since then, and the Senate has yet to act.
While the Bush administration and the Senate have failed to intervene, we Jews have a sacred obligation to defend the victims of senseless slaughter: “Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” the Book of Leviticus commands us. We Jews also have a special relationship with the people of Ethiopia, dating back to the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon, as recounted in the Bible’s Book of Kings. The horrors of Ogaden are especially vivid for us because we know all too well what it’s like to be an ethnic minority in Ethiopia: A previous government slaughtered hundreds of Ethiopian Jews in the 1970s.
To protect the Jews of Ethiopia, Israel airlifted thousands of men, women and children out of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. American Jews played a key role in coordinating and financing the operations. The effort to protect the ethnic Somalis of Ogaden need not be so dramatic. It can be waged on the home front: Americans must insist that their elected officials place clear conditions on future aid to Ethiopia. But so far, the situation in Ogaden has yet to spark the public outcry that it ought to. It’s time for American Jews to take the lead once again.
Daniel Hemel is a 2007 Marshall scholar and is studying international relations at the University of Oxford.
NAIROBI (AFP) — Up to 90,000 civilians were displaced in the Somali capital in three days of fighting, the United Nations said Wednesday, as aid groups warned that catastrophe was unfolding in the shattered nation.
The civilians were displaced in fighting on Saturday, Sunday and Monday that was “the worst in months,” the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a statement.
At least 10 civilians were killed in various incidents over the weekend — including one in which Ethiopian troops opened fire on demonstrators protesting against their presence in Somalia, witnesses and police sources said.
There was a lull in Mogadishu on Wednesday, but civilians continued to flee the seaside metropolis that has seen a deadly escalation in the recent months, the agency said.
“You can feel tension in the air,” the statement quoted an aid worker as saying.
“Everyone is afraid that the lull in fighting is not going to last. They fear the insurgents are organizing themselves and that violence is going to be unleashed on an even higher scale.”
In a separate statement, some 40 humanitarian groups warned that a catastrophe was unfolding in Somalia and that they could no longer meet the war-torn country’s growing relief needs.
“There is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Central Somalia,” they said in a statement, whose signatories include CARE, Oxfam and Islamic Relief, among others.
The UNHCR said the displacement forced civilians out of Mogadishu and others to move within the city.
“Of the people who have left the capital since Saturday, about 46,000 have settled along the road linking Mogadishu to Afgooye,” some 30 kilometres west of Mogadishu.
“Another 42,000 have either fled Mogadishu for areas outside the city or moved to safer neighbourhoods within the capital.”
The fighting is worsening an already dire humanitarian situation which has left 1.5 million — almost a sixth of the total Somali population — in need of humanitarian assistance.
Mogadishu has been the scene of daily fighting or attacks since Ethiopian-backed government forces ousted an Islamist movement from the country, setting off a deadly insurgency.
Civilians are bearing the brunt of the violence and hundreds are estimated to have been killed since June, although accurate death tolls are not available.
Humanitarian agencies have complained that all parties involved in the conflict have failed to respect human rights and protect civilians, also accusing them of hampering the delivery of aid.
In October, the head of the UN food agency’s Mogadishu office was detained for several days without charge by government authorities.
Meanwhile, Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed held talks with Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, two days after the resignation of the war-torn country’s premier Ali Mohamed Gedi.
“They are talking about the current security situation in the country, including Ethiopian army efforts to end insecurity in Mogadishu,” said an official in Yusuf’s office in the south-central town of Baidoa.
“The minister asked the president to ensure that problems are peacefully resolved through dialogue,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Yusuf is holding talks with clan and political leaders to appoint a new prime minister to replace Gedi, who was accused by critics of failing to quell a months-old insurgency and rebuild Somalia’s institutions.
Bloody clan brawls after the 1991 ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre has turned into an endless civil war, exacerbated by the US hunt for Al-Qaeda linked extremists it believes are hiding in Somalia.
American music superstar Beyonce Knowles returns to the U.S. after a spiritually fulfilling visit with Aba Gebremedhin (formerly Aba Paulos).
Beyonce Knowles
Beyonce with self-appointed, gun-totting
pop Aba Gebremedhin (aka Aba Diabilos)
