Clean Rivers and Profitable Farms in Ethiopia’s Coffee Country
On World Water Day, we highlight coffee farming communities in Ethiopia that are taking action for clean water. To provide for his five children, farmer Belayneh Otisso relies on the income he earns supplying coffee to his local cooperative’s wet mill. But he could see the environmental damage caused by the mill every harvest season, when it would send noxious wastewater into the neighboring river. “When the animals drank from [the river], they died. The children of the community were stricken with waterborne illnesses. When the wastewater was used for irrigation, the crops were destroyed,” he said. The wet mill would have to shut down for a week or two at a time when the pollution was at its worst, driving down the price that local farmers received for their coffee. It’s a problem that has been shared by many coffee-farming communities in Ethiopia. Wet mills, which separate the coffee bean from the cherry that surrounds it, produce a consistent, high-quality product, allowing