In the world of specialty coffee, Burundi is gaining steam to be the next big thing.
This tiny landlocked country just below the equator is a natural to be a powerhouse coffee producer. Its thousand mountains provide elevations that give a coffee a bright acidity. Burundi has ideal soil and climate. It has solid infrastructure.
What Burundi hasn’t had until recently is peace. More than a decade of wrenching civil war robbed Burundi of its wherewithal to focus on the exquisite coffee that is its destiny.
Now, amid growing political and social stability, Burundi is looking for a place at the table with the countries producing the highest quality coffees.
The country’s government has announced its intentions to privatize its 133 washing stations—the centralized places where coffee growers bring freshly picked coffee cherries to be processed.
It’s rolling out the welcome mat to a steady stream of coffee buyers and importers – especially the elite companies that choose the best coffees.
“For the people of Burundi coffee means a new economic concept,” said Séléus Nezerwe, coordinator of the World Bank financed Projet d’Appui à la Gestion Economique (PAGE). “If we develop coffee, we are moving Burundi toward a new way of competitive thinking in the international market, and that is very important.”
Burundi has been growing coffee for years—but only an average “commercial” grade that brings a lackluster price. Today’s coffee marketing is not so different from marketing tennis shoes to teenagers. A high-quality product that is adopted by the cool kids becomes a must-have item for everyone. In coffee, it means delivering excellent, well-processed beans that will wow elite boutique coffee buyers. These buyers may be a small part of the market, but their purchases create the desire that sends sales—and prices—soaring.
“The truth always is in the cup,” said Aleco Chigouns with Portland, Ore.’s venerable Stumptown Coffee Roasters, who visited Burundi in April. “If the taste isn’t there you can’t market it. But if the specialty people are buying, that is the gateway. People do call me, wondering what I have found.”
The World Bank is working to develop pilot projects designed to lead the country’s 800,000 coffee growers and their families to success, in farming, processing, transporting and marketing.
Along the way, they closely watch the success of Rwanda. There, the neighboring country in six years has gone from producing no specialty coffee to boasting 14 cooperatives who, together with private enterprises, supply more than 120 coffee washing stations with high quality specialty coffee in Rwanda. In 2006, Project
PEARL—Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages—sold 25 containers of specialty coffee to exports at a value of $1.6 million.
Burundi has learned from Rwanda that the coffee market isn’t only about quality of product. Coffee is personal—it’s about image. Story. The relationship a consumer can have with an exotic product.
The world needs to get to know Burundi; its past and its prospects.
“Burundi coffee growers are hard workers,” Nezerwe said. “They love nature in a way people cannot imagine. They nurture plants doing everything possible, never using pesticides or machines. They do it with their own hands. It really is a product of love.”