Addis Ababa Wants Fines and Jail Terms in a Raw-Milk Safety Code

The Addis Ababa Farmers and Urban Agriculture Development Commission says it has prepared a legal framework for raw-milk quality and safety that would carry both fines and imprisonment, after research confirmed health hazards in raw milk sold in the city.

The commission told Tikvah Ethiopia that the research identified raw milk being transported in jerrycans that cannot be properly washed, and that the city has had no independent compulsory quality-standards system for the trade.

What it would require of sellers

The draft would oblige shopkeepers to keep diagnostic equipment on the premises — shifting testing from an inspection that happens occasionally to a capability the seller must hold continuously.

That is a meaningful cost for a small dairy retailer, and it is the part of the framework most likely to be argued over. Raw milk in Addis Ababa moves through a long, informal chain of collectors and resellers, most of them operating on thin margins. A rule that assumes a shop can afford testing kit assumes a formality the trade does not yet have.

The gap it is trying to close

The commission's own account points at the real problem: not that standards were being broken, but that there was no mandatory independent standard to break. Penalties are the visible end of the framework; the compulsory standard behind them is the substantive change.

Open

The commission has not published the proposed fine amounts, the prison terms, which equipment would be mandated, who would certify it, or when the framework would take effect. Nor is it clear whether it has been adopted or is still a draft.

A note on sourcing: this account comes from the commission's statement to Tikvah Ethiopia, published in Amharic. The figures and penalties above are deliberately not quantified here because the available text does not state them clearly enough to report.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 12 October 2026