A landlocked, impoverished, densely populated country, Rwanda faces steep challenges in the quest to improve the quality of life of its people, who are mostly small-scale farmers. One solution promoted by the Sustaining Partnerships to enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD) project, which I visited last month with the leaders of the East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network, is helping farmers produce higher-quality crops, which can be sold for premium prices on international markets. In this way, farmers can increase their income by producing better crops, rather than producing more—since in Rwanda, there isn’t any more land to go around.

Coffee is Rwanda’s primary export, so SPREAD focuses its efforts there, although it also targets other high-value crops like chili peppers. SPREAD helps organize farmers into cooperatives with their own bylaws and elected leaders; for instance, the highly successful Maraba cooperative includes 1,400 farmers and their families. Agricultural extension agents show farmers techniques for raising the quality of their coffee. One innovation SPREAD has introduced is coffee bikes, which are specially designed eight-speed mountain bikes that can carry up to 300 kg of coffee cherries. SPREAD found that coffee transported to processing stations on the bikes scored 3.5 SCAA quality points higher than coffee transported by foot or truck, due to shorter average times between harvesting and processing.

SPREAD has provided the impetus for the construction of 120 coffee washing stations (CWS) during the past several years, and has also set up three CWS support centers, which assist with quality control. Washing coffee before and after fermentation is key to preserving its quality. SPREAD has made sure to incorporate a number of environmental initiatives into coffee growing and processing, including mulching coffee trees and digging trenches around them to prevent erosion on Rwanda’s steep hillsides; purchasing new water-efficient coffee-washing machines; filtering the CWS wastewater before releasing it into the river; and using vermiculture (worms) to process coffee pulp and mucilage into organic fertilizer. As SPREAD’s Jean Marie Irakabaho put it, growing coffee without caring for the land is like milking a cow without feeding it.

SPREAD has incorporated family planning (FP) and health initiatives into its agricultural work. The same coffee extension workers who teach farmers how to improve the quality of their coffee have been trained to deliver basic health and FP messages and products to them. Working closely with the district government and local health center, SPREAD staff focus primarily on improving maternal and child health; FP; HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, and treatment; and water, sanitation, and hygiene. A weekly radio program, “Imbere Heza” (“Bright Future”), integrates coffee-growing and health information.

SPREAD, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and led by the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M; University, knows it won’t be around forever, so it is striving to make its improvements to Rwandan livelihoods permanent. It created the Rwanda Small Holder Specialty Coffee Company (RWASHOSCCO), a cooperative-owned company that helps cooperatives market and export their coffee. Specialty Rwandan coffee can now be found in online stores like Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee and Allegro Coffee, as well as in cafes around the world. At the East Africa PHE Network workshop, our coffee breaks featured wonderful coffee from the Maraba cooperative. I encourage all coffee connoisseurs to taste for themselves the delicious results of sustained investment in the livelihoods, agriculture, environment, and health of Rwanda’s coffee farmers!

Rachel Weisshaar attended the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. See previous posts on the New Security Beat: “Rwanda: More Than Mountain Gorillas,” “East Africa PHE Network: Translating Strong Results Into Informed Policies,” and “East Africa Population-Health-Environment Conference Kicks Off in Kigali.”

Photo: Jean Marie Irakabaho (left), chief agronomist and coffee research coordinator at SPREAD, shows the beds where worms are being raised to digest coffee pulp and mucilage, while local children look on. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

The security community needs to “tell leaders that they won’t be able to guarantee security in a world where we don’t control climate change,” says Nick Mabey in this video from the Environmental Change and Security Program. “Because unless we have the authority of the security establishment and the foreign policy establishment at the table,” he says, “there’s no chance of both delivering the trillions of dollars needed to create a new clean energy economy, but also mak[ing] those tough choices.”

If you’ve visited Rwanda, chances are you’ve seen the country’s famous mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park. The endangered gorillas are such a national treasure that the ceremony when each year’s baby gorillas are named is a huge public event. Yet most foreign tourists never visit the country’s other attractions, which include Akagera National Park in the east and Nyungwe National Park in the southwest.

Destination Nyungwe Project (DNP), which I visited yesterday with the leaders of the East Africa PHE Network, is trying to change all that. It envisions Nyungwe National Park becoming a world-class tourist destination, and improving the livelihoods of the local people in the process. In fact, as project director Ian Munanura sees it, ensuring the park benefits local communities is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s fine to tell people not to cut down trees in the forest, or not to poach endangered animals, but they will continue these activities unless they have another way to make a living.

