Addis Ababa’s kitchens burn quietly through the city’s future. Behind the glow of its booming siga bets—the raw-meat restaurants that have come to define its middle-class life—lies an invisible economy powered by firewood and charcoal. Every plate of kitfo and every sizzling grill adds not only flavor but also smoke, carbon, and forest loss. Yet none of this appears in the city’s energy accounts, environmental reports, or health budgets. The result is a thriving urban industry that profits by exporting its costs to the public—a smoke economy in the heart of Ethiopia’s capital.
The Scale of the Boom: From Ritual to Routine
Addis Ababa is in the grip of a raw-meat revolution. A decade ago, the siga bet was a notable but limited feature of the city’s dining scene. Today, it is an industry. Addis Ababa’s two main abattoirs—the municipal Kera Abattoir (Addis Ababa Abattoir Enterprise) and ELFORA Agro- Industries—together supply more than 4000 registered butcher shops across the city. Available assessments suggest daily slaughter capacities on the order of a thousand head of cattle, with Kera averaging around 1300 per day and ELFORA’s Addis-area facility several hundred more. A significant share of this meat is served as kitfo, tire siga, gored gored, and zelzel tibs.
This is not merely a change in diet but the creation of a massive new urban supply chain. The act of eating raw meat—once tied to holidays and weddings—has become an everyday performance of status. The sheer appetite for meat now sustains a vast economy of abattoirs, delivery trucks, and open-fire kitchens—a transformation that fundamentally redefines Addis Ababa’s modern urban metabolism. These figures hint at more than culinary enthusiasm; they mark a structural shift in how the city eats and what that appetite demands.
The Stage and Its Players
Inside one of these establishments, the scene is unmistakably urban. The atmosphere is loud, driven by music, conversation, and the constant roar of a huge television permanently tuned to British soccer. Patrons—on average about thirty, mostly male though women appear in pairs or with companions—sit at tables overflowing with bottles of beer or jugs of Tekesheno (a pinkish punch of Bedele beer, Awash wine, and Sprite), decorated with slices of orange and watermelon. The air carries the combined scent of meat smoke, perfume, and alcohol. Nine waitresses in tight uniforms move continuously between tables, joined by about five atachi—“drink companions” paid to encourage patrons to drink more.
The siga bet is less a dining room than a theatre of appetite, where visibility, sound, and excess fuse into the social language of Addis Ababa’s new class. Noise levels reach 85 dBA inside and about 75 dBA outside, while the visual and sonic spectacle—soccer cheers, pounding bass, smoke haze—anchors the experience as one of display.
This performance has a specific audience. The siga bet boom rests on a deeper social shift: the rise of a non-salaried wealth class. This group, often comprised of brokers, speculative traders, and those engaged in high-turnover arbitrage, has emerged with quick, disposable income. While poverty remains widespread, this emergent stratum drives a culture where public consumption is used to quickly legitimize fast-acquired, non-productive wealth. For this group, the siga bet is not simply a place to eat; it is a stage on which belonging and prosperity are performed.
A single meal for two, with beer, can easily cost over 1,500 birr—more than a week’s wage for most residents. Public eating has become the language of social mobility. The act of consuming raw meat, while grounded in cultural continuity, now signals monetary identity—a declaration of having arrived.
The geography of this performance is visible. The corridors of Bole, CMC, Sar Bet, and Fiyel Bet are not random clusters; they are arteries of the new economy. At Fiyel Bet, a 300-meter stretch hosts nearly twenty competing establishments, lit by neon and scented by wood smoke. The expansion is propelled by the corridor project and brewery promotions that supply refrigerators, umbrellas, and financial incentives, binding beer and meat in one commercial ecosystem.
The story, then, is not simply about rising meat consumption, but about how appetite has become architecture—and economy—in the city.
Cultural Continuity Meets Industrial Demand
Ethiopia’s attachment to raw meat runs deep. Long before refrigeration, households slaughtered an ox for holidays and weddings. Eating it raw was both practical and symbolic—celebrating freshness, bravery, and trust. The act of sharing tere siga anchored social life much as bread does elsewhere.
