Starbucks to open center for coffee farmers in Rwanda

At Starbucks' shareholders meeting in March, Rwandan President Paul Kagame made a special appearance to tell investors how devoted the company is to the welfare of coffee farmers.

He also said he'd love for Starbucks to open a coffee shop in his country.

Instead, Rwanda is getting a coffee-farmer support center, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz told Kagame over the weekend during a tour of coffee-growing countries in East Africa, where the company has promised to buy more coffee.

Officials do not disclose how much coffee Starbucks buys in Africa, but Latin America is the source for most of the 300 million pounds it buys each year.

The center will help farmers improve their coffee quality and growing practices so that Starbucks will buy more of their beans. Starbucks pays more for coffee than farmers can get on the open market.

Last week, Schultz announced plans for a separate support center in Ethiopia, which will serve farmers only in that country. Last year, the Ethiopian government accused Starbucks of trying to prevent it from winning U.S. trademarks for Ethiopian coffees. The conflict was resolved, although details were not released.

Starbucks hopes to open the center in Rwanda during 2008, after the one in Ethiopia. Officials are not sure how many people will work at either center.

The company opened a center in Costa Rica in 2004 to help Latin American farmers. That center has 15 to 20 employees, including several agronomists.

Within Africa, Starbucks buys mostly from Ethiopia and Kenya, but one of its most popular African coffees was a limited-time offering from Rwanda last year.

"From its altitude and variety of landscape, Rwanda could be one of the top specialty coffee producers in the world," said Andrew Linnemann, Starbucks' director of green coffee quality.

Coffee growers in Rwanda, like most of East Africa, tend to be family farmers with just a couple of acres on which they grow coffee along with other crops like corn, bananas and sugar cane, he said.

Many need help with things like proper pruning of their coffee trees, picking coffee cherries when they are ripe and getting them to processing mills before they start to ferment.

The small processing mills also need support, Linnemann said. Starbucks can teach them how to improve the way they wash and dry coffee beans, manage the wastewater in their mills and segregate the beans based on quality.

Land-locked countries such as Rwanda and Burundi also need to learn how to export their coffee quickly, before bean quality suffers.

"Any African country will tell you, 'We don't want aid; we want trade,' " Linnemann said. "They want assistance in, 'Show us how to better our standard of living and our place in the global market.' "

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com