Coffee Tour Dispatch # 4 - Uganda: New coffee from the old world

Sitting in a bus stop restaurant yesterday deciding whether rice, fried chicken and chips would be a good meal choice, a young, Irish traveller got talking to us. After he found out we were Fair Trade coffee buyers, he asked "How do you decide which groups to buy from?"

The story of the Gumutindo Cooperative we recently spent 5 days with is some sort of reply to the Irishman's question. Unlike the Oromia Coffee Farmers Union in Ethiopia whom we have been buying from since 2001, our history with Ugandan coffee is very new, with the first NZ shipment only landing this year.

Trade Aid had been looking for some new African coffee varieties to respond to the New Zealand roasting market who are long-time lovers of Kenyan coffee but whose Fair Trade supply chain is at best small and tentative.
In the a wider 'family' of Fair Trade traders who are partnering with different cooperatives all over the globe, from time to time recommendations get made of a particular cooperative who have the promise of quality, financial soundness, and organizational capacity. In this case Twin Trading - a coffee buyer and capacity building organization with strong links to Trade Aid made the suggestion of Gumutindo.

The story of the Gumutindo cooperative has its genesis in the dark days that was Idi Amin's terror filled regime of the 1970s.

The coffee industry had been very prosperous under the previous Obote regime with government regulation and strong cooperatives operating on the fertile slopes of Mount Elgon.
This all very quickly came to an end as Amin's regime closed down Ugandan borders and all markets.

While meeting farmers on this trip, we heard Nimrod Wambette, a teacher and coffee farmer in the Amin era talk about how scarce food was. Bread was not seen locally for 3 years during the worst period, and salt was a luxury so rare that one of Nimrod's friends used to keep it in his jacket pocket for solely his own use at the family dinner table. It was during these times that coffee farmers who had no market to sell to embarked the dangerous task smuggling their coffee across the Kenyan border that runs through the centre of Mount Elgon - where the Gumutindo co-op farmers grow their coffee.

Starting in 1991, the co-op has struggled to regain the previous quality reputation it once had. With very low coffee prices, coffee farmers had all but lost interest in producing a quality product, many pulling out their trees.
Re-building a quality reputation has not been helped by the many private coffee buyers who will purchase farmer's coffee at similar prices to the Fair Trade co-op, but take whatever poor grade the farmers give them, with no quality control.
This has made the work of Willington Wamayeye, Gumutindo's charismatic leader "tough" - a comment that rang consistently throughout our time understanding the group's history.

Out of all my coffee travels over the years, this cooperative would have to stand out as one with a lot of hope and promise.
From FT minimum prices in 1997, the co-op has tirelessly worked on high quality, now commanding some of the highest prices per pound that Trade Aid is buying.

Lydia Nabulumbi, the co-op's newly trained quality controller and coffee cupper commented during a routine coffee grading that she would be making a trip to talk to a particular primary growing group due to some defects in the cup (You can see a short clip here showing Lydia grading samples as they come in from farmers).These trips and communication between quality controllers and the farmers are very important quality control.
These signs, plus the gorgeous coffee we sampled suggest to me that Gumutindo is a cooperative we will want to watch closely and support through coffee trade.

P.S. A year before our visit, Andrew Purvis - a Guardian journalist visited Gumutindo and wrote a very informative summary article about this cooperative. For more information you can read it here.

Tags // Uganda, Gumintindo

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