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High-quality coffee potential of eastern Congo being explored

18 February 2013

According to a report from IRIN, a coffee project funded by the UK government’s Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund (FRICH) has been working to develop the production and direct export of high-quality coffee from the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The FRICH Fund does not directly fund businesses but rather co-funds new business initiatives to help farmers overcome the ‘risk hurdle’ that can hold back the development of new trading relationships.

The Kivu coffee project, implemented in association with Twin Trading, which is a supplier of Sainsbury’s supermarket, has worked with a growers’ cooperative in Kivu ‘to improve the quality and work out the logistics of exporting to the UK’. The scheme has proved successful, demonstrating that ‘extremely high quality coffee could make it out from this area’, despite the ongoing political instability. Plans are now under way to scale up the project.

The FRICH programme has been welcomed for both taking some of the risk out of innovation and facilitating access to markets when production innovation proves effective. The UK government programme is open to working with private companies with ‘an ethical orientation’, ‘a self-interest in getting the product to market’ and ‘a commitment to service provision for the farmers’.

Editorial comment

The Kivu coffee project highlights the scope for the revitalisation of agricultural production in eastern Congo – previously a highly productive agricultural region – if logistical constraints can be overcome and direct marketing relationships established. However, if a more generalised agricultural revival is to be achieved in the region, then policies and institutional support will need to be set in place to both provide inputs and appropriate technology to smallholder farmers and support improved access to local, regional and international markets.

In the case of coffee, with production taking place on both the DRC and Rwandan sides of Lake Kivu, regional cooperation would appear to be an important part of coffee sector revitalisation. The Great Lakes Economic Community (CEPGEL), which includes Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC, has been trying to promote free movement of people, goods and capital. Border posts already operate on a 24-hour basis and the facilitation of formal cross-border trade could serve to cut down on the extensive smuggling which now takes place through both Uganda and Rwanda.

Shifting trade to formal channels and shortening the supply chain, by developing the kind of trade links being encouraged by the FRICH fund-supported project, is likely to offer considerable potential for improving farmers’ returns in the short term.

Regional political tensions, however, continue to overhang the coffee sector and more general processes of agricultural revitalisation in the eastern Congo. 

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