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Tale of 2 cash crops: Tea, coffee go separate ways
A man plucks green tea leaves from a garden in Kiko Town Council, Kabarole District, on May 4, 2024. PHOTO | ALEX ASHABA
What you need to know:
- With consumer demand for coffee continuing to grow across the globe to the extent that smallholder farmers in Uganda are getting nearly five times as much for the bean as they would for the leaf, there is no question as to what is their cup of tea. But does it have to be an either/or situation?
When Uganda’s black tea prices crossed the one-dollar mark in November last year, smallholder tea farmers, pluckers, and processors were somehow optimistic about the price recovering. Yet in the previous two weeks, driven by the weakening demand of East Africa’s teas at the Mombasa Tea Auction, the prices have steadily dropped.
At the close of the trading session, which opened on April 28 and closed April 29, 2025, a total of 13,508,415 kilogrammes of black tea were for sale. Processors, however, remained with 45.95 percent of the teas, working out to 6,207,116 kilogrammes.
The tea industry leadership in Kampala, in part, attributed the travails to the recent trade embargo Khartoum imposed on Kenya for the sharp decline in the volumes bought. Consequently, the trade spat between Sudan has spilled over to Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and Malawi.
Amid the raging war, Sudan remains the fifth biggest consumer of East Africa’s teas sold at the Mombasa Auction.
Thus, the withdrawal of Khartoum buyers from the market has created a huge demand gap and also triggered a sharp fall in the prices of tea. Some factory owners said Sudan was paying $1.70 (Shs6,188) per kilo of black tea for some of Uganda’s best quality teas. While this has seen the price drop to $1.30 (Shs4,732), the national average price stands at $1 or Shs3,640.
Mr Robert Ejiku, the chief executive officer of the Uganda Tea Development Agency Limited, told Saturday Monitor that the Sudan market is too big to ignore. In fact, tea industry players in Uganda are weighing options of delivering their teas by road via Juba in South Sudan en route to Khartoum, which is 2,800 kilometres from Kampala.
The second option being explored is shifting auctioning to the Dar es Salaam Tea Auction or loading containers at that port in neighbouring Tanzania.
Things are, however, not prim and proper elsewhere. Pakistan tea packers are for instance reported to be having cash flow challenges as domestic demand in their home market has sharply declined, impacted by high tax rates on imported teas.
Authorities in Pakistan capped the retail price of imported tea at Rs1,200 per kilogramme (Shs15,478), specifically targeting bulk imported black tea, which translates into high sales tax and withholding taxes.
The duties have made drinking a cup of tea expensive for the poor segment of society, leading to a sharp drop in imports.
The Pakistan statistics body’s imports data shows a 5.45 percent fall in volumes of tea imports to 184,663 metric tonnes in nine months ending April 2025, from 199,512 metric tonnes in the same period last year.
With consumer demand for coffee continuing to grow across the globe to the extent that smallholder farmers in Uganda are getting nearly five times as much for the bean as they would for the leaf, there is no question as to what is their cup of tea. But does it have to be an either/or situation?
Flagging fortunes
Canon Apollo Turyamusiima, a tea farmer, owns 100 acres plantation on Buzaare Tea Estate, located atop the scenic rolling hills, a few kilometres from Kitagata Town Council in Sheema District. Attracted to growing tea some 15 years ago, Buzaare Tea Estate has taken under its wing some of the 60,000 farmers in the country that found themselves attracted to growing tea when the government was giving out free seedlings.
Their entry into tea growing has increased the acreage in the country from 21,000 hectares in 2001 to 50,000 acres. Earnings from Uganda tea sector have, however, remained low, forcing entities like Buzaare Tea Estate to also adopt austerity measures after the price of both the green tea leaves and black tea collapsed.
This has rocked farmers, the likes of which Mr Turyamusiima supports. As a result, several tea factories are turning off the lights. Many that are operating have cut production, laid off staff workers, and, at least for the past five years, have not been declaring dividends.
In Kabarole District, Mpanga Tea Factory, which used to process 60,000 kilogrammes of green leaf daily, closed operations. This led to 500 direct jobs losses, with many of the factories having not paid salary arrears.
