The powers that be absolutely will not allow countries like Ethiopia to process the coffee they grow any more than they will allow Ivory Coast to process cashews.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1096413/main-export-coun...
Yeah....no.
Ethiopia doesn't do processing because there isn't enough capital or stability to justify a multimillion investment in processing.
Vietnam was in the same position developmentally as Ethiopia today in the 1990s, but had a relatively stable government that began working on expanding credit and entrepreneurship.
Ethiopia literally had a civil war barely a year ago, a massive civil war in the 90s, and multiple insurgencies in between.
There just isn't capital in Ethiopia. It's literally one of the least developed countries on earth.
The country had a civil war from 1974-1991 that killed 1.7 million people, a civil war/war of independence by Eritrea from 1961-1991 that killed 225k people, a second war with Eritrea from 1998-2000 that killed 300-500k people, a civil war from 2020 to today that has killed around 200k-600k people, 2 wars with Somalia that killed 35k people, and a number of ethnic insurgencies
In 2000, it's HDI was 0.292 and in 2021 it barely reached 0.498, which is where Vietnam was in the 90s and barely above Afghanistan and the DRC (I'd have compared Ethiopian numbers from the 90s but those don't exist due to the wars above). It's human capital is some of the least developed in the world.
They will get more development in food processing (and in general) because the UAE has been cultivating Abiy, but out of all commodities producers, they are one of the less developed ones.
> protected their domestic agricultural industries
Not at the processing level. Domestic agricultural tariffs are meant to protect commodity prices for farmers, not the processing capacity.
Most low level food processing is now Asian and Brazilian, with multibillion conglomerates like CP Group (Thailand), IndoFood (Indonesia), Mayora (Indonesia), Golden Hope (Malaysia), Kulim (Malaysia), ITC (India), Hindustan Unilever (India), COFCO (China), Foshan Haitian (China), and dozens of SOEs from those countries.
You need an industrial base to process food at an industrial scale.
One reason is that the resources are much greater - if one place has a bad year, another can have a good year. Also, each location can produce what it does best, what its land, capital, skills, and infrastructure best support. Then other locations do what they do best, and we get the most economical, the best of everything.
Economic nationalism is, among other things, a ruse by some businesses to monopolize markets (not having competition) and get subsidized by the public.
And invited them back with the Moi reforms in 1986.
> relatively free of foreign influence
They got a massive FDI influx from Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China - especially after China began boycotting Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese firms in the 2013-2017 period.
This is why VN's first SEZ (Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park) was devoted to food processing.
A leadership crisis has also been brewing in the VCP for that reason, as the Southern cadre leans pro-SK and the Northern cadre leans pro-PRC.
On the other hand, countries like Vietnam, China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea listened to the IMF in the 1990s and worked on reforming institutions.
CdI's economy only recently started to get on track after Ouattara came to power. It didn't hurt that he is an actual trained economist who has worked at the IMF and WB.
> being adjacent to PRC
French investment in the CdI in the 1960-70s is similar to Chinese and Korean investment in Vietnam in 2023, and American, Japanese, and Korean investment in China in the 1990s and 2000s
The PRC's GDP per Capita didn't catch up to CdI until 2005 when their civil war entered full gear.
The only difference is CdI's institutional capacity was crap compared to plenty of similarly poor Asian countries in the 1990s (China, Vietnam, India)
The Phillipines is a similar story as well btw. In 1990 Phillipines and Turkiye had the same standard of living. In 2023, Türkiye's HDI caught up with Hungary and most of Central Europe, while Phillipines fell behind Vietnam and Indonesia - two countries that have historically been much poorer than PH.
While there are still remnants of colonialism at play, in theory capitalism would prefer to do processing as near to production as possible... but that's hard to do in Ethiopia or most other African countries with a really unreliable electricity grid [1]. Ivory Coast has it different - they massively built out power generation [2], but it takes time and money for investments into processing facilities flow in.
Additionally, political stability is one of the largest issues impeding many African countries. Many of them are actively at war, undergo civil war or separatist movements, are governed by dictators or went through prolonged periods of instability. All of this isn't exactly helpful when looking for investors that have to invest millions of dollars up-front - investors want the guarantee that there won't be some government nationalizing away their investment or war destroying it.
[1] https://www.sinalda.com/world-voltages/africa/voltage-ethiop...
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/07/23/the-sec...
Beans do stay okish for a year or so if in a sealed package.
Your vague claim about the powers that be is (I suspect) a common and popular leftist trope even today that a vast global, neocolonial conspiracy of mysterious western power centers crushes the poor helpless third world into oppresion at every turn and is responsible for its many dysfunctions, while often conveniently ignoring contrary examples of success stories or internal sources of fault and problems.
A curious detail of this notion is just how implicitly condescending its proponents assumptions about agency and self-administration with people and institutions in these developing country are.
You yourself wouldn't invest your own money into an authoritarian country with an unreliable power grid and a penchant for useless wars, civil or external. Well, other people think along the same lines. No need to drag sinister powers that be into the calculation.