Exports Hit 2.3 Billion Dollars in Two Months, and Gold and Coffee Did Nearly All of It

Ethiopia earned 2.3 billion US dollars from merchandise exports in the first two months of the 2026/27 fiscal year, up 176 percent from the 837 million dollars it earned in the same two months a year earlier.

Gold and coffee are doing nearly all of the work.

A near-tripling is not the same as a transformation

An export base that grows this fast in twelve months has not been rebuilt in twelve months. Factories do not come online at that speed and farms do not triple output. What moves this quickly is price, volume in a commodity that was previously leaking out through unofficial channels, or both at once.

That is the significant part of the gold number. Gold earnings respond to two things the government can influence directly — the premium the central bank pays artisanal miners, and how much metal is therefore declared and exported through the official window rather than carried across a border. A surge in recorded gold exports can mean more gold mined or simply more gold counted. The foreign exchange is equally real either way, but the two have very different implications for what next year looks like.

Coffee is a sturdier story, resting on a crop and on prices that have been strong, though it carries its own exposure to a single global price.

The concentration problem

The headline every exporter should read twice is not the 176 percent. It is that two commodities are carrying it.

An export mix this narrow transmits world prices straight into Ethiopia's foreign exchange supply, and from there into the birr, into import cover, and into the availability of letters of credit for every firm that has nothing to do with gold or coffee. A manufacturer importing inputs is now, indirectly, long two commodities it does not trade.

The reform-era gains in foreign exchange availability that businesses have felt this year rest on this base. It is a good base while prices hold.

Open

The published figures do not break out how much of the gold increase reflects higher declared volumes versus higher prices, nor how much of the overall rise is price rather than quantity. Whether the pace holds through the rest of the fiscal year, when the coffee harvest cycle and global prices both turn, is unestablished.

Sources: Birr Metrics, 26 October 2026