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MSU pours hope into Rwanda
By Sue Nichols
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Photos by Sue Nichols
At left: The rolling hills of Rwanda are terraced to farm from top to bottom, like the ones surrounding the Karaba Cooperative, which has about 670 members, and last year produced 22 tons of specialty coffee. At right: MSU’s Dan Clay takes a turn on a machine that removes the red pulp from the coffee cherries to reveal the beans. He is observed by Jean-Claude Bizimana, who earned a master’s degree at MSU before returning to Rwanda. |
It’s common to gab over a cup of coffee. But soon, it’s going to be the coffee doing the talking.
MSU is introducing a premium specialty coffee to the United States, coffee that’s the fruit of an innovative international agriculture project that delivers both great taste and a great story.
This coffee tells of rebirth and hope in Rwanda, a nation rebuilding from war and genocide. It tells about the global economy, and how it can connect hard work in developing countries with an enthusiastic marketplace. And this coffee tells of the same land-grant university mission that empowered America’s heartland now reaching across the world and making a difference.
“When the land-grant philosophy really works, then there are no boundaries,” said Dan Clay, director of MSU’s Institute of International Agriculture. “It’s ultimately a bunch of people who work together to get a job done that needs doing.”
The Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages – PEARL – is the purest application of the land-grant tradition of partnership, practical application and research. Clay conceived and initiated the project, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
It’s a project that reaches out for knowledge – from university laboratories to industry experts to the farmers themselves – to transform an unremarkable crop into a marketable specialty coffee.
Rwanda direly needed a direct plan. Until PEARL, Rwandans grew bananas, cassava (a grain staple), beans and an average grade of coffee.
In April 1994, war exploded into one of the most tragic and devastating events in modern human history. Some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered. Those who escaped – many of them women and children – returned to farms in shambles. In a brutal sucker punch, world coffee prices bottomed out in 2002.
The people needed an aggressive sustainable way to make a living, and the challenges were plentiful. Rwanda – land-locked in the highlands of east Africa and about the size of Massachusetts – is one of the most densely populated and one of the poorest nations on the continent. Families have an average of a half-acre of land – much of it on impossibly steep terrain – on which to eke out a livelihood.
But Rwanda’s socioeconomic misery was situated in agricultural heaven. Rwanda’s mountainous terrain and gentle climate produces bounteous coffee harvests. PEARL, with MSU as the lead institution, partnered with Texas A&M University, universities in Rwanda, volunteer organizations and key private industry leaders to unlock the potential of a high-grade specialty coffee that could dazzle roasters across the world with its
distinctive character and compelling story of personal triumph and promise.
• In a world of complex problems, PEARL’s coffee plan moves from farm to cup with elegant simplicity:
• Help farmers organize in cooperatives and pool essential resources, especially washing stations crucial to specialty coffee;
• Disseminate growing procedures;
• Teach how to wash and sort the beans, a painstaking task that separates the heavenly beans from the so-so beans;
• Assist in marketing and sales;
• Instill not only quality control, but community pride, an ingredient that creates not only success, but sustainability.
“If you bring the right resources and give people a stake in it, it’s amazing how the technology spreads on its own,” Clay said. “There’s no reason this can’t work in other places.”
Another key piece of PEARL’s plan is to strengthen Rwanda universities and better align them with farmers, the spirit of outreach in which American land grants are steeped.
The first step: bringing 16 young instructors from Rwandan agricultural institutions to U.S. universities – 11 at MSU, five at Texas A&M – for master’s degree training in agricultural sciences, along with a strong dose of outreach. The students returned home to go forth and apply research.
Olivia Karekezi, a professor of crop science at National University of Rwanda who studied at MSU, sees research differently now, with the farmers and their needs in mind as she reviews projects.
“This has changed the way I think, the way I work,” Karekezi said. “I make my students be more oriented to rural communities in their research work. It changed my vision.”
PEARL carries on even in a backdrop of civil unrest, for this part of Africa’s history, and it’s present, long has existed in a complicated balance of conflict and hope.
“It comes down to, do you live with the pessimism, or do you live with optimism?” Clay said. “The Rwandans are an optimistic
people, and they are people who need help to heal. The entire community is committed to helping this occur.”
In the development world, there’s a theory-based methodology called participatory development – a process that often fails, said David Weight, PEARL’S project coordinator on campus. PEARL’s strength, and it’s credibility with Rwandan farmers, has been its emphasis on pragmatism over theory.
“These were people who wanted to make a living and were not able to – so it was very important to them,” Weight said. “This program is more like how business works. We found a market and worked backwards from the market. They decided to trust enough to take the jump and we worked in a way to get results.”
The PEARL project grows nearly as fast as the bright-red cherries on the trees that dot the terraces of Rwanda. In the next month, the coffee will be available in Michigan, and become part of the language MSU will use to explain what land grant means as the university celebrates its 150th anniversary.
The coffee is expected to be available for purchase in February on the Web at shop.msu.edu
For more information about PEARL, visit the Web at rwandacoffee.msu.edu
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