Prices for Rwandan coffee dips

The Rwandan coffee industry has taken a bit of a hit over the past month.

According to figures released by the National Agriculture Exports Board (NAEB), the average price that Rwandan coffee fetched at market dipped down to $3.24 per kg.

Naturally, this decline affected the country’s export revenue which, in July, plunged to $6.1 million.

To compare, for the same period last year Rwandan coffee was selling for $4.23 per kg and brought in $7.7 million to the country’s economy. That’s some drop.

Speaking about this issue, Pie Ntwari, NAEB’s current head of communications, indicated that this was down to the fluctuating and often volatile futures markets which has been up and down and down up recently.

Over the past twelve months there’s been fear about a lack of supply and then something of a glut of beans as many South American nations, such as Brazil, the world’s leading producer, bounced back from weather affected harvests.

However, it is worth noting that despite this doom and gloom, overall export volumes were actually up.

Down the line, this indicates that when the global market picks up Rwanda’s famers will be in a good position to reap the rewards, so to speak. As one trader stated, this decline “should not be viewed as a unique case.”

Ntwari seems confident that Rwanda will come out of the other side of this blip rather well.

“We want to focus on value addition because the country’s comparative advantage is not on volumes, but rather on quality,” he is quoted as saying in an interview.

Conversely, the tea industry did rather well. Tea earnings were up by over a quarter. It seems where coffee has stuttered, tea has prospered!