The Ethiopian government filed for copyright last year to trademark its coffees. Names like Harar and Sidamo are familiar to Starbucks clients around the world.
Securing trademark rights to those names would mean a spectacular rise in Ethiopia's coffee revenues -- a jump in the neighborhood of $88 million.
The most critical dividend would go to Ethiopia's struggling coffee farmers -- 15 million people, many of whom live on less than a dollar a day.
But the Ethiopian government and Oxfam, a Britain-based nongovernmental organization helping Ethiopian farmers reap some of the rewards of the multibillion-dollar global industry, say Starbucks is trying to block Ethiopia's attempts to register its famous coffees.
"Starbucks is using its influence on the National Coffee Association to block this application in the U.S.," said Gwenllian Griffiths at Oxfam's London office.
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