The Igara Growers Tea Factory, which used to provide a credit facility to the farmers for inputs such as fertiliser, herbicides, pruning knives, and spray pumps has since stopped, amid a sharp drop in revenues. For four years, Ms Jackie Kisakye, the production manager at the factory, says they have not been giving even fertilisers, sending signals of a financially struggling tea processing company.
Farmers, who cannot afford a fertiliser bag that costs Shs140,000, find themselves in an impossibly difficult position. For an acre, five bags of NPK fertiliser are needed to push tea productivity to Shs8 million per year on an acre. Without fertiliser applications to his tea plantation, Mr Turyamusiima estimates the productivity of the garden will remain low. He estimates getting anywhere between Shs1.5m and Shs2m from one tea garden per year.
“Farmers are not applying fertilisers because they do not have the money,” Mr Turyamusiima tells Saturday Monitor. For good quality teas, the good industrial practice requires that only a quality green leaf is plucked. It’s not just tender green tea leaves but also the bud shoot and two leaves that are harvested.
“That is why, as farmers, we are saying let us have a national tea policy. It’s very critical. The moment the tea policy is made, everyone will enjoy growing tea,” the National Chairman of the Uganda Tea Outgrowers Association (UTOA), Canon Apollo Turyamusiima, told this publication.
For a country seeking to reduce poverty levels, create more jobs, and improve household incomes, many in the industry say tea farming is the answer. But, currently, the farm-gate price of green tea leaves in Uganda is atrociously bad.
It has dropped from the highs of Shs700-Shs600 per kilogramme in 2023 to Shs100-Shs150 per kilogramme in the first six months of 2024, and, in the first three months of 2025, has not significantly recovered.
With consumer demand for coffee continuing to grow across the globe to the extent that smallholder farmers in Uganda are getting nearly five times as much for the bean as they would for the leaf, there is no question as to what is their cup of tea. But does it have to be an either/or situation?
Tea or coffee?
When supported, UTOA believes many Ugandans growing coffee are likely to switch to tea. Why? Apparently, when fertiliser is applied, tea farmers only wait for seven to 15 days to pluck the leaf. Coffee? It is harvested once every year. Yet fortunes for coffee farmers continue to grow from strength to strength.
The Agriculture ministry’s latest report shows that exports of the bean to China grew by a staggering 190 percent between February and March. This as fears grow that EU regulations on deforestation could take the wind out of the sails of Uganda’s vibrant coffee sector.
President Museveni has endlessly presented the socio-economic history of Nyabushozi, one of the two counties that constitute Kiruhura District, as one dominated by peasant nomads. These nomads not only didn’t see the need to educate their children but also had no clue about modern animal husbandry.
Weighing into this debate, Mr Elam Yitzchak, a social anthropologist, observed that between 1965- 1967, nomads in Ankole curiously avoided dams and rebuffed chiefs who dared to construct them or advocate their use.
“Since the chief’s intention in building the dams was to restrict the movements of Hima and thus to fasten their grip on them, and since adherence by Hima to indigenous methods of watering necessitating much movement was the instrument they used to rebuff their chiefs, I felt that movements, overtly pastoral, were political,” Mr Yitzchak says.
The social anthropologist also observed that the Hima, Mr Museveni’s sub-ethnic group, would use dam water at the height of each of the drier seasons. But this was because they had no choice.
“Their choosiness at other times, although the practical deterrents are a significant factor, is, I believe, largely because it is the rulers who supply the water. By rejecting their rulers’ supply in favour of nature’s (that’s to say by seeking rainwater as of old), Hima indicates that their movements are determined by political considerations,” Mr Yitzchak notes.
He adds: “The majority of the Bahima ... have been almost completely unaffected by modern ways and thought. Unable through their lack of education, and indeed unwilling to play any part in the administration of the district, they pay little heed to their chiefs' exhortations to improve their standard of life, or to educate their families. [Cattle] often mean more to [them] than the members of [their] family … To increase the herds is [their] main purpose in life … [They are] still instinctively nomadic and … constantly on the move in pursuit of fresh pasture.”
