Wild Coffee in Ethiopia

Ethiopia, Kaffa, 2015. Woman picking wild coffee.

Working for NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union) in Ethiopia last year, the assignment was to document the local communities who live with and off the local cloud forest in Kaffa, a region in the Southwest of the country.

The region is best known for its wild coffee forests and is believed to be the birthplace of coffee. In one of the coffee forests is an old coffee tree, said to be the Mother of Coffee. And while the forest is protected and kept alive, the coffee bushes grow wildly in the extensive forest and the local population enter the forest in small groups to harvest the coffee as needed for home consumption or to sell at the closest local market.

My journey to study the coffee harvest had started at the beginning of the year in Costa Rica and now, towards the end of the year, I found myself across the ocean, in a very different reality, looking at the same subject from a very different angle.

If you would like to see more photos about Ethiopia's Wild Coffee, please click here.

If you like to learn more about the Coffee Harvest in Costa Rica, please click here.