Burundi farmers unite to get fair prices for avocados

Farmers in a remote part of Burundi know to look for a truck parked by a highway when it is time to sell their avocados. They materialize from villages and form a crowd around the vehicle, watching closely as crews weigh and load the crated fruits. Such roadside exchanges, repeated regularly during peak harvest season, long provided a ready market for smallholder avocado growers in a country that’s sometimes ranked as the world’s poorest. But the transactions now promise real earnings thanks in part to the intervention of the national government and farmers’ cooperatives that worked to set terms for foreign avocado dealers. Just a year ago, farmers selling their avocados to the transporters earned 10 cents per kilogram (2.2 pounds), far less than the price for a small bottle of water. These days, they get roughly 70 cents for the same quantity, a meaningful increase for people who mainly farm to feed their families. A major change in the trade is that payments in U.S. currency now go into the bank accounts of cooperatives that pay their members directly almost as soon as the avocado haulers leave. Acting as intermediaries, groups such as Green Gold Burundi, which has its headquarters in the northern province of Kayanza and represents 200,000 farmers nationwide, say they are better positioned than individual growers to stem exploitation. The participation of the cooperatives is an important step toward regulating the country’s avocado exports, said Ferdinand Habimana, vice president of Green Gold Burundi’s administrative board. Although the government is promoting avocado farming to diversify exports, avocados grown in Burundi are yet to be trademarked as coming from there, he said. “So it is legally done now, but what we are developing now is that the (avocados) can reach the final destination as avocados taken from Burundi,” said Habimana, speaking of his group’s dealings with exporters in Tanzania and elsewhere in East Africa. Zacharie Munezero, who oversees quality management for Green Gold Burundi, acknowledged that the 70 cents farmers earn for a kilogram of avocados is still insufficient when exporters can fetch between $3 and $5 for the same quantity in international markets. Avocados are cheap in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where they can be purchased from farmers in bulk for almost nothing. In Burundi, avocados became more widely cultivated after the country’s former leader, Pierre Nkurunziza, started extolling the fruit in 2007 as a source of nutrition and income. Many households that don’t produce the varieties favored by exporters usually look after at least one avocado plant of the local variety known to Burundians as “amapeter,” in remembrance of Nkurunziza, who died in 2020. But while coffee and tea exports – Burundi’s traditional sources of much-needed foreign currency – have long been coordinated, the trade in Burundian avocados has remained unregulated, according to farmer representatives and a trade official. They said that avocado exports could be as profitable for the country as coffee if the government asserted its rule-making authority. Desirable measures include guaranteeing a minimum price for farmers, stopping foreign traders from dealing directly with farmers, and encouraging widespread cultivation of the Hass avocados favored by European consumers, they said. Burundi “cannot rely only on coffee and tea,” Onesime Niyukuri, an adviser in the foreign trade department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said of the country’s limited exports. If avocado dealers from elsewhere in East Africa “can come and buy at a price that is already set by the government, there is no problem,” he said. The government ramped up its efforts to organize avocado exports earlier this year as dollar shortages fueled sporadic shortages of sugar and other goods. Under new regulations, which require foreign dealers to register with local authorities, exporters must submit copies of their supply contracts and specify market destinations for Burundian avocados, according to the Ministry of Trade, Transport, Industry and Tourism. Burundi aims to export more than 10 million tonnes (11 million tons) of avocados each year by 2030, said Niyukuri, citing the government’s strategic plan. Recent figures on Burundi’s foreign exchange earnings from the avocado crop were not readily available. The government’s target is to plant 50,000 avocado trees in each of Burundi’s 17 provinces. Local authorities in provinces such as Kayanza want each household to own at least 10 trees producing exportable avocados. That includes the Mexican variety Fuerte and especially Hass avocado, the most commercially successful variety globally. The fruit, which has dark bumpy skin and bright yellow-green flesh, takes more than two weeks to ripen and can survive several days in transit. Burundi, a small mountainous country about the size of Maryland, is home to 13 million people. Annu