Uganda has announced a two-year suspension of its membership from the International Coffee Organisation (ICO) in attempt to pressurize the organisation to address its concerns as a coffee producing country.
The country has been trading its coffee under the 2007 ICO agreement, which stakeholders say does not favour farmers and other players. According to Uganda Coffee Development Authority’s managing director, Mr Emmanuel Iyamulemye, suspending membership for two years will give Uganda a chance to use the resources to further enhance our coffee sector and focus on the aspirations of Coffee Roadmap to increase production to 20 million bags by 2025/30.
“In this regard, our strategy is to strengthen the coffee sector regionally by advocating projects through the Inter-African Coffee Organisation (IACO),” said Iyamulemye.
Expectations
UCDA says the country’s position will be instrumental to incorporate key performance indicators to all the objectives mentioned in the Agreement. Some of the expectations from Uganda in this negotiation is for ICO to look at taking into the value added coffee and not only the green beans.
“Then we raised the issue of the volatility of price of coffee which is done by certain few individuals and they come up with the global composite indicator price. Ideally, the composite indicator price favors the consuming countries like USA, German and UK who buy the green been add value and later get the better prices,” UCDA report shared.
According to UCDA, Uganda not joining the two-year extension of ICA 2007 will however not affect coffee exports or trade in any way. This is because ICO does not regulate coffee trade. Non-ICO members including Guatemala, Paraguay, and China, export coffee in the same way while United States and Turkey are still importing coffee after leaving ICO.
“During the two years, Uganda will still issue the ICO Certificate of origin on coffee exports. All exports of coffee from member and non-members of ICO have country codes on their certificates of origin,” Iyamulemye noted.
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