Rwanda: Coffee – “the cow that never falls”?
Coffee lovers and traders rave about it being one of the best coffees in the world: a specialty coffee consisting of 100 per cent arabica, cultivated and hand-picked by small farmers – and frequently advertised as “made by women!” In short, we’re talking about coffee from Rwanda. But what’s really behind this good-sounding story? A CDE research team took a deeper look.
Women transport material for the preparation of coffee seedlings.
The beginning: a mission of the missionaries
Rwanda. The year is 1904. German missionaries introduce the first coffee plants to the region. Fast forward barely three decades and the first bags of coffee are ready for export. In the meantime, Rwandan coffee production has been intensified – periodically even made mandatory – by Belgium, the new colonial power. Before long, Rwandan coffee emerges as a major export success – remaining so to this day, just behind Rwandan tea (introduced later) and mining commodities.
Young coffee plants
From colonial heritage…
The crop’s success in Rwanda is also owed, in part, to the marketing of missionaries. An old Rwandan farmer, whom we’ll call Jean-Pierre, tells the story as follows:
“When the whites arrived, they told the farmers who had big livestock: ‘Those cows you have, they’ll eventually die. Now this is the cow we’re giving you. This cow is the coffee. We’re giving you a cow which will not fall off the mountain and die. You’ll own and milk it for many years.’ That’s how coffee came here.”
Cattle markets like this one in Bitaba, Nyamasheke, have a long tradition. The typical domestic cattle breed is the East African Ankole.
…to global cash crop…
Following its independence in 1962, Rwanda continued to produce coffee. Well into the 1970s and 1980s, coffee cherries – largely cultivated by smallholders – accounted for 60–80 per cent of Rwanda’s export earnings. Also in 1962, the first “International Coffee Agreement” was reached, an accord between coffee-producing countries and consumer countries. Its goal was to keep coffee prices stable.
This more or less functioned until 1989, when the agreement finally collapsed. After that, production was ramped up worldwide and expanded to countries like Vietnam – and prices plummeted. Hundreds of thousands of coffee-growing smallholder families in developing and emerging countries lost their livelihoods in the wake of this crisis.
A view of one of the specially decorated arches marking the attainment of independence on 1 July 1962
…and on into crisis
In Rwanda, too, the supposedly tireless coffee “cow” bestowed by missionaries finally lost its footing; one of several reasons for the country’s eventual slide into a deep economic crisis. The fact that approximately 300,000 farmers uprooted their coffee plants in the early 1990s speaks volumes about the social and economic situation at the time.
This economic crisis occurred on the eve of the 1994 genocide – that claimed the lives of between 500,000 and one million people with consequences echoing to this day.
The new plan
Following the genocide, the new government under today’s president Paul Kagame was initially concerned with consolidation of power. Nevertheless, the coffee sector would soon contribute to his overarching state-building project: achievement of national stability and elimination of poverty through economic growth.
Central to this policy was an effort to steer the country away from traditional subsistence farming and towards commercial agriculture; market orientation and productivity were the goal. Resulting job losses would be absorbed by developing an urban service sector, went the thinking.
Symbolizing happiness and peace (blue), economic development (yellow), and hope for prosperity (green): the flag of Rwanda as of 2001
In 2004, Rwanda introduced far-reaching land reforms. Previously, about 90 per cent of agricultural land was allocated according to traditional customary law, which gave rise to conflict as the population grew rapidly – at 546 inhabitants per square kilometre, Rwanda’s population density today is about twice that of Switzerland. With the aim of granting everyone the same right of access to land and increasing productivity, land was registered nationwide from 2008 and official land titles were issued. This was accompanied by liberalization and privatization, which created new inequalities. Indeed, not all agricultural plots met the minimum-size requirements for entry into the official land registry; and even if they did, some landholders simply could not afford the registration fees.
Small plots of agricultural land characterize the landscape of Nyamasheke, bordering Lake Kivu.
Against this backdrop, the country has focused its corresponding efforts on specialty coffees for some time now. Not only do Rwanda’s specialty coffees fetch higher prices than conventional coffee, they have also earned high marks for quality in the main consumer markets of Europe and the USA. A good sign for all the small producers, one would think.
Land or work
CDE studies in the heartland of Rwandan coffee growing, the district of Nyamasheke in the country’s southwest (see map), paint a more nuanced picture. Researchers investigated how structural change in agriculture has impacted the local population, particularly women.
