Yemen: the abandoned home of coffee

By Ahmed Al-Zurqa
Aug 6, 2005 - Vol. VIII Issue 31

SANA'A - To Europeans Yemen has always been known as a land of high quality coffee. The city of Mokha from where coffee departed, gave its name to a type of coffee, Mocha, a bean with a chocolaty hint that gave birth to the much-loved mocha. Mokha is still the main port of export for the Mocha bean and the current exports are valued at YR 3.114bn annually.

Homeland of Coffee

No one knows if Arabs really were the first people to drink coffee. Certainly the English word ‘coffee’ comes from the Arabic ‘qahwa’, which itself comes from the word for wine ‘khmora’.

There is some debate about where the plant originated. Some say that it was transferred from the Arabian Peninsula to Ethiopia, but others believe it first appeared in the Kafa region of Southern Ethiopia.

An expedition from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization sent to investigate the history of the tree in Ethiopia, in 1924, found no concrete evidence to support the belief that coffee originated in Ethiopia. The study said that it was possible that the tree could have been successfully transferred from Yemen to Ethiopia, due to the similar environmental conditions required for coffee production in both countries.

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