BUJUMBURA, January 7th (ABP) – On Friday, January 3, 2025, Emmanuel Ndorimana, assistant to the Minister of the Environment, Agriculture and Livestock, opened a meeting to hand over the results and certificates for the selected extraordinary coffees, 2024 edition.
The meeting was organized by the Burundi Coffee Development Office (ODECA), for coffee growers who took part in the competition for the selected extraordinary coffees, tasters and coffee buyers, a check on the site by ABP has revealed.
In his speech, Ndorimana said that that coffee competition enabled them to know the difference between Burundi coffees and to produce better.
According to him, coffee is very important for the development of families and the country, because if coffee producers grow it well, their families develop, and the country also earns foreign currency.
Ndorimana also pointed out that Burundi’s coffee sector faces a number of challenges. Those include climate change and currency trends. To meet those challenges, he called on all those involved in the coffee sector to work in synergy to produce good-quality coffee for international markets.
To that end, he thanked the companies taking part in the competition for demonstrating their willingness to promote Burundi coffee.
For his part, ODECA General Manager Jean de Dieu Niyindabira began by recalling that the aim of the meeting was to mark the end of coffee competitions in Burundi. That competition was held at national level, to enable Burundian players to take part in the international competition that could be held in Africa.
He made a vibrant appeal to coffee growers to apply themselves energetically to coffee cultivation, because “for over 33 years, coffee has been in the hands of the private sector. And the latter have been receiving exaggerated interest rates compared to coffee growers”. With that in mind, he explained, the Burundi government has been committed to closely monitoring coffee cultivation since 2020, promising coffee growers a preliminary price.
He called on coffee growers to apply themselves to that crop in order to obtain good-quality coffee, pointing out that the first-place winners in that competition will have the chance to take part in the Africa-wide competition to be held in Tanzania in February that year.
With regard to the results of the extraordinary coffees selected for that year’s competition, ODECA Technical Director Nestor Nizigiye began by recalling that during the competition, ODECA received 25 coffee-growing companies, from which 205 coffee samples were selected.
The tasters selected 9 presidential coffees (which grow all over Burundi) from the 205 samples.
In addition, he pointed out that ODECA is very determined, as they now produce around 65% of coffee and are determined to work up to 100%.
He called on coffee growers to work together with ODECA for synergy to achieve good coffee production.
At the end of the meeting, ODECA presented certificates to the 25 companies that took part in the Extraordinary Coffee Competition, and to the tasters who helped identify those coffees.