NEWS FROM BURUNDI

As highlighted in “Where has the coffee gone?”, 2021 was not the season we had all expected and hoped for.

Production was devastatingly low, with cherry volumes at roughly half of what they should be for Long Miles to break-even. The financial challenges we faced, and continue to face, were compounded by the fact that this was the third such harvest in a row.

Early this past season, once the reality of the harvest volumes began to settle in, we decided to make the best of a bad situation. Come what may, 2021 would be the year that we landed coffee in destination markets in October. Our hope was that the small volume would make this a more attainable goal. At the end of August, our first container was ready to ship and the export paperwork was in order. 

Unlike many coffee producing countries which have a seaport, Burundi is landlocked. Coffee needs to be trucked to a seaport in a neighbouring country before the coffee can get on a ship. The lion’s share of Burundi coffee ships out of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 

Our first container of coffee was in Dar es Salaam in early September. Coffee often waits seven to ten days in Dar while a ship booking is confirmed. However, our container moved at what we now know as the very beginning of a still-ongoing, East African shipping crisis. Container availability is and has been incredibly rare and sailings out of East Africa to both Europe and North America (though, North America in particular) are even more few and far between.

What is normally a brief and uneventful portion of the coffee’s overall trip from Burundi to Europe, North America, Australia, South Africa, or elsewhere, became a very protracted (and stressful) portion of this container’s – and more broadly, last year’s – story. The coffee sat in a bonded warehouse in Dar for over three months, finally sailing mid-December. There were, simply put, no available containers and then no available ships.

• 

However, it was not a year without any positive news to report. In fact, we can proudly say that, while the volume produced was quite paltry, the quality produced in 2021 was spectacular. Our teams at Bukeye, Heza, and Ninga washing stations continue to produce better, more consistent coffee. We could not be prouder of the work they are doing and the quality they are producing.

While the global shipping crisis ultimately defeated our efforts to land coffee in October, our logistics situation is not all for naught. Thanks to our team in Burundi and our logistics partners Royal Coffee and Osito Coffee, the 2021 coffees were not behind schedule compared to a typical year. 

While we were aiming to improve upon a “typical year”, performing as well as (and in fact, better than, in some regards) a typical year, is no mean feat considering the current state of logistics. In fact, thanks to Osito Coffee, our Europe-bound container landed at the end of December – the earliest that a container from Long Miles Burundi will have ever landed in Europe!