Conflict and Coffee in Burundi 139
reforms of the late 1980s. State-producer relations worsened over time, pri-
marily because of the authoritarian, top-down orientation. As a result the
agricultural policy was considered a constraint as it constituted a series of
orders from above, showing a sense of omnipresent authoritarianism. Laely
observes that:
"the monopolistic state has not tolerated other forms of organisations
... there were no peasant unions or even any autonomous associations;
indeed, the rural co-operatives were always under such tight state control
that they never succeeded in creating any dynamics of their own."'"The protest culture in coffee-growing areas of the northern provinces of
Burundi has been attributed to the relative accumulation of wealth from a@-
culture and other economic activities in such areas, some of them illi~it.'~
Palipehutu, which took up arms as early as 1980, was originally based in the
northern provinces of Ngozi and Kirundo bordering Rwanda. The confluence
of the Rwandese and the bordering population that is overwhelmingly Hutu
created networks of business activities that ensured that coffee farmers on the
Burundi side who could not get a good price for their crop could smuggle it
across to Rwanda where prices were higher.'" When, to curb the smuggling
of coffee to Rwanda, among other reasons, the Burundi military moved into
the communes of Ntega and Marangara in 1988, violence ensued, resulting in
the infamous Ntega-Marangara massacres that brought home to the new
Buyoya government the reality and explosiveness of pent up resentments.
The confluence of the region's agricultural renown and rebel activity war-
rants further inquiry. This is more so because prior to the turbulence in 1993
that proceeded the overthrow of the Ndadaye government, rebel activity
begun originally in the north spreading to the rest of the country only a cou-
ple of years later. Since the Hutu majority have been discriminated against in
education opport~nities.'~~ they were likely to be less politically conscious to
the extent of being mobilised on the scale that was witnessed during the 1988
violence in the north. The logical conclusion is that rebels tapped strong but
hitherto latent local grievances with respect to the government's agricultural
policies generally and those specific to coffee in parti~ular."~ This they have
been able to do because of rising levels of awareness among farmers about
market information and trends.
This contention is validated by the characteristic inadequacy of market
information in the international coffee environment, whose principal victim
is normally the primary producer. In their study, Nkurunziza and Ngaruko"'
illustrate the skewed provision of education services in favour of the agricul-
turally arid and poor southern provinces at the expense of the country's
northern coffee-producing provinces. Ngozi province, which ranks as a major
producer of coffee, is the least privileged among the country's provinces in
the provision of education infrastructure.