Uganda withdrew from the International Coffee Organization (ICO) effective February 2. This comes upon the decision not to renew their two-year extension of their membership. Uganda indicated its intention to withdraw last September. Uganda is the world’s eighth largest producer of coffee, and the fourth largest producer of robusta in the world and Africa’s largest robusta producer.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) wants the ICO and its agreement to do more with price volatility, climate change, and import tariffs.
“We want to have our interests catered for,” said UCDA managing director Emmanuel Iyamulemye in an interview on Feb 11 in Uganda’s capital city Kampala. “We think the ICO needs reforms.”
Industry insider Judith Ganes, president of J. Ganes Consulting told Bloomberg that disenchantment with the ICO and member withdrawal will be one of the challenges facing Vanusia Nogueira, ICO's recently elected executive director.
According to its website, ICO, set up in London in 1963, is the main intergovernmental organization for coffee, bringing together exporting and importing governments to tackle the challenges facing the world coffee sector through international cooperation. With Uganda's withdrawal, ICQ, may have to change its website claim from November 2019 that ICO's "member governments represent 98% of world coffee production and 67% of world consumption.”
Uganda is the third major country to withdraw from ICO in recent years: the US, a major ICO funding partner exited in 2018 under the Trump administration; and Guatemala, a major coffee producer left in 2020. However, ICO gained major members in 2021: UK joined as a separate country after leaving the EU, and Nigeria, listed as the world’s 41st largest coffee producer joined in 2021.