What has changed is not the tradition but its rhythm. Ritual has become routine. Refrigerated trucks now ferry carcasses daily from slaughterhouses; beer companies provide equipment; and investors find the service industry, specifically restaurants, far safer than productive work. Unlike manufacturing, which requires high upfront capital, faces challenges securing space, and struggles with foreign-exchange bottlenecks and import hurdles, a siga bet offers quicker returns on modest capital with fewer regulatory barriers. Cultural legitimacy meets commercial logic—and scale changes everything.
The ox slaughtered for a village wedding has become the daily supply for a busy restaurant. What was once communal celebration has turned into private gratification. Every plate of kitfo now represents not only the animal that provided it but also the wood, charcoal, and energy burned to prepare it—and the methane and carbon that rise invisibly from both stove and cattle.
Behind this cultural continuity lies an expanding material footprint—a new urban metabolism of firewood, smoke, and carbon whose scale remains uncounted, and whose costs are therefore borne invisibly by the city itself
The Urban Energy Paradox: Counting the Toll
The appetite that animates Addis Ababa’s siga bets defines an uncounted part of its energy economy. Every plate of kitfo or gored gored carries an invisible chain of wood, carbon, and pasture stretching from the city’s kitchens to the countryside.
Drawing on field observations, market data, and modeled estimates, we mapped both sides of this hidden ledger—the fuel toll and the livestock toll. The figures are indicative, not official, but they provide the first integrated picture of the scale and environmental footprint of Addis Ababa’s raw- meat economy.
Each siga bet typically spends 40,000–60,000 birr per month on firewood. At 18–22 birr per kg, that translates to roughly 27–33 tons per year, or about 160 kg on active days. Scaled to the city’s estimated 600–1,200 establishments, Addis Ababa’s grills collectively burn 22,000–32,000 tons of firewood annually, releasing 38,000–54,000 tons CO₂ and drawing on the equivalent sustainable growth of 2,400–3,600 hectares of forest. These numbers are necessarily approximations, but even at the lower bound they reveal a scale far greater than any household or institutional cooking sector in the city.
The livestock footprint is far larger still. Using updated consumption baselines and city-level slaughter data, Addis Ababa likely consumes 50,000–60,000 tons of beef annually, equivalent to roughly 340,000–375,000 head of cattle. Applying Ethiopia-specific Tier 2 emission factors (8– 30 kg CO₂e per kg beef) yields 400,000–1.8 million tons CO₂e per year. Combined, the raw-meat and grill economy contributes between 0.5 and 1.9 million tons CO₂e annually, large enough to merit inclusion in the city’s carbon accounts and climate-action planning.
Yet these city-wide figures obscure a more immediate human cost. Behind each dining room lies a closed kitchen where a small exhaust fan struggles against the haze. Measurements show PM₂.₅ concentrations near 600 µg/m³ in the kitchen, falling to 300 µg/m³ outside the door and 150–250 µg/m³ in the main hall—up to twenty-four times the WHO’s safe-air guideline. Cooks and servers inhale this air for hours each day, and the patrons who fill the hall breathe it as they eat, talk, and watch the televised matches. The restaurant’s sound and spectacle mask what is, in effect, an indoor pollution chamber.
In the afternoon alone, more than a dozen women—waitresses and atachi—work within this cloud, but exposure extends to everyone present. The smoke that escapes through the kitchen door or out to the street drifts into neighboring shops and sidewalks, carrying fine particulates that settle on lungs long after the last plate of kitfo is cleared.
If even a fraction of these emissions and health costs were monetized, Addis Ababa’s hidden burden would rise by hundreds of millions of birr each year. These calculations are not a census but a map—a first attempt to make visible what remains invisible. Firewood purchases are unrecorded, emissions uncounted, and health impacts unpriced. Still, the direction is unmistakable: the most visible smoke in Addis Ababa is the least accounted for in its policies. The cost of this invisibility is not only ecological but economic — a hidden subsidy that the public pays each day in health, carbon, and forest loss.
