Every year we hold our breath and hope as the Burundian government reviews applications to produce coffee. Producing coffee in Burundi is never a guarantee, which means that annually we need new permission granted only by the government in order to operate. There are always new hurdles to jump though in order to get a license and this year was no different.
As this season started, the government coffee board demanded that every coffee producer have the money needed to pay their farmers already in the bank; to be held in trust, before a single coffee cherry was delivered to the washing station. Last year’s coffee harvest was 25% of the normal export nationwide, which makes having these funds in advance unreasonable for most producers, including ourselves. On top of this law came the statement that if coffee producers were unable to comply, they would lose their washing station(s) along with any permission to produce coffee ever again in their lifetime.
We are no stranger to this kind of last-minute law building as coffee season starts, but scrambling to comply with these laws has made for a hard month. Add COVID-19 and its worldwide effects on top of this and we, possibly like you, have been surrounded by a thunderstorm of worries. Thankfully, we were able to find a way to comply with the government’s new laws and we began collecting coffee cherries last week. Friday’s daily report showed that 2,181.5 kilograms were delivered to our Bukeye washing station, so harvest is off to a nice slow start. Our other washing station, Heza, is at a higher elevation and is usually a few weeks behind Bukeye.
Recently while we were looking over our coffee-producing years, we realized that March Madness doesn’t just take place in basketball. March has, for the last six years, always held big challenges for us. Whether it’s a nation-wide fuel shortage, a coup d’état, a strangely low harvest or COVID-19, the start of harvest has always been marked by a challenge that feels larger than life.
As we all navigate this pandemic and its devastating challenges together, we’ve found hope in the coming harvest. Just like Spring coming or the sun setting, nature seems to hold a solidity that we all need right now. Harvest can’t be held back or rescheduled, the coffee cherries will ripen when they ripen. Production license or not, COVID-19 or not – harvest just comes. In a world that feels out of control, nature is a veiled reminder that stability will come again and that maybe, just maybe, normal life will too.