Bumper food harvests in 2017

Victoria Sekitoleko, the former Agriculture Minister in President Museveni’s 1990s government says Uganda should not be anywhere countries that are getting food aid.

“This is just because we are not prioritizing our agriculture starting with research and completely ignoring the extension workers,” she said.

“Getting food aid from China because of inadequate rain in 2016 is laughable, because Uganda neighbours Sudan and Egypt where it never rains and they are not on food aid.”

“One wonders if we know what we are talking about,” she said, “ It is just lack of preparation and taking things for granted; that it has always rained and will always rain and so life must go on.”

Joseph Kyegombe, the Programmes Manager of Action for Relief and Development, an NGO that works with smallholder farmers in Busoga and parts of central Uganda wants the government to intervene in the food market. He told The Independent on Dec. 14 that he gets baffled whenever he travels to food secure districts around the country and finds foreign-registered trucks taking away food.

“In Mubende, you will find trucks from Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan and Kenya trucking away food. The same happens in the Tororo-Bugiri- Namutumba areas (eastern Uganda) where trucks from Kenya park near gardens of smallholder farmers, pick the food, and ferry it to Kenya.”

“The government should not run away from regulating the food market. Kenya has its food reserves and Tanzania went ahead and stopped food exports early this year to protect its people; for us we accepted food aid from China yet the same government failed to regulate its food sector.”

Kyegombe says it would be better if the government bought the grains during bumper harvests and stored it in silos to prepare for the lean times.

“But such controls and strategy are not functional in this country,” he says, “If they are there, then they are very minimal.”

“It is cheaper to pick the grains from the national silos rather than buy food from abroad,” he says.

Sekitoleko says Uganda is an agricultural country and one of its most important agencies should be the National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO).

“It is good that NARO is now an autonomous body and has zonal offices around the country, but that is not enough—because it must continue to get more resources (financial and human) to facilitate the research,” she said, “And when the research is ready, it should be toned down to the language which local farmers understand.”

Sekitoleko told The Independent that this is the job of extension workers but Ugandan farmers are not getting the much-needed extension services and as a result, the country ends up where it is today.

Sekitoleko told The Independent that whenever her team visits smallholder farmers, one can see that these farmers have really done their best; they have passion, money, and even modern machinery but one soon realises that they do not have the knowledge to apply the meagre resources at their disposal.

“You easily notice that a simple trick could make a difference when it comes to productivity,” she said.

Sekitoleko is right.

Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have suggested that if governments in Africa are to sustainably meet the growing challenge of food security in this era of climate change, a three-pronged effort is needed— increased crop productivity through enhanced investment in agricultural research, development and use of resource conserving management and increased investment in irrigation.