Tibebu Roba, a farmer in his mid-50s, has spent much of his career trying to stay one step ahead of the ever complicated coffee production and export business.

Born and raised in Dilla town of the Gedeo Zone, 295Km south of the capital, he finds himself in one of the well-known coffee producing areas in the country after inheriting land from his father.

The father of six children continued with the family tradition of coffee planting. But unlike his ancestors, he uses new breeds of coffee seeds on the eight hectares of land he owns.

Until last year, he would supply the coffee seeds he harvests to the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Union, which was established in 2002 with 13 member organizations. The Union then exports the coffee and pays the farmers dividends based on the amount they supplied. Tibebu, whose only source of income is his coffee, was never happy with this arrangement.

Last year, he decided to do away with a middleman. He supplied coffee to Trabocca, a 15-year-old Dutch company that provides traceable coffee products to roasters around the world. Last year, the company bought 184ql of coffee from Tibebu.

“Previously, there were a lot of brokers in the chain that benefited more than us,” said Tibebu, who is now building a new house for himself and his family. “Before I started exporting directly, I used to sell my coffee to private buyers, who used to give me low prices.”

Like Tibebu, coffee farmers have lately found themselves in a better position, but it has not only been due to them exporting directly. One of these is Alemu Kebed, a resident of the Southern Guji Zone of Oromia Regional State.

A married father of five, he is the chairperson of Harda Hurde Cooperative Union, an association of coffee farmers established seven years ago.

Alemu and 710 members of the cooperative union supply their coffee to the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative, the largest coffee growing farmers union. Last year, they supplied 4,175 sacks of coffee to the Union. Alemu sold a kilogram of high-grade coffee for 50 Br last year.

"The major challenge is the inconsistency of the international price of coffee,” says Alemu, who admits that avoiding some of the brokers in the middle can help boost revenue for the farmers.

The coffee industry, which supports 818 coffee exporters and 5.3 million coffee farmers who cultivate 1.6 million hectares of land, has not merely been good for farmers but the national economy as well, boosting export performance of the first quarter of the year to 723 million dollars, the first increase in three years. Last fiscal year, the nation generated 2.7 billion dollars from exports, a six percent decline from the year before and well below the 4.3-billion-dollar target.

With 128 export destinations, the performance was 15pc higher compared to the same period in the previous fiscal year and satisfied 90pc of the government’s target for the quarter.

The Netherlands was the biggest export destination for the country, buying 82 million dollars worth of goods from Ethiopia. The European nation was followed by Somalia, the United States and Saudi Arabia as the top export destinations.

Seventy-six percent of the export revenue is owed to agricultural commodities, the most important of which has long been coffee. The commodity fetched 284 million dollars in the first four months of the fiscal year, with Germany buying almost a quarter of the coffee Ethiopia exported. Saudi Arabia and Japan were the other top destinations of Ethiopian coffee.