In June 2022, the TDC team met Joachim Munganga, President of Sopacdi (Solidarité Paysanne pour la Promotion des Actions Café et Développement Intégral), a cooperative of coffee growers in South Kivu. He had just returned from the World of Coffee event organised in Milan by the Specialty Coffee Association. Sopacdi won third place in the competition organised by the SPP label, whose aim is to promote quality coffees from small producers.
“It’s very important, as it gives you a place in the market. This generates more publicity and demonstrates that the cooperative produces quality coffee. Last year, when Sopacdi finished top of the competition, our three unsold containers went fast.” comments Joachim Mungaga.
Joachim gave us a long interview in which he spoke about the creation of the cooperative and the importance of coffee in the region, the organisation’s current challenges and the support of the Trade for Development Centre. Christophe Grasser, TDC coach, highlighted the challenges facing the organisation.
The origins of Sopacdi “I am the son of producers. My father had a small coffee plantation, which enabled him to pay my school fees”, says Joachim. “In the ’60s, you couldn’t build a house or send your children to school without coffee. When a young boy proposed to a girl, one of the first questions asked was whether his family had coffee plantations. Coffee meant life there. Subsequently, Zaire’s economic measures in the ’70s, such as nationalisation, included coffee, whose price fell, while remaining stable in neighbouring countries. Growers then took the initiative to smuggle coffee to Rwanda via Lake Kivu. Wind and bandit attacks caused many casualties. The bigger the pirogues, the more motorised they became, and the more people died. It reached the point that small producers became discouraged, as the amount of mourning in some villages was so high, with sometimes as many as 30 dead. There were a lot of widows and many orphans. People thought, “Are we going to produce coffee that we die for?”
“I am also one of those people who gave up coffee plantations to take up subsistence farming. We planted banana trees and manioc, and coffee production plummeted. We lost and forgot our coffee processing techniques, and quality deteriorated sharply. Congolese coffee disappeared from the international market and was no longer known to consumers. Houses built with coffee began to disappear. Parents found it difficult to send their children to school or pay for health care.”
“I said to myself, Where are we going? Where will this lead us? What can I do for my community? That’s when I learned that coffee from small producers was gaining ground on the international market. I was advised to create a producers’ association if I wanted to improve the situation in my community. So that’s what I did. I was in contact with a Rwandan cooperative, Coopac, which is Fairtrade certified. I created Sopacdi with five or six other people. I travelled through the region, raising awareness and mobilising people. People trusted me because I’m a native of the area. I’m a nurse and I used to treat people there. Many associations ended in conflict in those days. They said to each other, “With Joachim, we can give it a try. He has property here, he can’t run away and we know him.’ It took a lot of patience. From 2003 to 2007, we were playing around with coffee processing methods and with partners. We didn’t have a convincing cooperative structure. We sent samples everywhere.”
A sample finally reached Twin in England and was liked. “They asked us for a second one, then a third, and finally visited us on the ground at a time when the area was very insecure, with young people walking around armed, and so on. They offered us a lower price than we were receiving in Rwanda, arguing that our coffee was not well known. We finally accepted this loss to promote our coffee in
Europe. Twin ordered six tons of coffee, some of which was sold to Café Liégeois in Belgium. The English organisation then released small budgets so that our cooperative could be structured. Elections are necessary in a cooperative, but we didn’t know that. Its management has to be transparent, there has to be accounting, and we knew nothing about that. It was urgent that we recruit an accountant and some agronomists. That’s how we hired our current accountant, who has been a great help. Six years later, he became CFO and is now Managing Director of Sopacdi.”
Sopacdi took off and expanded its social activities
“We then increased our volumes and complied with Fairtrade standards, which place great emphasis on gender equity within the household. As you know, in our region, women are excluded from managing resources obtained from coffee, even though they work in the fields. A woman was not allowed to hold a meeting with men, to give her point of view. We worked on this subject, and today over 4,000 women are members of the cooperative. They are present in every sector. They can stand for election and vote. Today, men and women attend meetings together, and women from different regions have a committee on which they exchange their experiences.”
“We have also taken care of more marginalised people. We built a primary school for the local Pygmies. We financed the secondary education of four of them, and one went to university. We set up village credit associations for Pygmies, and for women too, because household debt was a major problem in the cooperative.”
Sopacdi has to negotiate a turning point
The Covid-19 crisis and difficulties in accessing the market are jeopardising the distribution of coffee plants and Sopacdi’s social activities. “Every year, we redistribute coffee plants to everyone, whether or not they are Sopacdi members, because we want to promote coffee. Before Covid-19, we sold 23 containers, which generated sufficient premiums to finance this activity.
Unfortunately, we are now down to 13. With nearly 13,000 members, we have to pay over 40 agronomists at the end of each month. It’s difficult to pay all these expenses and carry out our social activities. What’s more, while it was fashionable a few years ago, no customers now ask us for women’s coffee. The activities that used to bring women together will be discontinued. As will the distribution of seedlings to students.”
What are the consequences for producers?
