Jane Nalunga (Left), Executive Director of SEATINI, interacts with a colleague
Civil Society Group, Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) has called on African nations to drop the colonial mentality of relying on European, American and Asian markets and start trading at continental level.
The call was made by Jane Nalunga, Executive Director of SEATINI during a dialogue held at Africana Hotel in Kampala to discuss strategies on unlocking African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) through coffee value chain, on 13th March 2025.
She explained, “I think when we are talking about the CFTA, we need to also consider the fact that we need to break the chains of trading outside Africa so that we start trading with each other. We need to break that colonial legacy that it’s easier to go to Europe than to go to West Africa. That when you want to go to North Africa, you have to get out of the continent, then come back, we can’t trade like that.”
Nalunga added: “And when you look at the intra-Africa trade figures, we are just trading 14.9% intra-Africa trade. It’s an opportunity that we can be able to go higher and trade more with each other. Because when you compare Europe and Asia, they trade more with each other.”
Nalunga also called for increased efforts towards encouraging Ugandans to embrace drinking of coffee and tea in order to boost the local market, instead of relying on the international market that is vulnerable to policy changes like is the case with the new policy shifts in the European Union market.
“I was thinking that if we can be able to convince all our hotels to drink our coffee, we can be able to achieve a net of US$2.3 billion per annually. We can’t start talking about trading coffee under the CFTA when we can’t drink it here and when we are importing coffee. I have some statistics here, between June 2023 to June 2024, we imported coffee, tea, cocoa, and spices worth US$18.8 million. So, these are issues which we need to reflect really,” argued Nalunga.
She further argued that for Africa to benefit from trading at continental level, there is need to adopt a positive agenda because for long, Africa has been entangled in the negative agenda characterised by high indebtedness.
Nalunga explained, “What’s the negative agenda? Negative agenda is debt. We are indebted. We know the figures. We are paying so much in servicing the debt, you know. Things are bad. We are indebted, you know. And the figures are there. It’s a negative agenda. Because we need to get out of that indebtedness, isn’t it? So, when we talk about structural transformation, when we talk about leveraging the CFTA, to be able to ensure that we move up the value chain, the coffee value chain, we are talking about a positive agenda, getting out of the challenges we are facing.”
She defended her stance arguing that the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is the biggest free trade area globally because this market is composed of 54 countries with 1.3 billion people, noting, “So, there is a potential in the CFTA. So, on one hand, we have that CFTA, that potential market, which we need to turn into a reality. So, when we talk about the value, coffee value chain, we are talking about moving up from the beans into maybe speciality coffee, into maybe cosmetics, you know, into pharmaceutical, you know, into soluble coffee. So that when we go behind there, we have our coffee.”
Herbert Kafeero, Programs and Communications Manager at SEATINI defended the focus on coffee production as key trading commodity within CAFTA citing figures that indicate that 60% of global coffee production comes from Africa, although he called for the deeper interrogation of these coffee exports as most of these exports are coffee beans, with no value addition.
He noted, “We are one of the top-ranking countries in coffee production. And when I talk about coffee production, there are also issues we need to interrogate because there is coffee production and there is export, and the exports also need to be interrogated because we are still exporters of raw coffee beans. There is limited value addition. So, as we talk about unlocking the potential, or unlocking the CFTA through the coffee value chain, we need to talk about some of the realities.”
Kafeero further argued that although accounts for 60% of global coffee production, there is a huge percentage that smallholder farmers contribute to ensure that exports go out, which he attributed to the structural challenges of lack of value addition and logistical-related challenges.
“But as we talk about unlocking the potential of the CFTA through the coffee value chain, there are realities we need to be alive to. We’ve had challenges across the entire coffee value chain. Challenges of limited value addition, the volatile prices, issues around including given marketing. When you look at the actors in the value chain, it’s the smallholder farmers that are not getting a good share, yet they contribute a lot to coffee production. And we have segmented production because when you look at the smallholder farmers, there are so many out there,” added Kafeero.
According to SEATINI, there is need for Uganda to copy some of the best practises in Ethiopia and Sudan to boost domestic coffee consumption as these are more reliable markets than the foreign markets that are prone to many vulnerabilities.
Kafeero noted, “I think there’s no magic around that. It’s the culture which we can cultivate and inculcate. And if the same is adopted, then we can be able to increase earnings from the same because the domestic market is a sure market. That’s a sure market because the challenges are limited although they are there. But when you look at the global trade landscape, there are so many challenges.”
Among the challenges cited in the foreign coffee market was the European Union Deforestation Regulation under the pretext of reducing global deforestation, yet the same EU contributes 10% to global deforestation which policy shift has implications for the coffee exporting countries like Uganda because the new Rules would require that for a country to export coffee to the European Union, or to put coffee products on the European Union market, there has to be confirmation and data, evidence, due diligence, that the coffee put on the European Union market has no linkage with causing any deforestation or cutting down of trees.
Kafeero explained, “This is problematic because when you look at the coffee production, it’s sedimented. We have so many smaller farmers. Although there was a lot of pressure from coffee exporting countries and there was a pushback that prompted the EU to extend the deadline. But the deadline still remains for small enterprises and also for large-scale enterprises. But for small-scale enterprises, we are looking at this year, end of this year. And if we don’t meet the deadline, there are challenges because we will not be competitive coffee exporters. But as a country, if we are labelled non-compliant, that has implications.”
