The land of a thousand hills

12th August 2009

Last February, on occasion of the Sixth Conference of EAFCA (the Eastern African Fine Coffee Association), I had the honour and the pleasure to take a journey full of surprises through Rwanda, a country experiencing an exciting rebirth.

Rwanda has a central and strategic position in Eastern Africa: a small country of approximately 26,000 sq km bordered by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi, it has no access to the sea. Its capital is Kigali. It is a presidential republic, with a parliament with two houses. Its current government, led by President Paul Kagame — elected for the first time in 2000 and more recently reconfirmed — has improved the nation’s conditions since the tragedy that struck the country in 1994: the civil war and the Tutsi genocide carried out by Hutu extremists. (The groups are actually two different social classes and not the two ethnic groups they are generally thought to be.)

Nowadays, Rwanda, immersed in wonderful green landscapes, is tidy, clean (where, for instance, even using plastic bags is prohibited) and safe: it is possible to have an evening walk around the capital, without much worry.

Rwanda, also called “the land of a thousand hills”, can boast the production of several excellent coffee varieties. This is mainly the result of the climate and geography of the country, characterised by fertile and volcanic soil at high altitudes — from 1,500 m to 2,200 m above sea level — where the temperature varies from 17 and 23 degrees Celsius and where precipitation is frequent. More than the 90% of Rwandan coffee grows at high altitudes, and it is almost exclusively arabica. The country produces approximately 425,000 bags every year.

Like in other African countries, the coffee sector is rapidly developing and there is huge potential, but there is still a lot to do to improve productivity and the living conditions of local producers. The development and initiatives supporting coffee production in Rwanda are strongly fostered by the government and directed through the activities of OCIR Café, the Rwanda Coffee Development Authority, an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture based in Kigali. OCIR Café aims to boost the creation of new plantations and washing stations, as well as to spread high quality Rwandan coffee to an international market, partly by developing and introducing certification and control systems.

Visiting the coffee areas, it is easy to see how constant the motivation and the economic development processes are: suffice it to say that in just a few years, more than 100 coffee washing stations have opened.

Over 500 gather for the Conference

From February 12 to 14, 2009, the EAFCA’s Annual Conference was held in the capital. EAFCA is a sister association to the SCAE, instituted with the aim of promoting speciality coffees from Eastern Africa. The three days of the international congress focussed on the topic “A Coffee Journey to the Land of a Thousand Hills”, and the event counted more than 500 participants (among which were many personalities from the United States), hosted a (modest) trade fair and included the first barista championship ever held in Rwanda. I was given the chance to take part in EAFCA’s association meeting, during which the chairmanship of the association passed from Joseph Taguma (of Zambia) to Leslie Omari (from Tanzania).

EAFCA is a non-profit, apolitical association representing the coffee sector in the 11 member countries: Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Republic of South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. EAFCA’s head office is in Kampala, Uganda.

The vision of the association is essentially to develop quality of life through the quality of coffee. Its mission is to establish and promote partnerships and co-operation networks among the various professionals of the sector, from production in its different stages, to trade and consumption. It aims to increase the volume and value of coffee by commercialising it both at regional and international levels, as well as by increasing its consumption and distribution at a local level. Such improvement and expansion activities carried out by EAFCA will then benefit the many stakeholders involved in the “coffee chain” from across the region.

EAFCA can boast the strong support of important bodies such as USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), which supports coffee production and the expansion of the speciality coffee market for the relevant African origins, therefore improving small producers’ conditions. The USAID programme, Regional Agriculture Trade Expansion Support (RATES), supports EAFCA financially and by providing direct technical advice in product marketing and promotion.

On safari through the coffee regions

But, for three days before the association’s event, I was able to see the work of EAFCA’s Rwandan members on the ground. My interesting journey schedule included a “Coffee Safari”, a thorough tour of the plantations and the main washing stations in the country.

Starting from the Kigali Serena Hotel, the safari made its first stop in Kibuye, a city on the Kivu Lake; we then sailed northwards along the Rwandan lakeshore. During the journey to Giseny, located on the border with Congo, we visited the first three coffee washing stations (Kinunu Coffe, Nkora, and COOPAC) – extremely interesting places, and some of them rather big. Every visit was welcomed enthusiastically and kindly, with typical local dances and celebrations. Unfortunately, during the second visit we were overtaken by a storm that went on all day and we ended up soaked.

On the second day, the safari took us to the city of Ruhengeri and then, moving south, back towards the capital. Along the way, we visited three more washing stations — Facko, Musas and Muyomgwe — and various coffee plantations.

During the closing day of the safari, we travelled from Kigali eastwards, towards the border with Tanzania, to where the Akagera National Park is located. It is one of the most important Rwandan parks, and covers 14% of the country’s territory. Unexpectedly, I noticed a relative scarcity of fauna in the national park, but this is another consequence of the terrible massacres perpetrated during the civil war in the Nineties. Such events, along with the subsequent movement of evacuees, have combined to damage the areas that previously had been declared protected.

In the last part of the safari, heading back to the capital, we visited one of the biggest and most important washing stations, Rwacof (run by the Sucafina Group). It is very well structured and managed, and the excellent quality of the coffee that is processed here — using the fully washed process — can be assessed both in its natural state, right after processing, and in the tasting phase.

On the whole, all the washing processes I had the chance to see during these safari days seemed to be of good quality and well organised, and the raw material, Rwanda’s coffee, was excellent.

Coffee and science under discussion

On February 11, the day before the EAFCA Congress, the Fifth Scientific Conference on Coffee was held in Kigali. It was organised by an important backer of many development projects in the coffee sector, the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC), in which I was President of the Consultative Committee until last year.

The congress mainly dealt with the results of projects and investments, focussing mainly on the improvement of African small landowners’ working and living conditions, in order to transform their “fear of change” into “trust in change”. Despite the scientific approach, the debate also included political issues and other topics involving several personalities. Among such topics, projects financed by CFC to solve the problems linked to coffee production, such as plant damage from diseases (like coffee leaf rust) and insects (including coffee berry borer), were presented and discussed.

Professor Giorgio Graziosi, teaching at the University of Trieste, Italy, spoke about the new perspectives, for producers and consumers, deriving from genetic analysis and traceability of coffee. The recent results of the project concerning gourmet robusta in Togo and Gabon (aimed at commercialising washed robusta as a speciality coffee) were also discussed.

Finally, the congress dealt with the already concluded project to raise the quantity and quality of arabica coffee production in Ethiopia and Rwanda. The project had developed differently in the two countries, where extremely different processing techniques were applied, but in both cases with good results for the final product.

Highlighting Africa’s agricultural problems

After the scientific conference, I took part in another, extremely important collateral event: the African Coffee Policy Dinner, during which the so-called policy makers strongly underlined the lack of infrastructure in Africa. This, along with other problems, keeps production levels much below their real potential and brings up concerns, for example, about the genetic variety and quality of coffee. For many reasons, African farmland is often lacking in good agricultural practices as well, which permit organised and efficient production and an optimised exploitation of resources. The measures necessary to facilitate local production, product quality and the coffee trade beyond borders were also mentioned.

Ultimately, I can only underline my satisfaction and pleasure at visiting Rwanda and at having the chance to see once more a reality that is extremely different, but at the same time closely linked, to ours. With all due caution, we can only trust all the initiatives and enterprises that have been undertaken up until now, and wish for the creation of synergies and relations to bring tangible improvements to Rwanda, as well as to the other African Countries involved in the production and marketing of coffee in general, and of speciality coffee in particular.–Max Fabian