Uganda Quits the International Coffee Agreement

7-Feb-2022

Uganda has officially withdrawn from the International Coffee Agreement, becoming the second high-profile coffee-producing producing country to do so within the past two years.

The withdrawal officially came on Wednesday, Feb. 2, after officials from the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) signaled their intention to leave late last year.

Overseen by the International Coffee Organization, the International Coffee Agreement has been signed by nearly all the world’s largest coffee-producing countries and many of the world’s largest coffee-consuming countries. The agreement has existed in numerous iterations since 1962, and it was used to regulate global coffee supplies and stabilize global coffee prices through a quota system from the early 1960s until its collapse in 1989.

Since 1990, in the free-market era of the global coffee trade, the International Coffee Agreement has served as a kind of global pact among many of the world’s major coffee producers and buyers. Its members have vowed to work towards a more sustainable and less volatile global coffee sector, particularly for the benefit of the world’s more vulnerable coffee producers.

Last year, Uganda produced an estimated 5.95 million 60-kilo bags of coffee, including some 5 million bags of robusta and 950,000 bags of arabica. In doing so, the African nation became the world’s fourth-largest global robusta producer and seventh-largest coffee producer overall.

Read the Full Article by Nick Brown