Appendix E-J

More from Geoff Watts, the roastmaster and green bean buyer for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, whose beans we brew with pride and love. Read more about Zirikana, Rwanda here.

Hola:

Just back to Chicago after a quick trip to Uganda and Kenya. My backyard is covered by a sheet of ice, reminding me that the equator is a long ways from here.

On the plane ride home I learned how to say “the president of the soy sauce factory is President Kang and the president of the bean-paste factory is President Kong” in Korean. Here goes: Kan-jang-kong-jang kong-jang-jang-eun kang kong-jang-jang-ee-go, dwen-jang-kong-jang kong-jang-jang-eun kong kong-jang-jang-ee-da. Now that is just plain great and a sure contender in the tongue-twisting Olympics.

The 5th Annual East African Fine Coffee Association Conference took place this past weekend. Kampala, Uganda hosted the conference this year, and it rotates annually among the member countries. Last year it was Ethiopia and in ’09 it will move to Rwanda, to my great delight. (Kigali has started to feel like a second home after all the time I’ve spent there in the last four years.) The organization is an important one, for the simple reason that it is the first multinational institution focused on improving coffee quality and disseminating knowledge about Specialty Coffees in Africa.

Africa holds the future of Specialty Coffee, no doubt about it. Ethiopia, the birthplace of Arabica coffee, is home to a treasure trove of genetic diversity within the species. CIRAD, a French agro-science group, has been working at the Djimma research station (western Ethiopia, Kaffa area, probably the origin of the now famous Geisha coffee) to collect and begin to catalog as many different varieties as possible for future consideration. Who knows what might be discovered? No one has ever done a thorough enough investigation, and there is a great chance that some previously unheralded coffee types with unique and thrilling tastes and aromas will be identified. It will likely be decades before we see any real commercialization result from these efforts, but it is comforting to know that there is some effort underway to preserve these wild species that are disappearing at an alarming rate along with the forests.

In Latin America, rising land values that are a natural result of economic development and urbanization are making coffee farming less viable every year. Costa Rica is the best example of this as there are new shopping malls and residential communities now sitting on land that just three years ago was filled with coffee plants. Farmers in Panama are selling off parts of their coffee farms left and right to developers who are building condominiums and resorts. Labor is getting difficult to find as people emigrate to the cities and abroad.

These trends look to continue and accelerate, which bodes well for investment in coffee in other parts of the world. As the Specialty market keeps growing and becoming a larger and more meaningful percentage of overall coffee consumption, the efforts to find new coffee varieties and new sources for quality will get more intense.

Africa already grows a lot of Arabica coffee, but most of it goes into the commercial market because the quality is poor. It doesn’t need to be this way. There are just a few ingredients missing in the quality recipe, most importantly transportation infrastructure and access to technical assistance and capital resources… not to mention political stability. Very little can grow in the face of corrupt governments and ongoing civil unrest. Growers need more information about quality practices, they need sources of affordable credit, and they need reliable delivery systems in place. These things will improve and coffee may well become an important catalyst in East African economic development as both local businesses and governments recognize the potential that exists to transform their crippled coffee industries into major players in the increasingly attractive Specialty market.

I’m super-excited about what the future holds for African producers. It won’t be easy to reshape the coffee industries there, but necessity is a fairly reliable and time-tested driver of change. And reform there is most definitely necessary, more so each passing day.

We released it last week, and I am again asking you to read up on Zirikana, our Direct Trade offering from Rwanda. Truly an African success story.

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