Kivu violence slashes farmer pay from $300 to $50, threatening DRC's 62,000‑tonne coffee comeback

In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a promising climb back to being a credible coffee producer is being knocked sideways by renewed fighting. Farmers who had started to rebuild after decades of decline are watching cherries rot on the branch or shrivel on the ground because fields are abandoned and export routes are choked.

Since the start of the year fighting between government forces and Rwanda‑backed M23 rebels intensified, with the rebels taking control of several towns in North and South Kivu - the provinces that grow much of the country's prized Arabica. The violence has killed and displaced thousands, emptied drying beds at processing centres and interrupted the banking and logistics links exporters depend on.

At the state coffee mill in Bukavu, drying racks stood unused when reporters visited. Local agricultural officials note that trees flowered this season, yet very little left the country. With banks struggling and transport constrained, many exporters simply weren't active.

On the ground the damage is painful and granular. A farmer in South Kivu described fallen trees and beans that had rotted while fields were unattended. He said annual receipts tumbled from roughly $300 in a normal year to about $50 this season - a collapse that hits household budgets and school fees hard.

That setback threatens a slow, real recovery. Output that once topped 100,000 metric tons in the late 1980s collapsed during the chaotic 1990s, then crept back up over the past decade to a little more than 62,000 tons in 2023. Recent improvements in farming techniques and cooperative quality controls had started to win attention abroad; now much of that progress is at risk.

For market participants tracking coffee supply chains, the immediate facts are straightforward: key growing regions are disrupted, collection and export capacity is reduced, and farmer incomes have been hit hard. Specialty Arabica from those highlands carries quality premiums; any sustained loss of that crop can shift sourcing patterns for roasters and traders, and complicate logistics for ports and feeders in the region.

It's also a reminder that commodity flows are fragile. A good season of flowers doesn't translate into exports if people can't pick, process or move the crop. And because many of these growers sell small volumes into local cooperatives or through a handful of trading houses, a bottleneck in finance or transport can wipe out a harvest's value overnight.

If you're watching coffee markets, the headline numbers to keep an eye on are volumes collected in Kivu, exporter activity out of Bukavu and neighbouring hubs, and any signs that banks or transport routes are reopening. For communities in eastern Congo, the damage is immediate and severe; for the wider coffee market, the question is whether the disruption becomes a temporary blip or a longer supply squeeze.

DRC coffee output had risen to just over 62,000 tonnes in 2023 - a fragile recovery now under real threat.