Barista Magazine

APR-MAY 2016

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train new ones, partner them with MSU and A&M; professors, create an outreach center, and modernize the curriculum. OK. It sounded OK. Not very exciting, but we're out of Texas, and we both had jobs, and Rwanda was wonderful. I created this Outreach Center off-campus with the purpose of iden- tifying income-generating farm activities for this huge people-every- where rural population. They were in a state of shock and misery that was new to me. I'd seen a lot of misery already, but this was a new level. You know, there is poverty and then there is misery. Lots of poor people were happy in Mali, but these guys were miserable. The rector of the university was great—he supported the outreach center 100 percent. I could do what I wanted as long as I made some people some money in those hills. Enter specialty coffee. It was 2000 and the C market was at about $0.50 a pound! Farmers were pulling up trees and hated coffee, never even tasted it. But it was all over—quick calculations showed that about 500,000 farm families were involved in [coffee], and if there are five to 10 members of each of those families, damn, that's almost half the whole population! Don't need an economist to figure out that if the price could be raised on the coffee by a nickel a pound, it would mean huge income gains for these people. I didn't have the money to move. Project funds were going toward moving professors and students back and forth to the U.S. in "sandwich" MS and PhD programs. Really. Did they really think that an MS thesis done at MSU or Texas was going to be so good and incredible in develop- ing new technology that it would be extended and bring farmers money? So, I went into the director of USAID's office and said, "Dick [Dick Goldman], look, if we can raise coffee price for farmers, poor miserable people will be less poor and not so miserable. Politically, those rural peo- ple needed money, or it could all explode again. The idea is to target the specialty-coffee market which can pay twice what those guys are mak- ing today." I convinced the USAID director, who gave me the money I needed to start a program in coffee. The rector was excited and brought none other than the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, to the outreach center to listen to the idea. He said that if you can show that this can work, that he'd do all he can as president to make it work at scale. I brought on Sam Olivirei as a consultant, a Venezuelan who was doing his PhD on GIS and finding the best place to grow specialty cof- fee in Venezuela. He had a gig with Community Coffee, who was buying a box of coffee every year from Sam that Sam used to pay for studies. Sam looked around and said, "Hey, no wonder this coffee sucks. It's being processed in dumps, dried on the street with babies, dogs and goats walking all over it, etc." He said we needed to make central wash- ing stations and get the processing out of each farmer's hands so we can take control of the "quality chain." We did a simple experiment with small hand pulpers and we sent samples of coffee to Community Coffee in Louisiana. They said, "Not bad. Has potential. If you can get the quality up a little, we'll buy a box from you." At the same time, Union Hand Roasted of London was pros- pecting and they, too, said, "Hey, not bad. If you can get the quality up, we'll buy a box." The year was 2001. We went Zen-like into working with farmers, managers, and just all kinds of people to bring water down from a spring three kilometers away, set up holding tanks, work with Kenyans on a dehulling machine that could work without electricity, bags, tags, cement—it was crazy. Sam was up all night at the station checking fer- mentation, etc. The season was over and we produced 32 tons of Grade A coffee and about 15 tons of B/C. Voila! President Kagame came to our little washing station at Maraba with the buyers Carl Leonard from Community Coffee, Jeremy Torz, and Steven Macatonia from Union Hand Roasted for a launching. All the ministers, AID directors, etc., were there, plus about 100,000 farmers. It was like Woodstock. The deal was signed with the buyers, and the baby was born. Lots of people saw it work and started their own projects and wash- ing stations. Over the next five years Rwanda went from one washing station to over 200! SA: Coffee was one of several projects developed under PEARL, along with chili pepper, cassava, and geranium, right? Was coffee a bigger program than the others? TS: Without a doubt. Coffee was 85 percent and the others were like 15 percent. I had a huge coffee team, 18 people working on it. We also produced Rwanda's first fully processed and packaged food export product to the Ethic Markets of Europe! Bon Foufou! Google it. It's still out there! A high-quality fermented cassava product. We worked on geranium and chili peppers, chrysanthemums, avocados, green beans, mushrooms, worms, and more. "[Rwandan] President Paul Kagame came to see me in my offi ce in Butare in 2001 to discuss ideas for Rwanda's coff ee sector," says Tim. 116 barista magazine

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