Nyungwe has a lot to offer; as the largest montane rainforest in Africa, it boasts 13 species of primates, including chimpanzees and colobus monkeys, as well as nearly 300 species of birds. It also has a relatively well-developed network of hiking trails. DNP is working on several projects intended to boost the park’s tourism appeal, including an interpretive visitor center, high-end tented campsites, and a rainforest canopy walk on a bridge suspended between two towers.

As these larger projects are constructed, DNP—which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and implemented by International Resources Group, Family Health International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society—is also working to improve the health, livelihoods, and environmental management of the local communities. A health coordinator works with local clinics to improve maternal and child health, family planning and reproductive health, and hygiene. Health and family-planning activities are key to ensuring the park’s survival because high population growth, and the resulting demand for land, is one of the key threats to the park, says Munanura. A small-grants program provides micro-loans to local people for sustainable livelihoods, such as setting up cultural tourism attractions or producing soap, lotion, and oils from forest products.

Nyungwe National Park still struggles to attract tourists, as it lacks the luxury accommodations offered at Volcanoes National Park. But according to Munanura, 80 percent of visitors to Nyungwe hear about it through word-of-mouth, suggesting that those who do visit are extremely satisfied with their experience. These visitors would probably be even more satisfied knowing that their vacations were helping communities escape from poverty and disease. We will be following the progress of this innovative project with interest.

Rachel Weisshaar is attending the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. She will be posting daily updates on the New Security Beat throughout the week (see days one and two).

Photo: Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

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“The road to inaction is paved with research reports,” said Marya Khan, our Population Reference Bureau facilitator, opening today’s East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network workshop on bridging the research-to-policy gap.

Rwandan Minister of Natural Resources Stanislas Kamanzi officially launched the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network this morning, stating that Rwanda’s highest-in-Africa population density of 365 people per square kilometer—which he argued leads to environmental degradation and poor human health in both rural and urban areas—compels an integrated approach to development. Kamanzi said that Rwanda’s National Environment Policy and national development plan, Vision 2020, both recognize population-health-environment (PHE) links, and he expressed Rwanda’s commitment to implementing the recommendations of the First Inter-ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa, which was co-hosted by the World Health Programme and the UN Environment Programme in Gabon in August 2008.

“Human-animal conflicts have assumed alarming proportions in the region,” Asghar Inayati, a regional wildlife warden in Kashmir, recently told Inter Press Service (IPS) News. Since India and Pakistan gained independence in 1949, both sides have fought for control of the territory. Not only has the decades-long conflict claimed 100,000 lives (by some estimates), it has also displaced animals from their natural habitats, sparking violent encounters with local people and threatening many species’ survival.

Global sea level is projected to rise between 7 and 23 inches by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Recent melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has prompted geophysicists at the University of Toronto and Oregon State University to warn that global sea level could rise 25 percent beyond the IPCC projections. These catastrophic long-term predictions tend to overshadow the potentially devastating near-term impacts of global sea-level rise that have, in some places, already begun.

I’m a little over halfway through my brief stay here at the Wilson Center. This fellowship was made possible by CNN: They laid me off, along with my entire science, tech, and environment news team, in December.

We’re not alone: Many reporters and producers like us have found new meaning to the phrase “working journalist.” Non-working journalists now represent a significant piece of the pie.

Rightly or wrongly, many top news executives view beats like science and environment as peripheral to the journalistic mission, or at least to the business plan, of their organizations. Attention to these topics in the general media has a hard time competing with things viewed as more central, whether it’s politics or Paris Hilton.

On Thursday, February 12, in the Wilson Center’s Flom Auditorium, we’ll celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday by discussing how to make sure science and environment reporting doesn’t perish from this earth.

Two of the most accomplished science and environment reporters in Washington will join us: Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press and Elizabeth Shogren (not yet confirmed) of NPR. Seth and Elizabeth were among the best chroniclers of the environmental controversies that marked the Bush era, and are closely tracking the promised “change” that may (or may not) be underway in the Obama administration. Both are alumni of news organizations that have recently seen traumatic change: Seth as a correspondent for the Washington Bureau of Knight-Ridder, and Elizabeth for the Los Angeles Times.

Also on the agenda is the future of journalism itself: Newspapers as we now know them may be terminally ill; TV broadcast news as we know it may be five or 10 years behind. Panelist Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab at American University, will bring her expertise on new- and community-based media. J-Lab is a journalism R&D; center, focusing on providing both guidance and financial support to citizen journalism projects. Jan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, will help us see the way to what journalism will look like 10 and 20 years from now.

Space is limited, so RSVP to the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program soon. If you can’t make it to D.C., you can watch the webcast live.

Photo: Peter Dykstra. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Peter Dykstra is the former executive producer for science, technology, environment, and weather at CNN, and a current public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He also writes for www.mnn.com.

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