Abstract
Rwanda under the Habyarimana Regime was populated by smallholders growing coffee for export. This chapter studies the political and economic saliency of the coffee sector for the state budget and the power of the regime, building on Wintrobe’s model of dictatorship. In times of high world market prices the ruler buys loyalty from the peasant producers by offering a high producer price. This policy becomes unsustainable under declining world market prices as a result of which the ruler switches to repression to maintain power.
I cannot cultivate the land the whole year while watching merchants drive Mercedes.
Rwandan peasant in 1990 (In Agriculture African, no 3, April 1990, authors’ translation from French).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Uwezeyimana (1996), pp. 51–55.
- 2.
The Kenyan coffee sector, by way of comparison, was run differently. Kenyan coffee producers were free to chose to cultivate coffee or not and were not subject to government imposed producer prices (Bevan et al. 1989).
- 3.
Newbury and Newbury (2000), p. 868
- 4.
I refer Chap. 1 for the foundation of this approach
- 5.
Tullock (1987), Autocracy
- 6.
Personal communication with the author, March 4, 1999.
- 7.
Wintrobe (1998).
- 8.
The price of loyalty received by suppliers of loyalty may differ from the price paid by the dictator for a unit of loyalty. The latter may include all the costs incurred by the dictator to create and maintain loyalty. In the remainder of the text however, we do not make a difference between these two prices, hence we can drop the subscript S (and D for that matter) from the loyalty function.
- 9.
In a more complex version of the model, the objective function of the dictator features both power and personal consumption. Although this is certainly more realistic, it is not necessary to study the main characteristics of the political economy of coffee and dictatorship in Rwanda.
- 10.
Interested readers are referred to Capéau and Verwimp (2012). A working paper version of the paper is available as Berlage et al. (2003), Dictatorship in a single export crop economy, Discussion Paper, Centre for Economic Studies, Leuven, November. A reduced-from version was previously published in 2001 in the European Journal of Political Economy.
- 11.
The benevolent dictator is similar to the ‘developmental dictator’ in Olson’s or Robinson’s term.
- 12.
Little and Horowitz (1987) and (1988)
- 13.
I refer to Chap. 2
- 14.
Bart (1993), pp. 93–94 and pp. 108–115.
- 15.
Tardiff-Douglin et al. (1993), p. 8.
- 16.
Human Rights Watch found out that the regime sold the present and future earnings from the tea plantation in Mulindi to buy weapons from Egypt for the value of 6 million US dollars.
- 17.
Author’s own calculation based on the DSA data set.
- 18.
We can also look at the quality of the coffee as an indication for the decreasing interest of the farmer in the cash crop. In the beginning of Habyarimana’s reign, 70 % of Rwanda’s coffee was of standard quality with some 4 % reaching superior quality. Towards the end of the 1980s, 70 % was of only ordinary quality. See Uwezeyimana (1996), p. 77.
- 19.
Revealingly, Colonel Mayuya was replaced by Colonel Bagosora as member of the board of directors of the Bank of Kigali in 1988. Bagosora, now in custody in Arusha, is known as one of the major architects of the 1994 genocide.
- 20.
Using a comparative statics analysis in the article published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics (2012) co-authored by B.Capéau and myself we find more evidence for this ‘bad’ side of the benevolent dictator.
- 21.
We are leaving here a political economy of coffee and replace it by a political economy of ethnicity. In both analytical frames it is the quest for loyalty from the leaders point of view that is at the center of attention.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Verwimp, P. (2013). The Political Economy of Coffee and Dictatorship. In: Peasants in Power. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6434-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6434-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-6433-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6434-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)