International coffee honchos Starbucks and the Government of Ethiopia have come to a (tentative) agreement in their battle over coffee ownership and naming rights, reports the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper.
At issue was the right to use the Yirgacheffe and Sidamo names in marketing, with the Ethiopian government arguing that retaining the right to use those names would help provide millions of dollars of needed revenue to one of the poorest countries on Earth.
The details will be revealed later this month, but according to the article the two parties agreed to “sign a licensing, distribution and marketing agreement that recognised …..Ethiopia’s speciality coffees.”

1 comment
Comments feed for this article
May 22, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Starbucks: Making up with Ethiopia, Onto Uganda.... « A Notebook of Fair Trade Coffee, Tea, News & Reviews
[...] for that matter“. Starbucks and the Government of Ethiopia were recently involved in a dispute over coffee trademark issues. The article says that with such a high poverty level, the Ugandan government should also look [...]