Coffee and capital

U.S. aid agency and Texas A&M are helping farmers in Rwanda increase their standard of living

By JENALIA MORENO
Houston Chronicle

COLLEGE STATION — When the fighting came to Gemima Mukashyaka's Rwandan village in 1994, she happened to be away visiting her aunt.

Her mother and nine of her siblings were among the 800,000 killed in the nation's genocide.

When the conflict ended, the then 16-year-old turned to her parent's coffee trees to eke out a living for herself, her two younger sisters and her two sons.

In 2000, Mukashyaka and 1,684 farmers united their tiny coffee plantations and formed a cooperative that received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and help from Texas A&M's Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture.

These small-scale farmers were soon recovering economically from the effects of the war by marketing their beans internationally and taking courses in coffee cupping, or taste-tasting, to help identify quality.

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