Burundi's economy: export coffee, home-grown cassava

What Burundi's farms actually grow

The Présidence describes an economy resting on agriculture, with coffee and tea as the export crops and cassava, bananas, maize, beans and sweet potatoes as the food that keeps rural households fed. The World Bank's overview gives the scale: 85% of employment is in agriculture, mostly subsistence farming whose output is eaten by the people who grow it and so adds little to measured output. Britannica counts about half of the land as cultivable and a third as pasture.

The harvest figures for 2022, as the Wikipedia economy article gives them, show where the effort goes:

The two crops that earn foreign currency sit near the bottom of the table by weight. The ones that feed the country sit at the top, and almost none of them is sold abroad.

Why the plots are so small

Land is the constraint behind every other figure. The Wikipedia country article gives the average farm as about 0.40 hectares in 2014, and attributes the shrinking plots to population growth and the long absence of coherent policies on land ownership. Britannica adds that livestock is dense enough to overgraze the hills while having almost no commercial value, and that erosion, worsened by clearing land to farm it, is a major constraint on agriculture. The World Bank's overview names the consequence plainly: low-productivity activity dominates, and a large part of the population farms mainly for its own consumption.

How coffee and tea came to carry the exports

Coffee came with Belgian rule. The Wikipedia article on the kingdom records that coffee farming was introduced under the mandate, alongside forced labour. Britannica describes the crop as chiefly arabica and as the principal export and source of foreign exchange, with tea and sugar the other major exports and cotton grown mainly in the Imbo valley. Coffee and tea are grown on the high plateaus and sold on international markets, in the Présidence's description, and remain the main sources of foreign currency.

The crops have not been steady. Coffee production fell by about half during the civil strife of the 1990s and has since rebounded, according to Britannica, while cotton output fell to less than half its level of the early 1990s. The Wikipedia country article describes export earnings, and the ability to pay for imports, as depending mainly on the weather and on the international prices of coffee and tea.

The trade balance has been negative for decades. Britannica records a growing trade deficit from the 1980s, with export earnings usually less than half the cost of imports, and lists the imports as foodstuffs, capital goods and petroleum products. Its list of chief trading partners is China, the United Arab Emirates, India, Switzerland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The World Bank's overview gives the current account deficit as 9.3% of GDP in 2025, narrowed from 11.5% in 2024 by higher mining and coffee exports, with international reserves still low.

Why the war years still weigh on the economy

The economy that entered the civil war in 1993 left it smaller and in debt. A series of five-year plans begun in July 1986 with the World Bank and the IMF, meant to reform the exchange system and the coffee industry, ended when the IMF's programmes were suspended at the outbreak of the crisis in 1993. After the army's coup of 1996 the neighbouring states imposed an embargo; Britannica says it hit all of Burundi's exports and its oil imports, and the United States suspended all but humanitarian aid. Sanctions were eased from 1997 and the regional embargo was lifted on 23 January 1999.

External debt stood at $1.247 billion in 1997, according to the Wikipedia economy article. Much of the foreign debt was forgiven in 2005, Britannica records, and the Wikipedia country article gives a further US$700 million of debt relief in 2009. Britannica's summary is that recovery has been slow.

A second round of isolation followed the crisis of 2015, and Britannica records that the international sanctions imposed then were eased in 2022. The World Bank now funds Burundi through grants from the International Development Association: its overview describes a portfolio of 13 national and 3 regional projects worth $1.6 billion, 41% of it in the category the Bank calls People and 25% in infrastructure.

How prices and the franc have moved

The currency is the Burundian franc, issued by the Banque de la République du Burundi, which also regulates the national and foreign banks. The franc is nominally divided into 100 centimes, but the Wikipedia country article notes that no centime coins have been issued in independent Burundi.

Prices rose fast in the mid-2020s. Human Rights Watch, citing the United Nations, describes an economic crisis in 2024 with inflation at 26% and more than half the population in poverty. The World Bank's overview gives average inflation of 34% in 2025, after a peak of 45.5% in April that year, falling to 8.4% in August 2026 as good harvests eased food prices and a macroeconomic stabilisation programme for 2025 to 2027 stopped the central bank from financing the budget deficit. It lists the remaining pressures as fuel shortages, global energy prices, weather risks and a wide gap between the official and parallel exchange rates.

