CASH CRISIS HITS UGANDAN COFFEE BOARD Uganda's state-run Coffee Marketing Board (CMB) has been suffering a cash crisis for the past two months due to a bottleneck in export shipments and administrative delays in handling payments, trade sources said. The CMB needs between 10 and 15 billion shillings (the equivalent of seven to 10 mln dlrs) to pay farmers and processors for coffee already delivered, but its present export revenue is insufficient to cover such expenditure, they said. The board's cash crisis has serious implications for the economy as a whole, since coffee accounts for 95 pct of Uganda's total exports. The CMB's financial difficulties first started in January following delays in rail-freighting export consignments of coffee to the ports of Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Tanga. These delays were caused by a shortage of railway wagons in Uganda and bottlenecks on the ferries which transport Ugandan wagons across Lake Victoria to link up with the Kenyan and Tanzanian railway systems, the sources said Marketing Minister John Sebaana-Kizito publicly acknowledged on February 19 that the CMB had run up arrears to local suppliers as a result of the shortage of transport for moving exports. Sebaana-Kizito said at the time that the payments squeeze would be resolved in two weeks. However, an accident to the rail ferry which plies between the Ugandan lake port of Jinja and Kisumu in Kenya put it out of action between February 21 and March 15, causing fresh delays in cargo movements. Coffee exports are especially sensitive to the disruption of rail transport since president Yoweri Museveni has banned their haulage by road in a drive to save transport costs. Transport difficulties meant that by early February the CMB was holding unsold coffee stocks of around 750,000 bags. These stocks were equivalent to one quarter of Uganda's expected three mln 60-kilo bag 1986/87 (October-September) crop, the sources said. According to the sources, the board's financial problems have been aggravated by long delays in processing export receipts. The coffee board was taking about eight weeks to recycle export receipts into payments to local producers, whereas export bills handled by local banks took half that time to process, they said. The sources said the CMB's price structure had been overtaken by Uganda's high inflation rate, unofficially estimated at about 200 pct, and that this was a further disincentive to producers, already owed large arrears. "The coffee pricing structure is wrong and three months behind, the foreign exchange rate is unrealistic, and the sooner the so-called economic package is put in top gear, the better for the coffee industry and the economy as a whole," one of the sources said. The government is currently negotiating a package of economic reforms with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund aimed at underpinning a renewed inflow of foreign aid to help Uganda's economic recovery after 15 years of political strife.