Visiting Rwanda by Harriet Lamb #2

Visiting the Maraba farmers with me was Mark Price, the bubbly boss of Waitrose, nick-named the ‘chubby grocer’. He was impressed, saying: ‘Visiting growers in Rwanda reinforced my view that through Fairtrade there is a more morally just way of sourcing from developing countries. I was struck by the Maraba cooperative’s pride in producing excellent quality coffee – so the Fairtrade premiums can drive a virtuous circle. Fairtrade is now a proven model to raise the most disadvantaged out of poverty and I hope that one day all developing world commodities will be traded in this way’.

It was a similar story when together with the Starbucks team, I visited with the farmers of the Dukunde Kawa cooperative. They told us how they used to sell their coffee to the first middle-men who came round their villages at harvest time until they discovered that they were ‘being robbed’. So they organised themselves and started selling as a group. Then they realised, that if they washed the coffee themselves (the first stage of coffee processing) they could make more money. Today, many years later, they have a major washing station, have invested in schools and health clinics and bought wonderful special bikes with a long carrying section at the back on which farmers carry the huge bags of beans sometimes miles from their hilly farms to the collection points.

We asked the women farmers about their dreams for the future. One woman was hoping for a cow, to give milk to her children and so she could sell the rest. Another woman suggested that Starbucks launch a Woman’s Coffee. As she said, women do all the work on the coffee but get none of the rewards. The Starbucks team clocked the idea. So who knows? We may be able to enjoy that too one day. Certainly, there’s no shortage of ideas for future developments in Rwanda. As even the President of Rwanda, His Excellency Paul Kagame, said: ‘Fairtrade offers new opportunities for small-scale producers in Rwanda, and we have made great achievements in this respect, especially in the coffee industry. As a country where most people depend on agriculture, we must figure out how to move faster in this direction, in order to positively impact the economic well-bring of rural communities.’