“UCDA should transform from an authority into a profit-driven value-chain manager in a public-private partnership with global coffee giants like Nestlé.”

“Import substitution manufacturing is key to creating a productive, rich middle-class Uganda that will drink coffee.”

Coincidence perhaps. We had been musing over Mzee Mashurubu’ s Lockdown Exam questions. One such piercing question stated the strange but true fact of Germany having no single coffee tree on her soil, yet she earns USD 3 billion from coffee annually.

This is pitted against Uganda, where the average number of coffee trees is 5 per person, in a population of 42 million people, and earns only USD 500 million annually from coffee.

The question then challenges Ugandans to picture the destiny of a child born today to a coffee baron in Köhln, against that of a child born today to a coffee farmer in Kyabakuza.

As we scratched heads for answers, in came the media report that Uganda Coffee Development Authority (https://ugandacoffee.go.ug/ )  is inviting foreign experts to teach Ugandans to drink coffee. It went viral and received not so charitable reactions from Ugandan netizens.

The Authority has since come out and clarified what they really meant. In the interim, one director at UCDA was on Radio Maria Kampala reiterating the authority’s determination to increase Uganda’s coffee earnings through producing more, targeting 20,000,000? bags.

This captured the attention of Mzee Mashurubu, as we listened to the UCDA official. ‘More of the same thing… what we did even before independence’, was Mzee’s reaction, arguing that we are in the era of branding, speciality marketing and niching, yet our coffee is still sold as a commodity. And not only a commodity, but an anonymous, nameless commodity, since our coffee is simply used to blend and add flavour to other poor taste coffees from elsewhere by the roasters.

Speciality coffees, once branded, positioned and patented, do fetch high premium, even as beans [cases of a kilo going for USD 40 have been documented]. Even this one has eluded us, with our singular focus on quantities where we fight for a glutted market with fellow African and Third World producers.

The onus, says Mzee, lies with us to undertake simple but affirmative BUBU economic measures, if we are to truly earn our living from coffee. For starters, it should be UCDA transformed from an authority into a parastatal: from a sector regulator, to a profit-driven value-chain manager.

Incorporated as a subsidiary of Uganda Development Corporation (UDC), financed with domestic and borrowed funds… in majority public-private partnership with known global coffee giants, wakina Nestlé. ..

This latter will come in with technology at its highest, and soon, Uganda will be exporting speciality, branded coffee in all forms and presentations.

And instead of focusing on growing the number of bags produced, we shall focus on the quality along the value-chain, from the farm to the cup, the way Italian coffee giant Illy does it ( to the level of running a university of coffee!).

Beyond the beverage, this high tech company will equally produce caffeine for the pharmaceutical industry. This is another key sector, where we virtually depend on imported active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs, the actual medicine), notable of which is caffeine from coffee.

The million dollars we spend here will be saved, besides technology and skills. And Ugandans will then ‘learn’ to drink coffee. It is only a productive, rich middle-class Uganda that will drink coffee.

This will only happen when we deliberately, painfully, consistently, focus on import substitution manufacturing. We cannot keep importing toilet paper, toothpicks, napkins; drinking straws … and expect to increase our coffee intake, despite its medical benefits.

This is when the Kyabakuza farmer’s son will have a chance of meeting the Köhln coffee baron’s son in a university lecture room in Berlin. It is possible.

Cover Photo Image Credit: Rachel Hinman, Flickr

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