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Women workers are rolling up yellow tarps that protect coffee beans overnight at the Kerchanshe coffee trading company near Yirgachefe, Ethiopia. After unfolding the green mesh protecting the beans and spreading them out to dry, they sort them by hand for imperfections. Their pay was 50 Ethiopian birr (US $1.30) a day when this photograph was taken. Legend has it that a fifth-century Ethiopian goatherder was the first to discover his animals eating the beans of a small bush that kept them from going to sleep at night. Coffee has been grown and consumed in the Ethiopian highlands ever since, and the region’s mile-high, shade-grown trees still produce some of the finest coffees in the world. It’s a labor-intensive process, from hand-harvesting only the ripest cherries, to washing, fermenting, hulling, drying, and sorting the crop. About 90 percent of Ethiopia’s 110 million people are involved in agriculture.

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George Steinmetz
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www.georgesteinmetz.com
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Women workers are rolling up yellow tarps that protect coffee beans overnight at the Kerchanshe coffee trading company near Yirgachefe, Ethiopia. After unfolding the green mesh protecting the beans and spreading them out to dry, they sort them by hand for imperfections. Their pay was 50 Ethiopian birr (US $1.30) a day when this photograph was taken. Legend has it that a fifth-century Ethiopian goatherder was the first to discover his animals eating the beans of a small bush that kept them from going to sleep at night. Coffee has been grown and consumed in the Ethiopian highlands ever since, and the region’s mile-high, shade-grown trees still produce some of the finest coffees in the world. It’s a labor-intensive process, from hand-harvesting only the ripest cherries, to washing, fermenting, hulling, drying, and sorting the crop. About 90 percent of Ethiopia’s 110 million people are involved in agriculture.

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