Farmers in Rwanda are starting to sell to premium coffee buyers such as Starbucks and Peet's for the first time, thanks to a program to help them boost the quality of beans.
The effort to help African coffee growers is part of a pledge of $900 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help improve agriculture in the poorest countries. Much of the Gates Foundation money will go toward helping small-scale farmers gain access to markets.
Partnerships among businesses, governments and nonprofits can "stretch the reach of market forces" to connect producers in developing countries to new customers, helping more of the world's poor earn a living and even increase profits.
"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers — most of whom are women," he said in a statement. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on January 25 unveiled a package of new grants worth more than $300 million, nearly doubling its spending on agriculture. It plans to commit an additional $300 million by the end of the year.Increasing incomes of the poor has another benefit to the world's economy in opening up a vast untapped market, said Paul Polak, author of the book "Out of Poverty." "Those markets are just as big as the market created when personal computers were introduced," he said.
Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya have the right climate and geography for growing premium coffee.
Premium coffee makes up 5 percent of the world market, but it's the fastest-growing and most lucrative. But most small-scale farmers lack training and tools to maintain quality control during processing, especially "wet milling," which needs to be done within six hours of picking to remove the bean's fruity outer layer.
With a $47 million Gates grant, TechnoServe is installing new wet mills and training farmers how to produce high-quality beans for the premium market, which commands a 30 percent higher price. It expects to help 182,000 farmers in East Africa double their incomes in four years. Already the program, which started in 2004, is seeing dramatic results, including an increase in secondary-school enrollment from 20 percent to 75 percent in parts of southern Tanzania, a Technoserve official said.
The largest of Gates' grants, $164.5 million, goes to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to improve soil health. AGRA seeks to build on the original Green Revolution, which doubled food production in Latin America and Asia and saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation in the mid-1900s. But the Green Revolution methods have been criticized for damaging the environment and favoring wealthier farmers.
An AGRA official said the new approach for Africa is different. While the original Green Revolution concentrated on breakthrough seeds for a few major crops, AGRA is investing in more than a dozen local crops, each targeted to the food preferences of those communities, he said. Small-scale farmers are involved in the process from the beginning. New crops are tested in farmers' fields and modified at local research stations based on the farmers' feedback.
AGRA's plan to improve Africa's severely depleted soils includes fertilizers, but it combines that with intercropping to boost nitrogen and conservation tillage to retain water and nutrients, he said.
