Poor harvest and prices hit coffee growers

GIHETA, Burundi - Under the scorching African sun, Venela Gasanzwe is harvesting coffee beans that should have been picked three months ago.

Standing beside the coffee trees on the edge of his garden in Burundi, the 60-year-old looks up at the changing clouds and says: "That has been our biggest problem."

Poor rains in the year to September have hampered production in a tiny nation of seven million where one in two jobs depend on coffee, which is the biggest foreign revenue earner.

Officials at the Burundi Coffee Board predict a huge slump from the 37,000 tonnes produced in the 2003-04 crop year to only 6,000 tonnes this year, though better rains should restore the crop to around 30,000 tonnes next year.

The bad weather in the poor central African country meant many beans were not ripe at harvest time.

"This has been a very poor crop year," says Gasanzwe as he stretches out a palm full of coffee beans.

The skinny pale man, in hand-stitched shorts and a cream shirt, complains of a litany of problems with his farm.

He is bitter about what he calls exploitation by local dealers who buy coffee from farmers and sell it at a weekly auction.

Gasanzwe, who has 11 children, withdrew from a local cooperative, hoping to deal directly with middlemen.

"We used to be cheated by these local cooperatives especially when it came to weighing kilograms," he said.

"You would take 50 kilograms and they say you have brought 45 kilograms and you have no one to complain to."

But the middlemen did not improve Gasanzwe's fortunes. While overall global coffee prices have improved, he finds an almost negligible rise in what he earns.

This year Gasanzwe earned an average 200 Burundian francs ($0.28, US$0.19) a kg, up from 150 francs last year.

He notes unhappily that at the auction Burundi's coffee exporters pay an average of US$1.24 per kg for fully washed beans.

"When I hear about the price at the weekly auction and compare it to what we are getting here, I see mere cheating," he said.

Burundi exports much of its Arabica coffee to Germany, Japan and Singapore.

It is struggling to emerge from 12 years of civil war between rebels from the Hutu majority and a Tutsi elite. Around 300,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

Battered

The violence battered the coffee industry: farmers died, plantations became battlegrounds and thousands of producers fled their lands.

Jerome Barakanfitiye, 45, said half his plantation was deliberately cut down some two years ago by government troops alleging it had become a hideout for rebels.

Fighters would at times take over plantations as bases to relax in, making it impossible for farmers to tend the soils.

"The quality of coffee produced in our area has been greatly affected by war," says Barakanfitiye.

Coffee prices have been depressed for years largely due to oversupply, but have improved this year due to an expected tightening of supply in leading producers Brazil and Vietnam.

But poor countries in Africa have not benefited because they sell raw beans not processed coffee; the latter would attract higher tariffs from developed countries, a source of much grievance.

Poor countries are lobbying for better market access at the World Trade Organisation but richer countries have not yielded.

Low earnings have prompted farmers and traders in Burundi to smuggle coffee into neighbouring Rwanda, where a more organised market and more established stability attract many buyers from the speciality markets in Europe and the United States.

"The loss we are making is too huge," said Charles Ntezahorigwa, a local coffee processor and exporter.

"Coffee volume coming into our plants is falling dramatically because much of it is going to Rwanda."

Rwanda's average prices for fully washed coffee has risen to US$2.90 per kg -- more than double Burundi's average -- in 2004/05 from US$2.42 per kg a year earlier.

Average prices for semi-washed coffee rose to US$2.24 per kg from US$1.16.

Officials at Burundi's coffee board said much coffee was being smuggled into Rwanda.

"Thousands of tonnes of Burundi's semi-washed coffee are being smuggled into Rwanda," Jean Baptiste Manirakiza of the coffee board said.

- REUTERS