UCDA Aiming To Breathe New Life Into Robusta

With the aid of abiTrust, the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) is launching a new initiative which, it is hoped, will help boost the quantity and quality of the country’s robusta crops.

“Many players came on board and started to compete and the quality declined,” said the UCDA’s principal officer of development, Apollo Kamugisha.

As well as the standard of Ugandan grown robusta dropping in recent years, Kamugisha also commented that production levels have been falling too.

Therefore, in response, the UCDA has unveiled their latest project: the Centre of Robusta Excellence (CORE).

CORE’s aim will, hopefully, add value to the domestic coffee sector at all levels, from farmers through to exporters. Alongside this, it is believed that certain experiments will be conducted to accrue information on how improvements could be implemented further down the line.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this initiative is its focus on highlighting the coffee’s provenance once picked and processed.

“Markets want good coffee and the big concern has been how the coffee can be traced back to the farmer,” Kamugisha said.

The project is scheduled to run for three years and in that time Kamugisha hopes to see the widespread adoption of agricultural practices and the upturn of the robusta sector.

Also in Africa, it has been reported that the Ivory Coast produced 126,000 tonnes of robusta during the 2014-15 season, just shy of their target figure of 130,000.