Rwanda Plans to Boost Coffee Output With Drought, Disease-Resistant Trees

Rwanda will distribute half-a- million high-yield coffee saplings to growers this year, amid plans to more than double production, said Alex Kanyankole, director of the country’s coffee-development authority.

The agency, known as OCIR Café, and the Agricultural Research Institute of Rwanda, last year began a tissue-culturing program to breed plants that can better withstand disease and drought, Kanyankole said in an interview today in Kigali. The trees are expected to begin producing in three years time.

“We are now set to distribute the plantlets,” he said. “We cannot give yield projections yet, because we are still considering other variables like soils and climate.”

Starbucks Corp., the world’s largest coffee shop chain, is the biggest buyer of Rwanda’s coffee. The East African country, which produces the arabica variety of the beans, expects production to increase to 26,000 metric tons this year from 14,250 in 2009, according to the central bank. Output may grow by at least 4,000 tons annually until 2012, Kanyankole said.

After 2012, “we expect the new trees to produce even higher yields,” he said.

Rwanda is rebuilding its economy after 800,000 people, or more than a 10th of the population, were killed in the 1994 genocide when ethnic Hutu militias slaughtered minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus over a period of 100 days.

To contact the reporter on this story: David Malingha Doya in Kigali via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

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