STiR coffee and tea magazine

42 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2017 (April/May) T By Megan Smithyman he Democratic Republic of the Congo, situated in the heart of central Africa, is considered to be the most bio-diverse country on the entire continent. Iconic African wildlife such as jungle elephants and white rhino roam throughout the country's four national parks. It is one of the few places on Earth that great ape spe- cies, such as gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo, call home. Its lush forests and equatorial climate means that the DRC is also an excellent region for growing some of the best sweet bourbon coffee varietals in the world. But despite the country's wealth of natural resources, decades of war, genocide, and political unrest has condemned many of the country's 68 million civilians to lives of poverty, disease, and violence. The lack of businesses and income generating activity pushed DRC into deeper turmoil and left the once productive coffee sector neglected or abandoned. Most of the coffee farmers could no longer bring their harvest to market and fled the region, while others resorted to smuggling their beans into Rwanda to barter for food and supplies. Smuggling coffee is very dangerous and many people have lost their lives in the attempt. Due to these circumstances, the little amount of coffee still produced in DRC was coming from small farms with old or rudimentary equipment and no access to interna- tional markets. All of that changed when Joachim Munganga founded the SOPACDI co-operative. SOPACDI (Solidarité Paysanne pour la Promotion des Actions Café et Dével- oppement Intégral) was founded in 2002 to tap into the international specialty coffee market. The co-op is located on the shores of Lake Kivu, which straddles the border between DRC on the west bank and Rwanda to the east. Munganga started with his own farm and worked to rehabilitate an old, run down estate with a central washing station for the co-op to process coffee. It wasn't until 2008 when SOPACDI part- nered with the UK's Twin Trading Company, that the doors to the international cof- Congo Coffee Grauer's gorilla in the wild Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo The story of a war-torn region redeemed by the bean Gorilla coffee

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