In DRC’s Ituri, women coffee farmers wrestle with an uncertain future

Local cooperatives are stepping in to support vulnerable farmers, mostly women, struggling in conflict-ridden eastern DRC. Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo – Early each morning, 50-year-old Kavira Matsetse walks for two hours to reach her coffee plantation in Biakato, in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ituri province. The conflict has also made it difficult to gauge the exact amount of coffee production happening in eastern DRC; and challenges in the region continue to embitter farmers towards growing coffee. SOCODEVA also has coffee nurseries where they grow coffee seedlings, “which are then distributed to coffee growers for free”, the cooperative’s coordinator Jean Louis Kathaliko told Al Jazeera. “It requires less manual labour, unlike coffee which needs rigorous upkeep and constant maintenance,” she noted, adding that many other farmers she knows have either abandoned their coffee trees or are seriously considering the move.