Résumé des Observations tirées de Décaféiné? Situation, Tendances et Perspectives pour la Production du Café au Rwanda Analyse d’une Enquête sur les Ménages Ruraux, an 2002

Scott Loveridge (), Jean Baptiste Nyarwaya and Emmanuel Shingiro

No 55355, Food Security Collaborative Policy Briefs from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics

Abstract: Most Rwandan coffee is currently grown and processed the same way it was a decade ago. Consequently, Rwanda’s coffee production and marketing system has not been able to keep up with changes in the global market for high quality coffee. Given world market gluts of relatively poor quality coffee, Rwanda is now exporting a product that fetches low prices. Despite the challenges in coffee marketing and production, coffee remains one of Rwanda’s most important official sources of foreign exchange and the drop in production is of major concern to both the public and private sectors. In an effort to assist decision makers in the coffee sector better understand factors affecting farmers’ production decisions and their attitudes about coffee, the FSRP fielded a nationally representative survey in 2002. The survey results show that the sector appears to be at a turning point—significant numbers of farmers have moved away from coffee with more seemingly on the cusp of removing more trees, or “decaffeinating” their fields. While the overall picture presented in this report is one of decline, there are also some encouraging changes. Liberalization of coffee policies in the mid-1990s seems to have increased yields by taking the poorest fields out of production. Growing farmer interest in intercropping coffee with food crops suggests that there may be a means of stretching Rwanda’s most limiting resource—land area— thereby enabling farmers to achieve a better combination of food and cash crops. Also, the fact that the coffee sector survives at all in the face of numerous adversities is a weighty testament to its potential.

Keywords: Crop; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/55355/files/ps_5f.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:midcpb:55355

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.55355

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Food Security Collaborative Policy Briefs from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().