Colombia announces coffee price stabilization fund

Posted on Monday 15th, July 2019.

Colombian President Ivan Duque has announced the creation of a coffee price stabilization fund at the opening of Agroexpo 2019 on 11 July.
The President said the Fund aims to help stabilize the income of Colombian coffee producers.
“[The Coffee Price Stabilization Fund will] accompany an initiative by the President of the Congress, Ernesto Macías Tovar, to protect small producers, to give them guarantees in such an important sector for the country,” Duque said at the event.
“This will allow much relief to the coffee sector at times where we have price shocks.”
He said the fund will be maintained through multiple resources, including the national budget, quotas, and royalties. It was not revealed how much money this fund will amount too.
The government says through this fund, each coffee producer in Colombia can be a beneficiary of stabilization mechanisms for up to 70 per cent of their production capacity.
The announcement comes off the back of the second World Coffee Producers Forum (WCPF), where keynote speaker Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in the United States called for a similar fund on a global scale.
The fund will be accessed when prices fall below production costs and will be managed by the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia (FNC).
The FNC called for an international coffee base price of US$2 per pound at a Fairtrade conference on 2 July and repeated this sentiment at the WCPF.