New European Union Law on deforestation threatens livelihoods of coffee farmers

Diana Taremwa Karakire

KAMPALA Uganda – A foggy dawn is just giving way to daylight in an upscale suburb east of Kampala. Patience Apolot, a young accountant, joins the queue outside a mobile coffee booth for something once considered very rare in this east African nation: a morning cup of coffee. 

“I can’t afford to miss a cup of coffee before my day starts,” says the 28-year-old. “If I am a few minutes late, the line is longer which may mess up my day.” 

Despite Uganda’s role as a major African coffee producer, Ugandans are tea drinkers, a paradox dating to the colonial era and British rule. In recent years, the government has been trying to change this — a policy decision considered key to weaning the country from its dependence on volatile export markets. 

Adding urgency to this shift are new European Union deforestation regulations, which will place significant new pressures on coffee producing countries while prohibiting coffees from deforested areas, lands forcibly taken from indigenous communities, or involving labor and human rights violations. 

This doesn’t sit well with many coffee producers who, always at the receiving end of European power, now face the brunt of new rules. Some 25 million smallholder farmers produce about 80 percent of the coffee consumed worldwide, many of them in remote places with patchy internet.

“How do you trace how a farmer cares about the environment and climate change?” said Apollo Kaija, a Ugandan economist. “Some of these rules are simply ridiculous, it’s a big threat to the livelihoods of many farmers.”

The government’s response, meanwhile is two-pronged: There’s a race to create a National Traceability System on the one hand, enabling business to continue with conglomerate importers like JDE Peets and Nestle, and an investment in local coffee drinking on the other hand, as a way of developing a new consumer market.

At a sprawling coffee farm in western Uganda, amid lush green trees dripping with red robusta coffee beans, farmer Joan Kokutamba raises her smartphone toward the sky to capture the coordinates of her farm’s location relative to the nearest forest, a task she now has to perform every week during the harvesting season.

“These trees are in a safe location,” she says, gesturing to a group of laborers who are picking the ripened coffee cherry. “The European Union has a climate change challenge. They are the big polluters yet they are imposing on us actions and regulations. It’s not fair.”

Tracking 2 million farms

It’s a scene that is being replicated across Africa, from the highlands of Ethiopia, the continent’s largest grower of Arabica coffee, to robusta plantations in Uganda and Ivory Coast. Like it or not, the implementation of the EU regulations will determine whether millions of African farmers will continue to ship coffee beans to the European market. 

The EU imports more than 70 percent of Africa’s coffee annually, 20 million bags for the 2023-24 season, according to the International Coffee Organization. In recent years however, European interests have shifted toward saving African rainforests, which have shrunk as farmers expand plantations of coffee, palm oil, and cocoa. Africa suffered the highest deforestation rate in the world from 2015 to 2020, losing some 4.4 million hectares, 50 percent of which was observed in east and southern Africa, according to  data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Today, Africa has 16 percent of the world’s last remaining forest cover.

So, the EU has decided that importers, such as JDE Peet and Nestlé, must complete due diligence to ensure that the coffee beans they procure weren't grown on land cut from forests by the end of 2020. That pressure has compelled Uganda’s state-run coffee regulator, Uganda Coffee Development Authority, or UCDA, to embark on a $9 million project to register Uganda’s 2 million coffee farmers. Other companies such as coffee roasters and nonprofits are rushing to help farmers record the GPS data to ensure the continued flow of coffee exports.

“The regulation is good but implementation might be difficult,” said Emmanuel Iyamulemye managing director of the state-run UCDA, pointing out that Uganda is home to the second largest population of coffee producers in the world. Technology company Veritas and coffee roasters are helping with a territorial approach, he said, and the government is also using artificial intelligence to identify areas where people could have planted coffee following deforestation.

Back in Kampala, the coffee booth where Apolot and fellow young professionals in the business district get their coffee was set up by Coffee City, a government-funded project operated by a joint venture between Inspire Africa Coffee and the state-run Private Sector Foundation Uganda, to promote coffee drinking in the country. The two-year-old project aims to set up swanky mobile coffee shops and booths across the country to promote coffee drinking among young people between the ages  of 18 and 35.

The project, funded with a grant of 9.6 billion Ugandan shillings ($2.5 million) also aims to empower young people with skills throughout the coffee value chain in an attempt to attract more people into coffee farming, which is currently dominated by ageing farmers. 

Some analysts believe that while the industry has long been dominated by ageing farmers, younger people can be attracted if the right policies make coffee growing more “profitable and less boring,” said Lubega Jonathan, a trade expert with Kampala based agricultural firm Southern and Eastern Africa Trade, Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI).

“There's need to open up markets and leverage regional markets so that young people tap into these opportunities and sell their products,” he said in an interview. “There’s need for awareness and training beyond farming practices to entrepreneurial practices involving the youths.”  

The participation of young people has already contributed to the ongoing coffee growing campaign that has seen the country’s total coffee production swell to 8.1 million bags in the 2022-23 coffee season, from less than 4 million bags five years ago. The amount of that coffee consumed on the domestic market has increased to more than half a million bags, from less than 200,000 bags four years ago, according to the UCDA. 

“Young people are at the center of this initiative, they are the future of this country,” said Nelson Tugume, the chief executive of Coffee City. “Increased domestic coffee consumption means more jobs for them.”

