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Rwandan coffee enters crucial German market

Monday June 03 2019
coffee

Rwandan coffee has made it to dmdrogerie market Germany’s biggest retail store. PHOTO | SEARCH

By MOSES K. GAHIGI

Rwandan coffee has made it to dmdrogerie market Germany’s biggest retail store.

The coffee that is roasted, packaged and exported by Coffee Kooperative to Germany, is just one of the many to have ended up on international stores.

Other coffee products like Gorilla, West Hills and Land of a Thousand Hills have continued to attract sales on Alibaba’s Tmall international e-commerce platform, with producers already planning to increase volumes to tap into the growing opportunities.

Redmart Stores, a leading e-commerce grocery retail and delivery store in Singapore, also recently launched a window called “Best of Rwanda” for Rwandan products such as chilli oil, coffee, tea, honey and essential oil.

Fluctuations in global coffee prices are however, making it difficult for coffee farmers from the different coffee growing parts of the country to enjoy more earnings.

“We are happy with the success our coffee is enjoying internationally, if only prices were stable things would be much better for us, but they keep changing and this is an issue,” said Minani Anastase, a coffee farmer from Gakenke.

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“Last year, raw coffee was retailing at Rwf300 per kilogramme, but now goes for Rwf190,” he said.

He said there is a craze to increase coffee production in most of the coffee growing areas, where farmers are increasingly doing away with bananas.

“Farmers invest a lot planting this coffee and ensuring that it comes out with good quality, we have to buy fertilisers, so when prices fall like this it’s a big issue for us,” he observed.

He called on the government and other players in the coffee industry to expand markets to have enough market options to sale their produce.

The fall in farmgate prices is driven by a fall in international coffee prices, which dropped from $3.3 per kilogramme in 2018 to $2.2.

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