Ethiopia Link

Keswick and District Fair trade Campaign has a friendship link with Ethiopia, in particular, with the Choche Coffee Farmers' Cooperative, which is a Fairtrade certified producer organisation. Choche is the legendary birthplace of coffee, located in the southwest of the country, in the region of Oromia.

Our friendship has been growing slowly since 2006, and is now a very significant aspect of our campaign. The link has been facilitated by the Oromia Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union, whose General Manager, Tadesse Meskela, is known to millions around the world through the film, Black Gold. Tadesse has made it possible for us to visit Choche several times, and for two farmers to come from Choche to Keswick in 2008 (see press release 4th June, 2008). Tadesse has himself become closely associated with our campaign, having visited us twice. We are now at the point of expanding the link so that more can participate.

On two occasions when we visited Choche we had with us, photographer Richard Human, a member of the Campaign. Following each of these two visits, exhibitions were held in Keswick, and in 2008 a third exhibition was held in Choche itself. In October pictures from the second exhibition will be on show at Foxes Café Lounge in Carlisle, put on jointly with Carlisle One World Centre. Many of the photographs in our picture gallery are from these visits.

More recently we have established a second friendship with a community of refugees from Oromo who live in the Greater Manchester area, and who early in 2009 set up their own coffee company, the Oromo Coffee Company (OCC), to market coffee from Oromia in Britain, in a unique social enterprise venture. A business member of our Campaign, Fine Cheeses (Fond Ewe) in Keswick, was the very first shop in the country, to sell their coffee. As yet the OCC is not importing from Choche, but we hope that in time they will.

This friendship with the OCC has led on to a further link with the Lorna Young Foundation which has been heavily involved in helping to set up the OCC.

We have also built links with the coffee team at Taylors of Harrogate. Taylors is a major roaster and seller of Fairtrade (and other ethically sourced) teas and coffees, including some from Ethiopia. In 2008 we took our Choche farmer friends there for a morning of coffee talk and tasting (see press release 11th June, 2008).

• Find out more about our friendship with Choche. Keswick - Choche: The story so far


• More information - Glimpses of Choche


• Read about Oromia, the heart of Ethiopia's coffee country


• The Oromo Coffee Company, the first of it's kind! Read about what makes The Oromo Coffee Company so unique