The Bitter Harvest: Coffee, Power, and the Rwandan Catastrophe

Key Insights

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• The Monopsony of the Bean: The Rwandan state utilized coffee as a primary mechanism of rural control, maintaining a monopsony that allowed the elite to extract wealth from cheap, abundant rural labor.
• The Rational Dictatorship: The Habyarimana regime functioned as a rational actor, balancing loyalty and repression through the “price of loyalty” (producer prices) funded by international coffee markets.
• The Logic of Collapse: When global coffee prices collapsed in the late 1980s, the regime could no longer “buy” loyalty. It pivoted to extreme repression and the mobilization of genocidal ideologies as a cheaper survival strategy.

References

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1. Wintrobe, R. (1998). The political economy of dictatorship. Cambridge University Press.
2. Desforges, A. (1999). Leave none to tell the story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch.
3. Prunier, G. (1995). The Rwanda crisis: History of a genocide. Columbia University Press.
4. Uvin, P. (1998). Aiding violence: The development enterprise in Rwanda. Kumarian Press.
5. Verwimp, P. (2003). The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide. European Journal of Political Economy, 19(2), 161–181.