EU will not accept coffee, harvested from deforested areas under the new EU Deforestation Regulation 2023. Photo / Michael Kakumirizi
Choosing the bean
In various speeches, President Museveni has insisted that it was he who started the fight to change the fortunes of nomads in Nyabushozi when he advised them to break ranks with the practice in favour of dairy farming. Nyabushozi or Kiruhura in general has since come to be known for not only milk production but also crop farming, especially bananas.
Official statistics show that during the wet season the entire western Uganda produced 868 million litres of milk per day in the wet season and 1.447 million litres in the dry season. When Mr Wilson Kajwengye was elected the Nyabushozi County lawmaker in 2021, he moved to popularise coffee growing in his constituency.
“I know for the fact that we need to diversify because landholding isn’t increasing. It’s shrinking. We need to have a perennial crop other than matooke that brings in another stream of income,” Mr Kajwengye says. Having made up his mind on coffee, Mr Kajwengye, who defeated National Resistance Army (NRA) veteran Colonel Fred Mwesigye at the ballot, says he carried out a coffee census in his constituency.
He approached the now disbanded Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) and asked for coffee experts to sensitise his constituents on how and why they should grow coffee. The officers at UCDA, Mr Kajwengye says, laughed off the whole idea because to them, coffee growing is alien to the people of Nyabushozi. In Ankole Sub-region, coffee has traditionally been grown in the greater Bushenyi area. The area tends to get more rainfall than the semi-arid Nyabushozi.
“People from UCDA came, and we found that there are people who have been growing coffee. Then we started distributing seedlings, and now we have made strides,” Mr Kajwengye says.
Mr Fred Ahimbisibwe is one of the Nyabushozi farmers who are transitioning from cattle keeping to coffee growing.
“I have four acres of land, and, in cattle keeping, almost every cow needs an acre of land. Yet in coffee farming, you can plant 450 trees on one acre. That means cattle keeping takes up more land than coffee growing,” Mr Ahimbisibwe says.
Coffee boom
For the first time in decades, a global upsurge in coffee prices, largely driven by supply deficits occasioned by drought-induced production bottlenecks in Brazil and Vietnam, has put coffee farmers in Uganda on the pedestal. This is sheer contrast to what the tea farmers are grappling with. As tea prices dip, a kilogramme of kase has surged up to Shs 15,000.
“This coffee price boom found us already on the way. Look, we have land, which for a long time hasn’t been used for farming. This means that our land isn’t exhausted. We have manure because we are cattle keepers. I think we are ready for coffee growing. We have many success stories in all the sub-counties we have,” Mr Kajwengye says.
Indeed, Mr Wilberforce Kabaterine, one of the coffee farmers, didn’t take up the bean just because it has become profitable in recent years. “I h
ave been growing coffee for the last seven years. I thought that cattle keeping was taking up a lot of my land, and coffee needed little land. I’m growing coffee not because it’s profitable; It’s because I have a passion for it. Even if prices go down, I will insist on growing coffee. It’s our future because it’s perennial. You harvest every year,” he says.
Mr Wilson Katamba, who is a migrant from the nearby Sembabule District, also insists that coffee growing in Nyabushozi is going from strength to strength.
“I grew up among the Baganda in Sembabule. We used to grow a lot of coffee. I came to Nyabushozi and I continued with the tradition of planting coffee,” he says.
Clearly, coffee planting is not entirely new here. It is widely believed that coffee farming in Nyabushozi is going to benefit from the construction of the Inspire Coffee factory in Ntungamo District.
While eyebrows were raised after Parliament injected Shs67 billion into the Inspire Coffee project headed by Mr Nelson Tugume, Mr Kajwengye chooses to see the positives.
“I have selected 150 coffee farmers. 10 from each sub-county because we have 12 sub-counties, including three town councils. Then I collected 12 agricultural extension staff and the district agricultural officer. I took them to the Inspire Coffee factory. I have forged a partnership: they are going to give us a centre for bulking our coffee. They are going to help us generate coffee seedlings using their own technology because they have their own mother garden,” he says.
