It is stranger than fiction, but a fact universally recognized. Farmers get a lower price for their produces but have to pay dearly if they buy the products processed from the same product they sell in the market. A typical case is that of coffee prices in Rwanda. Most of the farmers, including coffee growers of the small league, earn less than US$ 2 per day. But when they yearn to have a well-brewed coffee, maybe the one grown in their own courtyard, they are compelled to fork out more than the wage received a day. That is why, in most of the countries in Africa, cheaper tea is preferred. Most of the Africans spend the money received from the sale of coffee bean on other products, except coffee, to make both ends meet.
In Rwanda, most of the coffee farmers are small both in terms of acreage of plot they cultivate and yield they get. According to some reckoning, there are some 400,000 small holder farm families in coffee in Rwanda. But their income level does not give them the perquisite of having a richly brewed coffee. Instead, that privilege is being enjoyed by upward mobility class of urban centers like Kigali. For the rest, it is the hope of increasing production of coffee and thereby income is the only available route to enjoy the coffee they produce. That is also the bane of Africa for almost all commodities from diamond to dolomite and from coffee to cassava.
Coffee development is an important plank of the inclusive growth strategy of Rwanda since it occupies 2.3% of the total cultivable area and is grown mainly by the small and marginal farmers having acreage under one hectare. The country has one of the best varieties of coffee and most of the produces are exported. Rwandan farmers were forced to plant coffee trees in large numbers by the colonizers-Belgians- leading to the cultivation of poor quality coffee, which did not have any international market. In the later years, coffee cultivation was greatly affected by the genocide of 1980’s and 1994. During this time, most of the old coffee plants were uprooted and new ones with better quality and yield were planted. But still, the coffee economy of the landlocked country is not out of woods, afflicted by a lot of problems. The first issue itself is small size of the holding, which prevents the farmers to undertake scientific farming, setting up processing plants and finding market outlets.
