Local cooperatives are stepping in to support vulnerable farmers, mostly women, struggling in conflict-ridden eastern DRC.
Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo – Early each morning, 50-year-old Kavira Matsetse walks for two hours to reach her coffee plantation in Biakato, in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) Ituri province.
The widow and mother of eight inherited the plantation from her late husband nearly a decade ago, and has worked hard to cultivate it ever since.
“My husband was killed in 2015 during attacks in Oicha in the neighbouring province of North Kivu,” she told Al Jazeera, recounting how the family fled to Biakato where it was up to her “to erect a home and a life from scratch in a new locality with new people”.
Lush green rows of coffee trees cover rolling hills and valleys in Biakato. But in striking contrast, the area has also witnessed decades-long conflict and violence.
Ituri, like most of eastern DRC, has been overridden by interethnic and religious tensions, conflicts over land resources, and violence fuelled by political and economic factors.
DRC has some of the most fertile land in the world and has often been dubbed a “paradise for coffee” for its high-quality produce.
The eastern part of the country was once lucrative for coffee production and a significant cash crop for residents.
But the conflict, which has spurred massive waves of displacements, has negatively affected the region’s agriculture, contributing to DRC losing almost 75 percent of its coffee production in 40 years.
The conflict has also made it difficult to gauge the exact amount of coffee production happening in eastern DRC; and challenges in the region continue to embitter farmers towards growing coffee.
For women, who make up 80 percent of the labour force in coffee farms as the fighting draws men to the front lines, working on farms amid conflict means multiplied dangers and challenges, with little support.
Coffee cooperatives
In Ituri’s communities, where men are traditionally the breadwinners, earning money to support her family after her husband died was uncharted territory for widowed Matsetse.
When the family first arrived in Biakato, she improvised a tent to shelter her children as she slowly discovered her way around growing the beans.
But she knew she needed help.
Three years later, that help came in the form of a cooperative of local coffee growers called the Association Solidarite des Cooperations pour le Developpement et la Vulgarisation Agricole (SOCODEVA).
The association, formed in 2014, had begun registering coffee growers, raising awareness and bringing them together.
“With the help of SOCODEVA, I was able to buy a new plot of land and build a house of my own,” Masteste told Al Jazeera.
The group, along with other grassroots associations and cooperatives, helps support smallholders and women farmers by providing them with knowledge and resources on sustainable agriculture and how to maintain their coffee fields in the face of climate change, economic shocks and other challenges facing the sector.
SOCODEVA also has coffee nurseries where they grow coffee seedlings, “which are then distributed to coffee growers for free”, the cooperative’s coordinator Jean Louis Kathaliko told Al Jazeera.
The association is funded by membership fees and the profit margin on group sales – a system that brings together large quantities of coffee from different farmers to sell to buyers. This allows the coffee buyer to avoid the expense of going to each small farmer independently to buy a small amount of coffee, while increasing farmers’ chances of selling their crops, Kathaliko said. She added that a profit margin is added to the price of coffee to further empower the growers financially.
With their support and advice, Matsetse said she was able to ramp up not only the amount of coffee she grows to up to 2.1 tonnes but also the quality of her coffee.
“I was able to expand my coffee field from the three hectares [7.4 acres] I had initially inherited from my husband, to five hectares [12 acres],” she said.
Supportive networks
As a group, SOCODEVA has brought together 3,000 coffee farmers in Ituri.
Meanwhile, other regional and international organisations – including CARE and Women for Women – also intervene to support widowed and destitute women, Kathaliko said.
“They provide training and resources for them, but the conflict in eastern DRC poses a challenge to the work of organisations,” she added.
Fighting has plagued eastern DRC for decades, and has escalated recently. In resource-rich Ituri, there has been recurring conflict between government forces and more than 120 armed militias for decades. Over the past two months, there have been attacks by CODECO and Zaïre fighters over gold mining sites in the Djugu district. Additionally, six Chinese miners and two Congolese soldiers were killed early this month in the village of Gambala.
When fighting spills over, it can affect farmers’ ability to access their fields and harvest enough coffee to sell to the market, hitting them financially. Poverty is also rampant in villages in the region.
