Coffee Quality and Its Determinant Factors in the Gedeo Zone of Southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACT: The Gedeo Zone, heartland of the globally renowned Yirgacheffe coffee, possesses exceptional agro-ecological potential for producing high-quality Arabica beans. Despite this international reputation and optimal growing conditions, a significant portion of coffee from this region fails to achieve its potential quality grade, representing a critical quality paradox that undermines farmer incomes and national export earnings. While previous research has documented general factors affecting coffee quality, there remains a lack of integrated analysis that simultaneously quantifies the effects of specific pre- and post-harvest practices while identifying the key socioeconomic and institutional determinants of quality failure at the producer level. This study therefore aimed to address this gap by evaluating how pre- and post-harvest processing techniques affect coffee quality, assessing the inherent quality of coffee in the Gedeo zone, and identifying the determinants of coffee quality among producers. The study employed a mixed-methods approach combining a cross-sectional survey of 138 coffee-producing households across four major woredas (Yirgacheffe, Kochere, Dilla Zuria, and Wenago), standardized laboratory analysis of physical and organoleptic properties following ECX protocols, and binary logit regression analysis to identify quality determinants. The findings reveal a stark quality paradox: despite the region’s optimal agro-ecology and high adoption of pre-harvest good practices (97.1% use organic fertilizer, 94.3% practice pruning), 50.5% of farmer output was graded as unacceptable quality (ECX Grade 4 or 5). Laboratory analysis confirmed the significant superiority of washed processing, with washed coffee exhibiting substantially higher scores in key sensory attributes including acidity (8.5 ± 0.2 vs. 5.8 ± 0.3, p