Word: rwanda
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...Rwanda is best known for the 1994 genocide in which Hutu tribesmen killed 800,000 of their Tutsi rivals. Coffee, one of the country's biggest exports, was also a casualty of that massacre. For Michigan State University professor Dan Clay, a specialist in Third World agricultural development, rebuilding Rwanda's coffee industry proved a double-edged challenge: how to get the industry on its feet yet avoid the commodity trap that dooms many farmers to subsistence living in a world where coffee is abundant...
...solution was to go upmarket and try to make Rwanda more famous for fabulous coffee than for murder. Rwanda has the ideal climate for growing quality beans, and its coffee has "notes of fruit and pecan," says David Griswold, president of Sustainable Harvest, a coffee importer. "It has a taste you can't find anywhere else in the world...
Getting that unique taste to market required a new approach. So Clay--with Texas A&M professor Tim Schilling; Emile Rwamasirabo, then rector of the National University of Rwanda; and aided by the U.S. Agency for International Development--formed the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL). One idea: create cooperatives whose farmers, 20% of whom are genocide widows or orphans, learn a multistep process for producing gourmet coffee that involves harvesting only the ripest beans and washing, sorting and drying them at new community washing stations...
Ironically, Rwandans don't traditionally drink coffee. So importer Griswold took his customers to Rwanda to brew coffee with the farmers, showing them exactly the kind of taste and consistent quality the market is looking for. The farmers were taught to detect notes of blackberry, the consequences of improperly processing beans, and how coffee is graded...
Since 2001, PEARL has assisted 11 cooperatives with 15,000 members. "It's small, but it's growing like wildfire," says Clay, an American who worked in Rwanda before fleeing the violence. The co-ops' income has jumped from $650,000 in 2004 to $1.2 million in 2005 and is expected to reach $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 made $30 annually when she started selling coffee in 1993. After joining...