Boutique Coffee Map | know Ethiopia's ECX-DST system

For professional baristas, please follow the coffee workshop (Wechat official account cafe_style)

* in 1984, a drought in Ethiopia resulted in a short harvest of crops, killing about 1 million people, but there were sufficient food stocks at that time, but due to the lack of central management, sufficient food could not be delivered to scarce areas, thus giving birth to the establishment of ECX. Ethiopia launched ECX in April 2008 to provide deals in wheat, corn and sesame. In order to make it easier for farmers to transport transactions, Ethiopia has set up nine warehouses across the country. ECX is like insurance for transactions, providing buyers and sellers with a transparent, efficient and reliable platform. ECX hopes to improve the quality of farmers and let them know how much their products can be traded and how much they actually get, rather than being exploited by middlemen.

* Coffee beans were also included in ECX in December 2008. farmers, processing plants and cooperatives will bring coffee to the ECX warehouse. When they enter the warehouse, they will be graded in the way of cupping. In the process of collecting goods, all raw beans will lose details such as producer and origin, leaving only standardized names such as producing areas and grades, on the ECX website. You don't know which farmers or which smaller producing areas produce coffee beans, and the traceability of some boutique coffee has disappeared. In the past, some importers or companies would cooperate with local farmers and processing plants to develop specialty coffee, but now they are unable to cooperate because of ECX.

* it is not a good thing for us who like high-quality coffee with traceability. Later, through the efforts of high-quality raw bean merchants and associations in Europe and the United States, Ethiopian officials realized that high-quality coffee beans have different raw beans, and then a second window-DST (Direct Specialty Trade) bidding system was set up under the ECX system. The biggest feature of this bidding system is that the buyer can know the producing areas and growers of these beans. DST bidding not only allows buyers to fully understand coffee-related information and buy their favorite coffee, the most important thing is that through DST auctions, coffee cooperatives and farmers can get 85% of the auction amount and get direct feedback to improve their living standards, which is one of the important functions of the ECX system. In this way, local farmers will be more committed to producing high-quality coffee, and buyers will have more choices in the DST trading mechanism, so that both buyers and sellers can benefit each other.