International Coffee Organization

International Coffee Organization (ICO)

The International Coffee Organization (ICO) is the intergovernmental body for coffee: a club of governments, not of companies. It was established in 1963 under the aegis of the United Nations, following approval of the first International Coffee Agreement in 1962.¹²³ It describes itself as the only intergovernmental organisation for coffee, and it is headquartered at 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8HB.¹

Its stated mission is to “strengthen the global coffee sector and promote its sustainable expansion in a market-based environment for the benefit of all actors.”¹

If you have ever read a coffee statistic — how many bags a country exported, what the world price did last month — there is a good chance the ICO produced it. That is what most people meet it as today. But it began as something far more powerful: the body that decided how much coffee each country was allowed to sell.

Who belongs

Membership is by government, and it comes in two kinds: exporting members (producing countries) and importing members (consuming countries). Both sit at the same table, which is unusual — most commodity bodies represent one side only.

As of 7 November 2022 the ICO listed 49 members covering 75 countries — 42 exporting and 7 importing.¹²³ Members outnumber countries because a single member can be a bloc rather than a state.

Those members are said to represent 93% of world coffee production and 63% of world consumption.¹² The gap between those two numbers is the whole shape of the coffee trade — nearly everyone who grows it is in the room, and a good deal of the money that buys it is not.

Several governments have left. Wikipedia’s membership table records the United States withdrawing on 27 June 2018, along with Turkey (12 February 2017), Paraguay (26 November 2019), Guatemala (30 September 2020) and Uganda (2 February 2022).³

To verify — the withdrawal list, and a conflict with our own ANACAFÉ note

The list of departures above comes from one source, Wikipedia; the ICO’s own membership register was not read here.³ It also contradicts an existing note in this wiki: ANACAFÉ states that Anacafé represents Guatemala at the ICO, which cannot be true if Guatemala withdrew in 2020. One of the two is out of date. The ICO’s current member list is the source that would settle it, and neither claim should be repeated as fact until it is checked.

The quota years, and the day they ended

For most of the twentieth century the world coffee price was negotiated rather than traded. Under the International Coffee Agreement the ICO ran an export quota system: members set a target price, and each producing country got an allowance. When the price fell below target, quotas were tightened to starve the market; when it rose above, quotas were loosened.⁴

The system broke on 4 July 1989, when the Coffee Council suspended export quotas after members could not agree new allocations — Brazil, the dominant producer, would not accept a cut to its own.⁴ The result was brutal and immediate: the average indicator price fell from US1.34 per pound to US0.77 per pound over the following five years.⁴

That collapse is the hinge in modern coffee economics, and it is covered in full on C-market. Almost everything this wiki describes on the sourcing side — Direct trade, Premiumisation, the auction channel at Cup of Excellence and Best of Panama, Specialty coffee as a separate market with its own prices — grew in the space that opened when the price stopped being negotiated.

The ICO has never regained that power. It kept the treaty, the statistics and the forum; it gave up the lever.

The agreements

The International Coffee Agreement (ICA) is the treaty the organisation runs on — the ICO calls it the only international mechanism under which governments of producing, processing, trading and consuming countries work together.² It has been renegotiated repeatedly: 1962, 1968, 1976, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2007 and 2022.⁴²

The ICO’s own FAQ describes the ICA 2007 as the framework in force, extended until 1 February 2024 and under revision by member governments.²

To verify — which agreement is actually in force now

The ICO’s public FAQ still names ICA 2007, extended to 1 February 2024, as the current framework.² Wikipedia refers to an ICA 2022 and mentions a Joint Committee created to handle the transition between the 2007 and 2022 agreements, but gives no adoption or entry-into-force date.³ The two accounts are not reconcilable from the pages read here, and the 2024 date has passed. The research report behind this note adds, citing the ICO, that ICA 2007 was agreed by 77 members of the International Coffee Council in London on 28 September 2007, adopted by Council Resolution 431, and entered into force definitively on 2 February 2011. Those specifics were not independently confirmed here. The ICO’s own agreements page is the source that would settle all of it.

How it is governed

The International Coffee Council is the supreme decision-making body: government representatives who meet in March and September, deciding by consensus.³ Supporting it are a Finance and Administration Committee for budget matters and a Joint Committee created for the transition between agreements.³

The Executive Director since May 2022 is Vanúsia Nogueira of Brazil — a specialty-coffee insider rather than a career diplomat. She comes from a coffee-growing family, spent fifteen years as a partner at PwC Consulting before moving into coffee in 2002, and ran the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA) as executive director from 2007 until April 2022.⁵

What it actually produces

Since the quotas went, the ICO’s real output is information. Its regular publications include a monthly Coffee Market Report, the World Coffee Statistics Database, Annual Reviews, and the Coffee Development Report — a research series with 2019 and 2020 editions listed.⁶⁷

Two things in there are quoted constantly.

