Rwanda Fairtrade

From Harriet Lamb of the Fairtrade Foundation

As we all snuggled-in amid last year’s snow-storms, I watched Hotel Rwanda on TV. My daughter kept checking: was I crying? Or looking away from the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man during the 1994 Rwandan genocide? Instead, she was amazed that I had a stupid soppy little smile on my face. No-one watching that film can fail to be humbled and inspired by its true story of how hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, saves over 1,000 refugees from the murdering mobs, showing with endless ingenuity and a deep well of common humanity. That really is having the courage of your convictions.

A few months later, I was in Rwanda with the team from Starbucks. In that small country, with its lush rolling hills and rich red earth, it is hard not be to humbled and inspired by how its people – from senior civil servants to coffee farmers – are pulling together with equally remarkable focus and ingenuity, to tackle the poverty, that blights lives and feeds so many conflicts, to regenerate their economy and rebuild society.

We visited farmers at Dukunde Kawa. They told us how they used just to sell their coffee to the first middle-men who came round their villages at harvest time. Until they discovered that they were ‘being robbed’. So they organised themselves into a group and started selling. Then they realised, that if they washed the coffee themselves (the first stage of coffee processing) they could make more money. Today, many years later, they are proud of their impressive achievements – a major washing station, high quality coffee that is sold to overseas buyers including Starbucks, the special bikes they have bought for the farmers which have a long carrying bit at the back so they don’t have to carry the beans sometimes miles from their hilly farms to the collection points, and investment in schools and health clinics.

And now you too can enjoy those farmers’ coffee as Starbucks is launching a special limited availability single-origin Rwandan coffee this Fairtrade Fortnight. It’s good news for the Rwandan coffee farmers who will be so proud that their coffee is being recognised, and excited about the extra programmes they can undertake in their villages with the premium they earn. And it’s good news for you and me because it really is good coffee. I don’t know what more incentive you need to go and have a special coffee…. Oh ok – so Starbucks are even giving you a Fairtrade chocolate brownie for free on Friday 26th February too! Sounds like a very fair trade for you indeed.

It’s all part of the Big Swap. We’re aiming for people to make a One Million and One Swaps to Fairtrade – swap your ordinary coffee, tea, t-shirt, ice-cream or face-cream, to Fairtrade and register it on our wacky swap-o-meter. Just go to: BigSwap.org.uk because the more you buy, the more the farmers can sell as Fairtrade. So get swapping!