Part I: Rwanda Finds Hope in Premium Coffee

Ethan Arpi — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:52:59 -0400

This Sunday, the New York Times Business section ran a front page article -- Coffee, and Hope, Grow in Rwanda -- on the remarkable story of Gemima Mukashyaka, an orphan of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, who has returned to her parents former coffee farm and, with the help of USAID and a local cooperative, has become part of a thriving coffee trade, which produces premium quality beans for export to the United States. As the Times notes, there are many small farmers like her who are also reaping the benefits of Rwanda’s booming coffee business: “Rwanda, a tiny East African country recently rent by a famously savage civil war, has found hope in that most colonial of crops: coffee. By riding booming demand in the developed world for specialty brews — and, to a certain extent, by turning its own challenges to its advantage — Rwanda has made premium coffee-growing a national priority. That has not only brought in a trickle of money to a country with little else to trade, but provided a stage on which one-time blood enemies can reconcile their terrible history.”

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Part I: Rwanda Finds Hope in Premium Coffee