Ending the Free Lunch
Addis Ababa’s restaurants have dined too long on a public subsidy disguised as smoke. They pay for wood but not for the forests, for chefs but not for the lungs that breathe their haze. The siga bet economy thrives on this unspoken bargain: profit for a few, pollution for all.
But the siga bet is only the most visible part of a much larger problem. Nearly every café, small eatery, and hotel kitchen in the city still relies on firewood or charcoal. The same fires that power the raw-meat boom also heat stews, boil coffee, and bake bread citywide. The siga bet merely exposes, in concentrated form, Addis Ababa’s broader dependence on biomass energy.
Even under conservative assumptions, the city’s siga bets and related restaurants emit between half a million and nearly two million tons of CO₂e each year. At a modest carbon price of USD 15 per ton, this represents a hidden public cost of roughly 1–4 billion birr—money the city forfeits by allowing polluters to externalize the cost of their smoke. Redirected, it would be enough to finance the full transition of every siga bet to clean-cooking technologies while also supporting thousands of smaller cafés and eateries that still depend on firewood or charcoal. In short, what Addis Ababa now loses in untreated emissions each year could, if properly priced, fund its own clean-kitchen revolution.
The first step to recovering that loss is knowing where it comes from. Yet no authority currently tracks how much biomass the city’s restaurants consume or what it costs in fuel, emissions, or health. This absence of data makes both accountability and reform impossible. Without a system to measure and disclose biomass use, Addis Ababa cannot manage the economic or environmental toll of its kitchens. This blindness reflects a failure of political imagination and inter-agency coordination—a reluctance to regulate a culturally popular industry that serves an influential class. Even as the city advances its Green Legacy campaign, it has no mechanism to ensure its kitchens join that vision. Addis Ababa plants trees with one hand and burns them with the other.
That contradiction can be resolved within a year. The city should require restaurants, cafés, and hotels to report quarterly fuel purchases. Medium- and high-margin venues—those serving more than fifty customers a day or spending over twenty thousand birr monthly on fuel—should adopt certified clean-burning systems within twelve months. After that grace period, any establishment still burning firewood or charcoal would pay a levy proportional to fuel use. The revenue would fund inspection, air-quality monitoring, and small-business incentives through a Clean Urban Energy Fund.
Such a measure would also give concrete form to the Prime Minister’s call for a “Clean Ethiopia.” The national initiative, originally framed around reforestation and urban greening, remains incomplete without clean kitchens. Extending its vision from the planting of trees to the prevention of their combustion would transform a symbolic effort into a structural one—linking Addis Ababa’s urban energy reform directly to Ethiopia’s broader environmental agenda.
This is not punishment but correction—the end of an unfair subsidy. Larger venues can finance the transition; smaller eateries will follow as technology diffuses. The same framework can serve other cities—Adama, Hawassa, Bahir Dar—as they urbanize.
Critics may warn that such a policy risks harming an industry that provides thousands of jobs for waiters, cooks, butchers, and suppliers. But this argument mistakes a temporary subsidy for sustainable growth. The sector’s current profitability and employment depend on externalizing its environmental costs to the public. Transitioning to clean cooking would not eliminate these jobs— it would move them onto a sustainable footing, while generating new work in clean-energy installation, maintenance, and fuel supply.
The siga bet is also the logical starting point for reform. It concentrates the city’s most acute exposures—kitchens where PM₂.₅ levels reach six to thirty times the WHO limit—making action here a matter of both public health and environmental justice, particularly for the young women who staff them. It is also the segment most capable of absorbing the cost of transition. By beginning where capacity and urgency coincide, the city can establish the technical and regulatory foundation for cleaner kitchens across the entire hospitality sector.
Addis Ababa’s problem is not scarcity; it is blindness. The city cannot claim a sustainable future while ignoring the fires that already burn within it. Bringing its kitchens into the clean-energy transition is an act of justice, not charity. Businesses that profit by taxing the public through smoke and deforestation have enjoyed a free lunch long enough. One year is time enough to pay the bill.
Tsegaye Nega is a Professor Emeritus at Carleton College in the United States and the Founder and CEO of Anega Energies Manufacturing.
Contributed by Tsegaye Nega
