Coffee, culture, and intellectual property: lessons for Africa from the Ethiopian Fine Coffee Initiative

The initiative to register trademark for Ethiopia’s fine coffees was launched in 2004. What seemed a quiet progression of actions by the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office quickly grew to command international media attention. Opinions differed as to whether rightful claim could be exercised over an agricultural product that happened to be growing in a particular location. The fact that a leading specialty coffee company opposed the initial registry attempt added further charge to the issue, as it subsequently became cast as a battle between a country with meager means and an avaricious multinational with little regard or remorse. Little research has been done about this important action and its potential application to other sectors of the African economy and cultural resources. This paper reconstructs part of the initiative in a preliminary exploration of its significance for the future. The Ethiopian trademark initiative provides the basis to examine related uses of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a powerful potential tool for development. Lessons learned in this case study suggest similar benefits could be garnered for other African agricultural products that fulfill registry requirements. Even beyond trademarks and commodity products, exercising IPRs to identify and protect creativity offer boundless possibilities for Africa that have yet to be galvanized. Heran Sereke-Brhan is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and Visiting Researcher at the African Studies Center at Boston University. After earning a doctorate in African History from Michigan State University, she has initiated and participated in projects that combine her interests in historical research with her passion for the arts and culture, including art exhibitions, performances, and literary publications. This paper on Ethiopian coffee trademark registry is part of her recent broader inquiry into issues of intellectual property and African culture production. This paper is part of the Africa 2060 Project, a Pardee Center program of research, publications, and symposia exploring African futures in various aspects related to development on continental and regional scales. For more information, visit www-staging.bu.edu/pardee/research/

Africa 2060: good news from Africa, April 16, 2010

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, As the keystone event of a research program called “Africa 2060,” the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University convened a conference on April 16, 2010 called Africa 2060: Good News from Africa. The program featured more than a dozen expert panelists from Boston University and across the world, and the approximately 100 participants included many African scholars and citizens from the continent who contributed to lively and well-informed discussion. The Pardee Center conference was co-sponsored by Boston University’s Africa Studies Center (ASC), the African Presidential Archives & Research Center (APARC), and the Global Health & Development Center (GHDC).This report provides commentary reflecting upon and information pertaining to the substance of the conference. An introductory overview looks at the major issues discussed at the event, which are placed within the larger literature on Africa’s future. Four short essays prepared by Boston University graduate students provide readers with more specific reflections and highlights of each conference session and the main issues discussed by panelists. The final section presents analyses of key trends and projections related to societal, economic, and governance issues for Africa and a commentary on what this information tells us about the drivers that will determine the continent’s future

Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history

This article traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastisation of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination