Chinese and Ethiopian companies have agreed to expand coffee trade through forging closer industrial and supply chain partnerships and tapping into potential bilateral agreements, including China's zero-tariff treatment for African countries.

On Tuesday, a trade promotion event involving China's Yunnan Province and Ethiopia was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, to expand high-quality coffee exports from Ethiopia to China.

Speaking at the event, Liu Xiaoguang, minister counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Ethiopia, said the event is part of China's commitment to broadening voluntary opening-up, increasing imports from Africa and upholding the multilateral trading system.

"Ethiopian coffee has become a major supply for China's specialty coffee market. Yunnan, on the other hand, is the heartland of China's coffee industry. Yunnan is eager to introduce original specialty coffee from Ethiopia," Liu said.

Li Yi, deputy director-general at the Department of Commerce of Yunnan Province, said the coffee consumption market in China is continuously expanding, and the demand for high-quality and deep-processed products is rapidly upgrading.

She said Yunnan's stable processing capacity and vigorous market demand are becoming an important window for high-quality coffee raw materials from Ethiopia.

Zinabu Yirga, deputy commissioner of the Ethiopian Investment Commission, stressed that the event explores transformative opportunities in Ethiopia's coffee value chain development, and serves to directly bridge Ethiopia's high-altitude coffee forests with the dynamism, huge capital, and unmatched market scale of China.

"We welcome Chinese enterprises to establish large-scale commercial estates under modern agrarian practices, climate-smart irrigation, and digital farm-to-cup traceability to double crop yields," Yirga said.

The Chinese delegation of 20 coffee-importing enterprises is expected to make precise connections and achieve more substantive cooperation with their Ethiopian counterparts to deliver high-quality specialty coffee across China and beyond.