Bloomberg — The International Coffee Organization is talking with the U.S. about the possibility of the country rejoining the group, according to Vanusia Nogueira, a Brazilian who will take over as the body’s executive director in May.
“We are in talks with the Biden administration,” Nogueira said Friday in a telephone interview. ICO is the main intergovernmental body dealing with global coffee issues.Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday after regular business hours.
Nogueira, the first woman to lead the ICO, is planning a series of meetings with U.S. companies during a trip to Boston in April to discuss how they could help on engaging U.S. lawmakers to approve the nation’s return to the organization. The U.S. left the ICO in 2018 after a review by the Trump administration.
The ICO advocates for the coffee industry, collects and reports coffee statistics, and provides a forum for interaction between governments and the private sector. Fostering government-company cooperation is one of the main goals of Nogueira, whose career has been all in the private sector. Governments alone won’t solve important issues in the sector, such as improving growers’ income and raising transparency on coffee inventories worldwide, she said.
“We want to bring other consumers to ICO,” she said. “So it’s important to have an agenda that engages everyone.”
Nogueira, who comes from a family of coffee growers in Minas Gerais’ south, has been a director at the Brazil Specialty Coffee Association for 15 years. She’ll leave the group next month to take over ICO.
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