Burundi, Kayanza Campazi

Our Burundi Kayanza Campazi Natural is produced by 847 small farmers within the
immediate vicinity of the Umuco wash station, located in the Campazi Colline of the
Muruta Commune. This lot is 100% Red Bourbon, natural processed and sun dried on
raised beds for a period of 25-30 days. The lot is dry milled at the Horamama Dry Mill in
Kayanza by the COCOCA Cooperative Consortium. The Umuco wash station is
independently operated by a subgroup of Kayanza Campazi growers from local
communities using a cooperative format that supports local pride and uses a readily
available network of transportation and distribution services. Kayanza Campazi has a total of seven wash station owners and managers, who
provide an integral role in their community, not just in processing but also added values such as market access, agri-tech and key growing
knowledge within the chain of production. Campazi growers are assisted by Burundi Specialty Seeds (BSS) using World Bank grants. To date
BSS has distributed over 300k trees and planted an additional 40,000 under direct ownership. Though they will need several years to begin
fruiting, the development is very exciting. Murata Commune is located in the larger Kayanza Province, which is one of 18 different provinces
in the nation of Burundi. The Burundi Kayanza Campazi farms located here are quite small, averaging just around one and a quarter acres
apiece. Some farmers have 50-100 trees, but many others have more like 10 or 20; very few have enough space for several hundred trees.
One factor for small farmers with less than one hundred coffee trees is the understandable reluctance to stump (or cut back) trees that may
be suffering from a degenerative health condition. At such small numbers each tree is incredibly vital to overall volume. The soil on these
Burundi Kayanza Campazi farms is mostly red clay that is also used to fashion building bricks for local structures and dwellings. The nation of
Burundi is located directly south of Rwanda and shares a majority of its eastern border with Tanzania. Coffee was first introduced here by
the Belgians in the 1930s. For a country where approximately 90% of the population relies on farming for a living, coffee and tea have
remained the top two respective cash crops for generations. Today there are roughly 600,000 individual coffee farmers, whose combined
export volume accounts for 60% of overall export earnings. The vast majority of Burundi’s coffee producers are small farm holders who
manage an average of 200 trees apiece on single, 1-acre plots or smaller. These producers are responsible for growing and harvesting their
own lot of cherries which are in turn sold to either privately-run or government owned wash stations called SOGESTALS. In order to best
serve Burundi’s coffee sector and oversee its sustainable development, InerCafé Burundi was founded in 2010 as a professional, non-profit
association of stakeholders. Their board of directors is tasked with a number of essential duties including farm-to-market traceability,
promotion, quality control, producer arbitrage and international partnering to name a few. To ensure equal representation, their 13 member
board is staffed by professionals from each sector—wet milling, dry milling, exporting and roasting.