Advertisements promoting coffee drinking plaster bus stops, taxi stands and public squares, while social media influencers contribute to the trend. It is now common to see young people post photos of themselves in coffee shops.  

Demand and deforestation

Uganda has one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations. People aged 12 to 35 account for a staggering 78 percent of the country’s 47 million people. Youth unemployment remains a major challenge and the government has acknowledged that job creation is not keeping pace with the country’s growth rate. The overall unemployment rate is currently 4.28 percent while the youth unemployment rate is at 6.58 percent. 

Meanwhile, Uganda is also among the countries whose tropical climate, volcanic soils and high mountain peaks offer the ideal growing conditions for arabica coffee as well as robusta.Traditionally, Ugandan coffee is mostly grown by small holder farmers who inter-crop it with bananas and other trees. Most of the coffee farms are very small and farmers rely on family labour during planting, harvesting and post-harvest activities. Over the past decade, Uganda has consistently exported more coffee than most other nations in Africa, even rivaling Ethiopia as the continent’s top grower.

Like many agricultural industries, this has often come at the expense of forests. Africa was once covered in dense rain forests, but they have been quickly disappearing. From 2010 to 2020, Africa lost some 3.94 million hectares  of forests each year, up from  3.28 million hectares per year in the prior decade. Half of Africa’s last remaining forest cover is in Central and Southern Africa, which is also a farming heartland for coffee and cocoa palm oil plantations.

Some of the countries working to protect their forest cover from encroachment by coffee farms include the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is home to some of the continent’s largest rainforests. In the eastern highlands of South Kivu, a charity Technoserve is working with small-scale specialty coffee farmers near the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. In collaboration with Nestlé Nespresso and Olam Food Ingredients, the group is working with thousands of farmers to promote sustainable coffee farming practices, improve coffee production and fight poverty.

“The protection of this national park interests me as a coffee farmer because it ensures that we have timely rainfall for ourselves and our plants, which will allow us to produce a lot of good-quality coffee while protecting the environment,” one coffee farmer, Marcel Ntalambagira told a Technoserve blog in August.

Still, coffee planting has always responded to price spikes, and the prices for robusta, grown in countries like Uganda and Ivory Coast, have nearly doubled over the past twelve months, according to data from the Intercontinental Exchange. The price of Arabica is up by more than 50 percent. Supplies from key producers such as Brazil and Vietnam have dwindled after poor weather hit harvests, leaving markets more dependent on African growers, who account for around 20 percent of global output.

While farmers have traditionally responded by clearing forests to expand plantations, under the current EU legislation this is no longer an option. There are growing fears that many will abandon the industry, which could leave a lasting shortage and worsen structural problems that make coffee farming seem like a low-earning career option for older people.

The majority of coffee farmers in Uganda are between 55 and 70 years old, most of them small-holders who intercrop their coffee with bananas and other trees. Most rely on family labor during planting, harvesting and post-harvest activities.  

Still, a common view is that the biggest threat to Uganda’s coffee exports comes from the  EU’s deforestation regulations.The EU’s largest roaster, JDE Peet, says it is helping Uganda to rehabilitate land deforested and planted with coffee after 2020 according to Nadia Hoarau-Mwaura, the company’s sustainability director. 

It’s no accident, then, that domestic coffee consumption is on the rise.

"Coffee is money"

“With more people drinking coffee in Uganda, the proportion of the exports will also shrink, boosting farmers’ incomes and ending over-reliance on foreign markets”, says Gerald Katabazi, a Ugandan coffee entrepreneur and founder of Volcano Coffee. 

“The Ugandan coffee domestic consumption market is emerging against the will of European Union policy makers,” he said. “Additionally, other  export markets in Asia are also on standby to seize the opportunity.”

Last season, Ugandan farmers exported some 4.1 million bags of coffee to the European Union markets, representing nearly 70 percent of the country’s total 6.2 million bags exported. Ethiopia, Africa’s largest producer with a long cultural history of coffee drinking, consumed more than 40 percent of its own output last year, exporting just 4.8 million bags of coffee from its production of 8.3 million bags.

Kyokutamba, who has been farming on one acre for six years, clearly recognises that more coffee drinking is in her interest.“Unless we drink our coffee then we cannot determine the prices or control the market,” she says. “We cannot wait for Europeans to tell us the quality and taste of our coffee and dictate the price of the coffee.” 

Young people are key throughout the process, from production to consumption, said Niyibigira, of the UCDA, and he provided a glimpse of how the government is approaching a perception shift.

“We are talking to youth that coffee is money and showing them numbers. Their perceptions are changing,” Niyibigira said. “We are bringing them people who have good education and have ventured into coffee as business and made money so as to take away the picture that coffee is only grown by peasants in the villages.”

However, the challenges of creating new consumer markets are numerous, notably corruption —  one of the key enduring obstacles to development in the global south. Last year, the Ugandan parliamentary speaker ordered a probe into entities involved in campaigns such as Coffee City. Lawmakers accuse the groups of failing to set up funded coffee shops that had earlier been planned in far flung cities such as Arua, Mbale and Lira. 

The government had extended around $20 million or more to these entities to promote domestic coffee consumption and find alternative export markets outside of the European Union, notably in Asia and Eastern Europe. The groups have now been accused of lack of transparency.

Tugume scoffs at the accusations. He said the work of the consortium had been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic which slowed down the establishment of some of the coffee shops around the country. The group remains on course, he said, to roll out more shops in new cities that do not yet have one.