Helen Ayele

Ethiopia Commodity Exchange

The Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX) is a new initiative for Ethiopia and the first of its kind in Africa. The vision of ECX is to revolutionize Ethiopia's tradition bound agriculture through creating a new marketplace that serves all market actors. The ECX is a unique partnership of market actors, the Members of the Exchange, and its main promoter, the Government of Ethiopia. ECX represents the future of Ethiopia, bringing integrity, security, and efficiency to the market. ECX assures all commodity market players the security they need in the market through providing a secure and reliable End-to-End system for handling, grading, and storing commodities, matching offers and bids for commodity transactions, and a risk-free payment and goods delivery system to settle transactions, while serving all fairly and efficiently. ECX creates trust and transparency through aggressive market data dissemination to all market actors, through clearly defined rules of trading, warehousing, payments and delivery and business conduct, and through an internal dispute settlement mechanism. ECX provides market integrity at three important levels: the integrity of the product itself, the integrity of the transaction, and the integrity of the market actors. ECX commenced trading operations in April 2008. With only one third of output reaching the market, commodity buyers and sellers tended to trade only with those they knew, to avoid the risk of being cheated or default. Trade is done on the basis of visual inspection because there was no assurance of product quality or quantity, this drove up market costs, leading to high consumer prices. For their part, small-scale farmers, who produce 95 percent of Ethiopia's output, came to market with little information and are at the mercy of merchants in the nearest and only market they know, unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their market risk.