“We only buy from growers the quantities for which we have sales contracts. Because it’s thanks to contracts that the bank releases the money we need to buy coffee from the growers. In the short term, this does not pose too many problems for growers, since the price of coffee on the international market is on the rise, and any coffee not purchased by Sopacdi is purchased elsewhere. If Sopacdi collapsed, it would be bad for the reputation of the Congolese in our region, because Sopacdi is a benchmark cooperative and we were able to demonstrate that we could organise ourselves”.
No shortage of challenges
TDC coach Christophe Grasser confirms the challenges facing Sopacdi, such as the high number of members. “Sopacdi is growing steadily and now has around 13,000 members. Expectations of the cooperative are high, but real collaboration between members and the cooperative has yet to be established. For example, to become a member, a coffee grower has to buy a $10 membership share, which can be paid in instalments. But not everyone is paying their dues and Sopacdi has significant financial problems. Another challenge is the diversity of the members, who are made up of young people, women and Pygmies. Thirdly, new players, such as those present in Virunga Park, use many means of communication, and Sopacdi must find its place in the midst of all this. Sopacdi is like a big liner that needs to be stabilised, but I am confident. And last but not least, the cooperative must no longer have to rely on a single person. We need to strengthen the institutions and people involved, so that they can understand what’s at stake. All these challenges were identified by the Sopacdi team itself. So we’ll be able to work on it.”
TDC support
TDC has been supporting Sopacdi in its development for several years now, whether by investing in nurseries to replace coffee plants or by financing erosion control in an area inhabited by a community of Twas, to help them sustain coffee production.
Today, TDC supports the cooperative in business management and marketing. Christophe Grasser explains the support work, in which the empowerment of the cooperative plays a central role: “We worked with the teams on proposals for action, with around ten Sopacdi people involved, including Joachim. We carried out a SWOT analysis and its inverse, the TOWS analysis, to define a four-year strategic plan based on four major axes. The final step will be to translate this strategic plan into an annual plan and ensure that the methodology is taken up by Sopacdi members so that they themselves can define the indicators and action plan for 2024 and beyond. I really work hand in hand with Raf Vandenbrulle, TDC’s marketing coach, on developing marketing tools, participating in trade fairs, how to meet potential buyers and keep in touch with existing ones; understanding their needs, trying to comprehend the market, making Sopacdi understand that a whole ecosystem works around them and that you have to get involved in the ecosystem to be part of it and be a recognised player. It’s not an easy job. Over the last three or four years, the external context, with the Covid-19 crisis, war tensions and tensions with Rwanda, has made things more difficult. New players have also emerged. How will Sopacdi, one of the leading players in the field, be able to maintain its specific character and its important social role? This is multi-faceted support, but above all, Sopacdi needs to take ownership of the methodologies used, so that it can be autonomous.”
Soil fertilisation and agroecology
In addition to coaching the cooperative, the TDC also provided funding over two years to improve production and soil fertilisation. “The project financed by Enabel’s TDC means that we can purchase new machines for hulling and drying, new drying tables and improved production (manufacture and application of solid and liquid biofertilisers), as well as seedlings for agroforestry. It’s good for the soil but requires a great deal of awareness-raising. We create pilot fields so that growers can compare them with their own and see the benefits of biofertilisers for themselves. This is very important and very useful given the situation in Kivu. As you know, Kivu is a mountainous region whose soils are being washed away by erosion. We’re fighting it, but on what scale? We don’t have the capacity to take the place of the government, which is doing nothing; we’re too small an association.”
Multiple certifications
“We are Fairtrade, Organic, SPP and Rainforest certified. All at the request of buyers. This represents a significant cost, in terms of complying with standards and being audited. SPP pays better than Fairtrade, but we only have a small market, via Ethiquable. Fairtrade is a very good certification because it forces producers to be organised and protects workers and the environment.
This year, we produced 13 containers. We sell a lot in the United States, to Café Import and Cooperative Coffee. Of the 13 containers, nine went to the United States, three were bought by Ethiquable, and Oxfam bought just one from us. Our washing plant enables us to produce all qualities, even the highest, the 88. At Café Import we sell micro-lots of 88 quality. In the USA, consumers have reported that Sopacdi’s coffee is of superior quality to Ethiopian coffees.”
How do you motivate young people to work in the coffee sector?
“It’s a problem. Young people want to earn everything effortlessly. And they would like positions in which they can “abuse”. To work for Sopacdi, they have to have land, because that’s a guarantee that they will stay. You know, you have to look after a field of coffee plants. But educated young people want to wander around cities and urban centres, where they earn next to nothing. And they would like positions in offices or elsewhere, in NGOs. It’s only poverty that makes them come back. But if the price of coffee could stay where it has been for two years, many young people could return to the village and grow coffee.”
Shared history as an argument
And Joachim appealed to the history that links our two countries to ask Belgians to buy Congolese products: “You have to drive looking in the rear-view mirror. Don’t you remember that our relatives were part of what you are? How many of our relatives perished in the pits while mining? And you forget the people who worked for you? That’s ingratitude! The damage you did there is impossible to repair, but this story connects us. You must think of us, not by giving us money, but by buying our products. Get us back to work!”
