By KT Reporter
The Uganda coffee value-chain taskforce has started piloting digital traceability tools to facilitate efforts towards ensuring compliance with the European Union Deforestation Regulations (EUDR) in the country.
In 2023, the European Union member states passed a regulatory requirement for deforestation-free products for any country that wishes to continue exporting to their market.
The regulation, whose timeline was set for December this year, requires proof that agricultural commodities such as coffee are not contributing to deforestation, which poses a serious challenge, given the need to align with sustainability standards while ensuring coffee industry growth.
The Uganda Coffee Platform: a taskforce that brings together technical teams from the Ministry of Agriculture, Development partners and private value-chain actors, has unveiled two digital tools as a response to the critical coffee traceability requirement for compliance with regulations.
Judith Muvara, the Advocacy and Communications Officer at Café Africa;-the coordination unit of the taskforce, says that the team has introduced two digital applications that can be used to trace the coffee all through the production and value addition chains up to the final marketplace.
She indicates that the digital applications, Farmerlink and Symos, have been linked with the national coffee farmers’ database, which enables the exporter and financial consumer to trace the origin of the commodity right from the farm where it was grown.
Since last year, the government has been registering coffee farmers and issuing them unique identifiers as proof that a farmer did not clear a forest to establish a plantation.
Muvara explains that the developed applications enable the intermediary coffee dealers, processors and aggregators, cooperative societies, exporters and final traders in the international market, to trace the origin of the coffee by searching using the farmer’s identification number, to prove compliance with the regulations.
She says that applications have been piloted on coffee farmers’ cooperative societies and dealers in Kalungu district, where they proved to be effective.
She indicates that the innovations are a great milestone in the country’s journey towards compliance with the EU coffee export regulations.
According to her, the task force will soon start sensitising all the coffee value-chain actors about the effective use of the developed traceability tools.
The coffee buyers enter the unique identifiers of the individual framer into the system to generate a verification batch number, which is passed on to the exporter and eventually attached to the shipment, to facilitate backwards tracing at the final market stage.
Wim Simonse, the Chief Executive Officer of ExoLink, a German company that developed Farmerlink, one of the piloted digital tools, says the software can operate both online and offline, making it compatible with all categories of users, regardless of their geographical location.
He indicates that they have spent a full year working on the software before it was tested, describing it as a viable solution for tracing coffee throughout its production and supply chain.
Rauben Keimusya, the Assistant Commissioner for Coffee Production in the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, says that innovation is going to guarantee the country’s coffee export market, which is the biggest destination of Uganda’s coffee produce apparently-URN. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com
