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

¥ RODNEY MUHUMUZA and GASPARD MAHEBURWAFarmers 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…