Land ownership and labour relations play a key role in Nyamasheke. Almost every household possesses some land. But the average plot is only 0.36 hectares, and half of all households own just 600 square meters – too little to make sense for coffee growing. Even families with more land face a major obstacle: “Newly planted coffee trees take three to four years to start producing a harvest. For many, that’s too long to keep their heads above water,” says Patrick Illien, who conducted the study in the field together with CIAT Rwanda.
Sharecropping and inequality
Steep population growth and other factors are worsening land scarcity. As a result, most small farmers depend on seasonal wage labour for “larger” coffee farmers or for one of the dozen major plantations in Nyamasheke district. Or they rely on a special system of sharecropping, Nyiragabana.
In this system, one party leases a plot of land with a handshake, pays for the seeds and fertilizer, performs all the labour – and then shares the harvest with the landowner, often just another small farmer, usually according to a 50:50 split. On these plots, farmers typically grow staples like manioc, beans, and sweet potatoes for household consumption.
Microcapitalism
However, the lease is tied to cultivation of agreed crops and harvest dates, making it impossible for lessees to farm the land according to their own wishes. “I just go, because it is not a choice. I don't have to think,” says Josephine, a widowed mother of two children with hardly any land of her own, when describing her options. It illustrates the significance of class distinctions, even among the poorest households, which fuel exploitation and accumulation – in other words, social and economic inequalities. It’s a situation that the researchers describe as “microcapitalism”.
Many small farmers must also pursue wage labour on other agricultural plots: Rice field in Nyamasheke
According to official figures, Nyamasheke has the highest share of coffee-producing households and the highest number of coffee trees in Rwanda. In spite of this, 70 per cent of the population here lives below the poverty line, making it the poorest region of the country. When labour demand falls after the coffee harvest, the daily wages for casual labour on local farms drop, too, from about USD 0.91 to USD 0.69. Meanwhile, small farmers’ own plots also lie fallow during this “lean” time of the year. As a result, many households are unable to feed their families during this season. Contrary to common perceptions that in-kind payment or sharecropping systems are somehow archaic or feudal institutions, the researchers see them as “the expressions of increasing land pressures and limited monetization under predominantly capitalist relations of production”.
Nyamasheke’s modern roads contrast sharply with the poverty of broad segments of the population.
The position of women? Especially precarious
“Women in particular are at an added disadvantage in this system,” explains Patrick Illien. “They consistently earn less than men, are less likely to find a better job – and they must often take their children to work because of a lack of alternatives.” Some employers use the latter as a justification for hiring men instead of women, while others use it as an excuse for paying women less.
For women – who head about a third of all rural households in Rwanda, partly as a result of the genocide – it is also markedly more difficult to obtain access to land. While they are legally equal to men, patriarchal social norms present major obstacles to women inheriting land or using it on an equal footing. Many women are also denied joint ownership of land, since Rwandan law requires an official registration of marriage for this – which does not occur in a third of all cases because of the cost of wedding ceremonies and/or polygamy, for example.
A Rwandan woman doing hard labour in the field.
And what about when women join forces? Indeed, there are a number of women-led producer associations or cooperatives – especially in the coffee sector. Nevertheless, at least in the coffee heartland of Nyamasheke, local realities contrast starkly with the many endorsements for Rwandan speciality coffee found online, which suggest that women enjoy equal rights across the sector.
Harnessing coffee’s potential for the poorest population segments
Even so, based on the research results, Patrick Illien cautions against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. “Coffee has attained such economic, cultural, and ecological significance in Rwanda that it’s impossible to imagine the country without this cash crop.” While coffee may be susceptible to disease and global price fluctuations, the livelihoods of many poor households are now inextricably linked to the sector.
Work on washing stations tends to be better paid: collecting rinsed beans (left) and preparing them for drying in the sun (right).
In this sense, coffee may indeed be “the cow that never falls”. Still, Patrick Illien emphasizes: “Coffee’s poverty-reducing potential will remain limited as long as the pressure on land continues to rise, value-adding local processing goes underutilized, and decent agricultural jobs stay the exception.” As a result, it is especially important to exploit any scope for political initiatives and collective action aimed at “harnessing the potential of coffee for all”.
More on the topic
CDE Policy Brief (2023): Bittersweet fruits of ‘miracle growth’: Identifying poverty and labour dynamics in coffee heartlands
Illien, Patrick (2024). Coffee and the agrarian questions inLaos and Rwanda: Taking a bottom-up perspective
Illien, Patrick; Pérez Niño, Helena; Bieri Sabin (2022). Agrarian class relations in Rwanda: a labour-centred perspective
Patrick Illien is an Associated Senior Research Scientist at CDE and a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich.