To help farmers, particularly the women who make up the bulk of the labour force, better endure these challenges, SOCODEVA has also enabled a system where members lend one another a helping hand when times are tough.
As part of its endeavours, the association brings farmers together in groups of 25 people – creating a mutual aid system between the members.
Group members make contributions – typically 2,000 Congolese francs (less than $1) – which are then held in a common fund to help members who need financial assistance.
“This money is used to pay bills in the context of solidarity when a member, for instance, is sick or in need,” Kathaliko said.
‘Bleak’ situation
On the coffee farms, the association also incentivises farmers who succeed in producing a tonne or more of coffee per season. In return, they get materials that help them in the field, including hoes, tarpaulins, machetes and watering cans worth up to $25.
Such incentives encouraged Francoise Mbambu Desi, a 56-year-old mother of four, to take on the challenges of coffee growing, with the help of the cooperatives.
She arrived in Biakato in 1997 from Beni in North Kivu – another province in the east plagued by decades of conflict. Many of Biakato’s other inhabitants also initially came here searching for land to farm.
Desi had nothing but her children, her husband and a chicken when she first arrived, she said.
The Pygmy people, an Indigenous community native to the Congo basin, generously gave her two hectares of coffee to cultivate in exchange for the chicken.
“Until 2016, coffee was the main income-generating crop for me and I was faithful to this crop, which enabled me to acquire five more hectares,” Desi said.
Over the years, she was able to acquire and grow more coffee fields thanks to the help she received from SOCODEVA and others to get seedlings and sell her coffee to the market at a fair price.
According to Kathaliko, the association has provided coffee growers with some 30,000 seedlings to grow and expand their fields, along with technical support on best practices for soil management and yielding more coffee from their land.
However, even with the initiatives, the support cooperatives provide falls short of addressing bigger challenges brought about by the years-long conflict.
Matsetse, citing longer growing seasons and lengthy cultivation periods due to climate change, said her profits have slumped as the market is volatile because of the conflict and a lack of profitability.
In theory, she can sell one kilogramme of coffee for $2.6 compared with $0.7 in previous years; but in practice, she is not selling as much coffee as she used to, she lamented.
“It is a bleak situation now,” Matsetse said.
An uncertain future
Not only has the conflict affected coffee prices, but it has also led to a significant increase in the smuggling of coffee outside DRC – an exploitative practice that deprives local producers, predominantly women whose families have been affected by the conflict, of vital income.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, several local coffee sellers said that about 10,000 tonnes of coffee in the territories of Mahagi and Djugu in Ituri province are fraudulently smuggled out of DRC to neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda annually. Several farmers prefer to deal with smugglers to sell raw products to be smuggled to avoid high taxes levied by the state.
Amid the challenges, Desi, like many coffee growers in Ituri, has considered the obvious alternative – farming cacao instead.
“It requires less manual labour, unlike coffee which needs rigorous upkeep and constant maintenance,” she noted, adding that many other farmers she knows have either abandoned their coffee trees or are seriously considering the move.
Having coffee as her key source of income for years, Desi has finally made money but she feels the volatility in market prices caused by the conflict, and the effort required to preserve the coffee fields, is not worth it.
“Today, I’m left with just a quarter hectare, where I grow a small quantity that I consume as coffee in the morning, and the mere memory of a crop that has enabled me to become who I am today”, she added.
No longer as strong as when she was young, she grows a hectare of cacao [2.5 acres] and a quarter hectare of coffee, and can no longer care for the rest of her field.
Constantin Ali, an agricultural engineer in Ituri, explained to Al Jazeera that cacao cultivation poses a significant risk to the survival of coffee farming, despite coffee having been the dominant crop for many years.
“Coffee and cacao cultivation have the same production period. It takes three years to have the first production. Cacao differs from coffee in the price on the market, it is double, or even triple the price of coffee,” Ali said.
Matsetse is also considering an alternative course.
“Cacao cultivation is gaining popularity. There is desperation and I think if these conditions persist, I might give up. Sometimes, the coffee seedling dries up, and cacao has become a promising crop given its market value,” Matsetse said.
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.