The public accounts improved in the same period, on the World Bank's figures. The budget deficit narrowed to 4.6% of GDP in 2025 from 6.4% in 2024. Public debt fell to 67.0% of GDP, 71% of it short-term domestic borrowing. Real GDP grew by 4.2% in 2025 after 4.1% in 2024, and the Bank projects 4.2% for 2026 and about 4.7% in 2027 and 2028, on mining and coffee exports and on new power capacity. Its 2026 overview breaks output down as 51% services, 31.6% agriculture and 17.4% industry.

Why fuel and power run short

The Wikipedia economy article records 565 gigawatt hours generated in 2022, half from fossil fuels, mainly oil, and half from renewables, mostly hydropower. Domestic production does not meet demand and the balance is imported from neighbouring countries. Britannica names peat and firewood as the main local fuels.

New dams are meant to close the gap. The Rusumo hydroelectric station, shared equally between Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania, opened in 2023 and added 27 megawatts to Burundi's grid, giving Gitega a steadier supply and allowing an older oil-fired plant to close. A project at Rubirizi is designed for 160 megawatts. The World Bank credits improved electricity supply with strengthening industry in 2025.

Fuel is the harder shortage. Human Rights Watch reports supplies of petrol becoming sporadic from the beginning of 2024, disrupting public transport. The Wikipedia economy article describes a fuel shortage of nearly five years by October 2025, with power cuts and a lack of drinking water in Bujumbura, Gitega and other towns. Every import comes overland or by water: the East African Community's page records no railway, the Wikipedia country article put the paved share of roads at less than 10% in 2005, and the same article notes a passenger and cargo ferry, the MV Mwongozo, between Bujumbura and Kigoma in Tanzania.

What lies underground and who mines it

Britannica describes nickel deposits in the east as considerable and unexploited, alongside reserves of vanadium and uranium as well as phosphates, and geological assessments that suggest petroleum beneath Lake Tanganyika and the Rusizi valley. Actual mining is limited to niobium, tantalum, gold, tin and wolframite. The World Bank's overview calls labour-intensive artisanal and small-scale mining a leading source of foreign earnings already, and says Burundi is reforming its laws and regulations to allow large-scale mining projects.

Manufacturing is small. Britannica describes small-scale processing plants concentrated mostly in Bujumbura, a brewery and a textile company among the largest, and the processing of cotton, coffee, tea and sugar. The Wikipedia country article adds the assembly of imported components, public works, and light consumer goods such as blankets and soap. Lake Tanganyika and the interior lakes and rivers supply tilapia and other fish.

Who feeds the country when harvests fail

The World Food Programme describes a population of whom more than 70% struggle to make ends meet and in which nearly 56% of children under five are stunted. It records more than 1.9 million people at crisis levels of food insecurity, recurring weather extremes that displace rural families, and 70,000 refugees from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo arriving after mid-February 2025. Funding shortfalls cut refugee rations from 75% to 50% of the recommended daily calories.

Some of the response runs through the farms. In 2024 the programme fed more than 753,000 schoolchildren in 885 schools and put US$6.8 million into local economies by buying food for those meals from smallholder farmers, with the aim of a national home-grown school feeding programme reaching every elementary pupil by 2032. In 2024 it also supported more than 29,000 cooperative members in rice, maize, beans and milk.

Where refugees and returnees fit in

The same programme works with people moving across the borders in both directions. In 2024 it gave cash transfers and training to 8,000 refugees across five camps, and emergency food or cash to more than 430,000 returnees and severely food-insecure households, while helping the government build a single national social registry. It also reconditioned 25,000 tonnes of maize for the national food reserve agency that year and trained its warehouse staff. The World Bank has written about refugees in Burundi as a source of local enterprise; its 2024 feature on the subject describes refugees and Burundians starting businesses together.

What private finance is doing

The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank's private-sector arm, concentrates on finance, agribusiness and sustainable energy in Burundi: the Bank's 2026 overview gives its commitments as $18.4 million to the banking sector and $8 million for feasibility work on power generation and distribution. The Bank's own diagnosis is that Burundi's climate and soils would let small firms process farm produce for regional and global markets if the business environment and the agribusiness system were less constrained.

Trade policy is set mostly in the regional blocs. Burundi has belonged to the GATT since 13 March 1965 and to the World Trade Organization since 23 July 1995, and it is a member of both the East African Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. The East African Community's own country page gives a nominal GDP of US$3.2 billion on 2018 statistics.

The government's own plan, adopted in 2024, is the vision of an emerging country by 2040 and a developed one by 2060. The Présidence lists its priorities as modernising agriculture, promoting enterprise and youth employment, and improving the business climate; the World Bank's overview describes a national development plan updated to carry it out.