The National Coffee (Amendment) Bill, 2024 has generated controversy. On Thursday, October 31, New Vision’s Umaru Kashaka spoke to the Minister of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, Frank Tumwebaze, who tabled the proposed law in Parliament in March.
Your Bill has generated controversy; what do you say about this?
First of all, I think many people have chosen to play politics and are not willing to understand the merits of why the Government wants a streamlined and rationalised structure of delivering services. I do not think that they are debating the development of coffee anymore; it is only politics that I see.
The exercise of rationalisation is not about Uganda Coffee Development Authority [UCDA] alone; it is a re-organisation of the entire government structure of service delivery.
Rationalisation seeks to eliminate scattering of scarce resources across many government institutions doing the same work. It seeks to consolidate resources and efforts. Is that a bad policy? Certainly not. I see other voices saying that why not reduce on the other arms of the Government? That is not a problem.
Maybe this debate about the rationalisation of agencies could give us a starting point on the need for an entire public sector reform (Parliament size, Cabinet, districts, among others).
Why are some people not trusting a word the Government says about this Bill and why do they believe the worst will happen when UCDA is transferred to your ministry?
How can someone say that I do not trust the intentions of the Government, but yet again trust UCDA? UCDA is part of the Government and was created by the latter. I think Ugandans forget so easily.
The very same voices now bidding for UCDA were the same that harshly condemned it last year that it had withdrawn membership from the International Coffee Organisation [ICO] and that because of that withdrawal, Ugandan coffee was going to suffer and lose market.
I have not seen Ugandan coffee lose market. To the contrary, the prices have been increasing exponentially. They condemned UCDA, condemned me as the minister, and called us all sorts of names as clueless people messing up the coffee sector. The same voices that condemned UCDA for withdrawing from ICO are now claiming that UCDA is internationally accredited.
That is why I choose to sometimes keep quiet on some of these people, especially when the debate is deliberately driven to take on unnecessary polarising sentiments.
So, there is nothing lacking in the agriculture ministry as far as coffee is concerned?
Yes, there are no systems lacking in the ministry. All the ministry needs is more staffi ng and funding. Be it UCDA or the ministry, the real production of coffee is done on farms by private people — the farmers.
The major role of the Government is to avail the farmers with quality disease-free and resistant coffee seedlings. The other role is regulation of the whole value chain to ensure adherence to the correct agronomical practices.
The disease-free seedlings that have helped Uganda to develop its coffee crop have for years been developed by the National Coffee Research Institute[1]Mukono [NACORI-Mukono], which is under the National Agricultural Research Organisation [NARO], not UCDA.
As the minister of agriculture, I have been appealing to all authorities (fi nance ministry, Parliament, among others) to increase funding for agricultural research, but we never get that much needed support.
How I wish all those voices well mobilised and charged for UCDA can join me to advocate for more funding to NACORI/NARO, which is the breeding house for all the coffee we are proud of.
Currently, coffee seedlings are scarce. In most coffee nursery beds, a seedling of coffee is now about to hit sh3,000. The demand is so high. That means NACORI must be funded more to produce more and more disease-free coffee foundation seed for the nursery operators to multiply.
There is no future for coffee if the development of the current high-quality disease-free foundation seed being produced by NACORI is not prioritised and funded. I ask all those doing coffee activism to know this.
All a coffee farmer wants is the correct seed and correct advisory on handling the commodity across the value chain and markets.
This can be done by UCDA or any other government department that is designated and supported. We do not have to spend sleepless nights debating this. If UCDA had not been supported by the Government, what would it have done?
And has the agriculture ministry been doing nothing? Certainly not. Despite it being a chronically under-funded ministry, it has been fi ghting all diseases in the country and pests such as foot-and-mouth disease, coffee wilt and banana wilt successfully.
So, if we want the future of coffee guaranteed, let us fund more NARO/NACORI to continue producing more affordable disease-free coffee varieties.
The rest will be done by the farmers and other value chain actors. Any other agency or department can be tasked and supported to do quality control and enabling regulation.
‘Nothing is complex’
Some of your critics say the work of UCDA is beyond your capacity as a ministry. How would you respond to them?
That talk that the ministry of agriculture cannot handle the work of UCDA and that it has no capacity is another falsehood. What is that work of UCDA that is so complex? The staff in UCDA are agronomists that offer agricultural extension work, just like those of the ministry.
Most, if not all staff in UCDA, came from the ministry. They moved to UCDA because of better pay that the agencies had over ministries.
The current UCDA managing director, Dr Emmanuel Iyamulemye, for example, came from the ministry. So, there is nothing technical that UCDA staff are doing that the ministry staff cannot do; the difference has only been in staff remuneration.
UCDA has been licensing actors in the value chain and regulating export standards. Is that too complex work not to be done in the ministry?
The same desk will be put in/returned to the ministry to do the same work, just like it will be for dairy and dairy products. So, there is nothing that UCDA has been doing that will be lost.
The agriculture ministry, like any other ministry, is structured according to the public service governance framework. It has three divisions of; crop, livestock and fisheries with all enabling departments. The departments can be expanded as the scope of work expands.
The ministry has been here since the colonial days. All staff in UCDA and other agencies came from it (agriculture ministry).
Agencies like UCDA and the National Agriculture Advisory Services have only been more funded than the ministry and this has been a cross-cutting problem in the whole Government; a problem that now the Government wants to fix with rationalisation.
My appeal to them [critics] is that coffee is for all of us. Whoever has a garden of coffee; small or big, like I do personally, is an equal stakeholder. It is, therefore, arrogance to believe and assert that coffee is for a few or a certain region. This is wrong and it does not help the future of our country.
LEAD PHOTO CAPTION: Coffee House where offices of the UCDA are located. The building is located on Jinja Road in Kampala.
