Conflict and €offee in Burundi 103The Predatory State
Natural resources form the basis of material wealth for the state. In Burundi's
case the natural resources that are most relevant are land and agricultural
produce. The most important source of income for the state is its foreign cur-
rency earnings through the sale of coffee, tea and cotton, which together
make up 90% of foreign currency income.
The fact that Burundi is relatively poor in other natural resources, such as
gems, minerals, oil or timber, affects how the predatory state is shaped. The
state is built around the formation of wealth through the sale of resources to
an external market and the use of controls and regulations to extract rents
from this trade. It is less concerned with the actual production or extraction
of resources itself. This stands in contrast to the experience of countries like
Sierra Leone, Angola or the neighbouring DRC, where control over those
areas with mineral deposits and the means of extracting them are crucial for
the continued power of the state, and therefore central to the contest with
rebel groups. In Burundi, rebel groups have targeted coffee plantations, tear-
ing down coffee trees, but with the twin aims of reducing government income
and symbolically illustrating the exploitation of the peasants by the govern-
ment, and not primarily in order to capture the coffee harvest themselves.
Looting of the harvest for smuggling and export do occur, but are an isolated
and occasional feature in the country. Wealth creation from agricultural pro-
duce happens at the processing and export stage, which is controlled by the
state.
One of the central characteristics of a predatory state is how it distributes
the profits from the resources it controls. State income is channelled into pri-
vate, often prestige consumption by a small elite, and investment in unpro-
ductive projects, often capital intensive and industrial, which are chosen for
their ability to create rents for their owners and not for their contribution to
the economy and society at large. Furthermore, income is often channelled
into financing repressive state mechanisms such as the aim): which serve to
protect this system from the majority of the population. Burundi fits this
model of a predatory state perfectly.
The use of income from resources to protect the system is not limited to
financing the my. Political opponents are regularly bought out with offers
of lucrative positions in public enterprises or powerful civil service jobs. Such
political appointments to positions of economic extraction can directly con-
nect control over natural resources with levels of violence. As Beatrice Hibou
notes: "In Burundi ... the struggle for control of the most important pur-
chasing offices has been a factor in the development of the civil war."% Three
of the main gold-purchasing bureaux are the fiefs of individual politicians.
and have helped to fund their extremist political parties, thereby directly con-
tributing to funding violence.