Abstract

Ethiopia is believed to be the birth place of Arabica coffee and coffee takes a lion share in Ethiopian economy and socio-economic development since it is a prime export commodity in the country. Cognizant of its importance, Ethiopian government made key development plan and strategies to increase coffee production and productivity. As a result, many efforts were made in coffee research and extension in the last five decades; but so far Ethiopia has not attained to fully capitalize its potential in the coffee sector and there is no information on change over years of production and productivity of coffee.  FAOSTAT and International Coffee Organization data were used and analyzed by descriptive statistics. Descriptive results depicted that even if coffee productivity is not significantly increased in the last decades, coffee production increased from around 180,000 metric ton in 1993 to 487,808.44 metric ton in 2021.  However, still Ethiopia left behind in coffee production as compared to the major world coffee producing countries and its contribution to global coffee production is less than 5% over several years. To change and improve the historical growth trend of coffee production and productivity, it is the responsibility of all stakeholders to support coffee producers to use full package of recommended production technologies and to stump old coffee trees and work on soil and water conservation practices.