KAMPALA. Government has announced that it will start issuing due diligence certificates to coffee exporters eying European market on October 15, 2025.
According to Rauben Keimusya, assistant commissioner in the Coffee Production Department at the agriculture ministry, Uganda is classified as a standard-risk country under the EUDR, requiring full due diligence compliance, including providing reports for every coffee batch exported to the EU.
He revealed that the process of mapping atleast 1.5 million coffee farmers across the country has been completed.
“ The due diligence certificates for all these farmers and their coffee will be issued to exporters to the European market starting from 15 October this year,” he said during a multi-stakeholder dialogue on Uganda’s EUDR Risk Classification and Compliance Preparedness organised by SEATINI Uganda at Kabira Country Club in Bukoto, a Kampala suburb .
The certificates will detail the 1.5 million farmers who have been mapped and found to be compliant with the EUDR regulations.
According to the agriculture ministry, the regulation requires exporters of commodities such as coffee, cocoa and their derivatives to submit specific documents to access the EU market. It also stipulates that coffee planted on deforested land after December 2020 will not be allowed into the EU.
In May , the government set a new target to register 2.8 million coffee farmers across the country and launched registration of other farmers doubling its earlier projection as part of efforts to comply with set regulations and Uganda has until December 30, 2025, to comply with the regulation.
Coffee, according to data from Bank of Uganda, currently forms a share of at least 14.4 percent of Uganda’s export earnings.
It is Uganda’s second most valuable export after gold, which contributes at least 40 percent or more of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.
Uganda has, in the last 10 years, exported an average of 4.894 million 60-kilogramme bags of coffee.
However, export volumes have grown from about 3.24 million 60-kilogramme bags in June 2015 to about 6.12 million 60-kilogramme bags in the 12 months to June 2024.
Equally, earnings have grown exponentially, increasing by 64.98 percent in the 10 years to June 2024 from $400.49m in 2015 to $1.14b.
With more people going into coffee production, the Coffee Roadmap target of producing 20 million 60 kg bags by 2030 is likely to be achieved much earlier than it was originally projected.