The members of the Foreign Affairs Committee are bracing up to scrutinise the bill.
The members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly are bracing up to examine the bill to authorise the President of the Republic to ratify the International Coffee Agreement 2007, adopted in London on 28 September 2007. The bill that will be the second forwarded to the Foreign Affairs Committee since the start of the ongoing November 2010 budgetary session of the National Assembly, was tabled before the entire House during a plenary sitting last Monday.
The agreement is under the umbrella of the International Coffee Organisation (ICO), which Cameroon joined since its creation in 1962. The International Coffee Organisation is a forum for intergovernmental consultations and negotiations on coffee-related issues and means of ensuring a fair balance between world supply and demand under conditions that will ensure adequate supply at equitable prices for consumers and outlets at profitable prices for producers. Cameroon has been affirming its membership of the ICO by signing and ratifying the successive agreements.
The International Coffee Agreement 2007 takes into account the two-fold need to pay greater attention to sustainability and to give a convincing vision to the ICO goal. The agreement comes immediately after the Second World Coffee Conference held in Salvador, Brazil, from 23 to 25 September 2005, on the theme , “ Lessons Emerging from the Crisis: New Paths for the Coffee Sector”. The agreement provides a response to the issue of the link between its goals and ICO missions, mainly by highlighting chapters relating to the promotion and development of markets, project organisation activities and private sector involvement. The deadline for the deposit of instruments was fixed for 25 September 2009, and the agreement will definitely go into force when the Governments holding at least two-thirds of votes of exporting members and the Governments holding at least two-thirds of votes of importing members will have deposited the instruments of ratification, acceptance or approval.