The composite indicator price (I-CIP). This is the ICO’s own world coffee price: a statistical average across market groups that blends arabica and robusta. It is not the C-market price — the C is a single New York futures contract for arabica only. Recent I-CIP readings from the ICO: June 2026 averaged 248.90 US cents/lb, down 2.8% on May; within that month it fell to 231.96 on 9 June, the lowest in nearly two years, then rebounded 17.4% to 272.39 by month end.⁶

Export volumes, counted in 60-kg bags. The sack is the unit of the entire trade, and the ICO is what turns sacks into world statistics — see Coffee supply chain. The ICO reports 12.38 million bags exported in May 2026, and 94.82 million bags across the first eight months of coffee year 2025/26 (October 2025 to May 2026), down 0.1% year on year.⁶ For the twelve months ending May 2026 it splits the world crop into 81.84 million bags of arabica against 59.28 million bags of robusta — roughly 58/42, with arabica falling and robusta rising.⁶

That last figure is the single most load-bearing number on Arabica vs Robusta, and it is why the ICO matters to a specialty reader who will never attend a Council session: it is the only body publishing species-level world trade data as a public good.

International Coffee Day

1 October is International Coffee Day, established by ICO member states in March 2014 to create a single global date for it — previously a dozen countries each had their own.⁸ The ICO frames it as celebrating the sector’s “diversity, quality and passion” and as a moment to support the farmers whose livelihoods depend on the crop.⁸

Why a specialty reader should care

The ICO is easy to dismiss as a statistics office with a nice London address. Three reasons not to.

• It is the counterfactual. Specialty coffee is, economically, an answer to the question the ICO stopped being able to answer in 1989: how does a farmer get paid enough? Quotas were one answer; differentials, auctions and Direct trade are the current ones.
• Its numbers are the denominator. A record Best of Panama lot is meaningless without knowing that the world moves roughly 12 million bags a month at commodity prices.
• It is where producing governments still speak collectively. National bodies like ANACAFÉ, the Coffee Board of India, ICAFE and IHCAFE meet each other here, and the low-price crises that shape Producer cooperatives and Climate change and coffee policy get argued about at the Council before they reach anybody’s bag of beans.

The ICO also turns up in specialty’s own origin story: George Howell was brought into a UN-backed quality project in Brazil run with the ICO in 1997, and that project fed directly into what became Cup of Excellence.

Related

• C-market — the futures contract that replaced the quota system, and why the C and the I-CIP are different numbers
• Coffee supply chain — the 60-kg bag the ICO counts in
• Arabica vs Robusta — the species split that ICO export data is the best public source for
• History of coffee — the long run-up to a treaty organisation for a farm crop
• Specialty coffee · Premiumisation · Direct trade — the market that grew after 1989
• Green coffee buying — where world prices meet an actual contract
• Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute — the trade-body layer, as opposed to the government layer
• ANACAFÉ · Coffee Board of India · ICAFE · IHCAFE · Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority — national bodies whose governments sit (or sat) at the ICO
• Cup of Excellence · George Howell — the UN-backed quality project the ICO helped run in Brazil
• Climate change and coffee · Producer cooperatives — the pressures that make an intergovernmental forum matter again

Official links

• Official site — International Coffee Organization

Footnotes

1. International Coffee Organization — About Us — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1963 founding under UN aegis, the mission statement, the headquarters address, the 49 members / 75 countries figure dated 7 November 2022, and the 93% / 63% shares ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. International Coffee Organization — FAQs — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the founding rationale, the definition of the International Coffee Agreement, the 42 exporting / 7 importing split, and the statement that ICA 2007 was extended until 1 February 2024 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. International Coffee Organization — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Council’s structure and meeting months, the committees, and the member-withdrawal dates ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. International Coffee Agreement — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the list of agreements by year, the quota mechanism, the 4 July 1989 suspension and the US1.34 → US0.77 price fall ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. International Coffee Organization — Executive Director — confirmed via WebFetch; source of Vanúsia Nogueira’s appointment from May 2022 and her BSCA and PwC background ↩

6. International Coffee Organization — market reports and statistics — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the June 2026 composite indicator price and its intra-month low and rebound, the May 2026 and coffee-year-to-date export volumes, the arabica/robusta twelve-month split, and the list of ICO publications ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. International Coffee Organization — Coffee Development Report — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2019 and 2020 editions ↩

8. International Coffee Organization — International Coffee Day — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1 October date and the March 2014 establishment ↩ ↩²