How farmers in Burundi banded together to get fair prices for avocados

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Farmers in a remote part of Burundi know to look for a truck parked by a highway when they want to sell their avocados

KAYANZA, Burundi — Farmers in a remote part of Burundi know to look for a truck parked by a highway when it is time to sell their avocados. They materialize from villages and form a crowd around the vehicle, watching closely as crews weigh and load the crated fruits.

Such roadside exchanges, repeated regularly during peak harvest season, long provided a ready market for smallholder avocado growers in a country that’s sometimes ranked as the world’s poorest. But the transactions now promise real earnings thanks in part to the intervention of the national government and farmers’ cooperatives that worked to set terms for foreign avocado dealers.

Just a year ago, farmers selling their avocados to the transporters earned 10 cents per kilogram (2.2 pounds), far less than the price for a small bottle of water. These days, they get roughly 70 cents for the same quantity, a meaningful increase for people who mainly farm to feed their families.

A major change in the trade is that payments in U.S. currency now go into the bank accounts of cooperatives that pay their members directly almost as soon as the avocado haulers leave. Acting as intermediaries, groups such as Green Gold Burundi, which has its headquarters in the northern province of Kayanza and represents 200,000 farmers nationwide, say they are better positioned than individual growers to stem exploitation.

The participation of the cooperatives is an important step toward regulating the country's avocado exports, said Ferdinand Habimana, vice president of Green Gold Burundi’s administrative board. Although the government is promoting avocado farming to