What’s the Buzz?
A new regular column about what’s being served at the World Peace Café
The story behind Rwandan coffee
By Ruth Ann Church
The coffee beans that will be ground and brewed to fill FUMC’s coffee urns this month are an excellent example of the goals of the World Peace Café – promoting peaceful trade, not war, and the highest ethical trade standards. We think you’ll find it satisfying to drink coffee that is good tasting, and at the same time directly supports an innovative program that created on-going livelihoods for otherwise oppressed and war-torn people. Etienne Bihogo, 36, works with the PEARL project in Rwanda and notes that Hutu and Tutsi farmers work side by side at their local coffee washing stations. “You can see that people are together now, and they can think in terms of profits, not in terms of what divides them,” he says.
For its debut month, the World Peace Café is featuring Rwandan -- the stunning new hot-shot among the world’s best coffees. Most specialty African coffees sold in North America are from Ethiopia and Kenya, the two most distinctive coffee origins in the region and arguably in the world. Rwandan has gone from being completely unknown to being the most raved about coffee origin in recent years. Look for the great fruity taste one expects from an Ethiopian coffee, but with gentle floral juiciness ultimately different from any Ethiopia type.
Rwandan coffee has become available in North America in large part due to an agricultural extension project initiated at Michigan State University. For MSU professor Dan Clay, a specialist in agricultural development for Africa and other economically struggling regions, rebuilding Rwanda’s coffee industry was a huge challenge: how to get the industry on its feet after years of devastation, yet avoid the commodity trap that dooms many farmers to subsistence living. Also, Rwanda is a land-locked country. Many would laugh at the thought of trying to successfully compete with neighbors like Kenya who have ports and a well established, globally recognized brand of coffee.
The ground-breaking approach was created by Clay, Texas A&M professor Tim Schilling, Emile Rwamasirabo, then rector of the National University of Rwanda and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). They teamed up to form the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL). They created cooperatives whose farmers, 20% of whom are genocide widows or orphans, learn a multi-step process for producing gourmet coffee.
Since 2001, PEARL has assisted 11 cooperatives with 15,000 members. The co-op’s income has jumped form $650,000 in 2004 to about $3 million in 2006. That’s just a drip in the $11.4 billion world coffee market, but to farmers like Triphine Mukamyasiro, 23, whose family was killed in the genocide, it’s huge. She now earns $400 a year, about twice the average for Rwandan take home pay.
You can buy Fair Trade Rwandan from Paramount Coffee Company, based in Lansing, MI. for $8.49 per 12oz bag. Use their on-line store (www.paramountcoffee.com) or call at 800-968-1222.
Coming up in October – wonderfully full tasting coffee from a Zapatista cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico.
Sources for the information above include Coffee Review Newsletter, June 2007; Time, Sept. 19, 2005, Diedre VanDyk
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