This paper investigates the role of coffee and its connection to deforestation in Ethiopian forests. You can read the abstract below. Stay tuned for the full paper! This is just one example of the exciting research happening on multiple fronts in the TreesForDev project.
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Squeezing the coffee out of Ethiopian forests: European Union's deforestation regulation in-the-making
Linda Annala Tesfaye (Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland), Neema Komba (Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland)
The European Union deforestation regulation (EUDR), which prohibits the distribution of certain commodities originating from recently deforested lands in the EU, will come into force by December 2025. Despite its ambition to reduce the EU’s impact on global deforestation and forest degradation, the regulation is expected to push out small-holder and indigenous communities from high-value global value chains. Labelled as another form of a “green squeeze”, the EUDR is anticipated to induce severe disruptions through its stringent requirements for traceability and due diligence. In countries like Ethiopia, Africa’s largest coffee producer and exporter, EUDR is estimated to cause a severe decline in coffee exports and GDP. Nevertheless, the discourse around EUDR largely excludes voices from the global South. In this paper, we investigate how the actors in the Ethiopian coffee sector are organizing themselves, navigating and contesting the looming EUDR in-the-making. The transnational regulatory regime places uneven responsibilities of compliance on the producer-side of coffee value chains. Yet the relationship between coffee and forests has a deeply socio-cultural and spiritual place in the Ethiopian collective consciousness, providing counter-hegemonic meanings for practices around environmental responsibilities and decolonial resistances. Drawing on literature on corporate social responsibility in global value chains and pluriversal perspectives on human-environment relations, we show how EUDR’s regulatory regime is adopted and contested within the economic uses of forest coffee in Ethiopia. Ethiopian place-based perspectives on relating with forests and coffee offer insights on strategically contesting and navigating transnational responsibility regimes such as the EUDR.