THIS week, President Yoweri Museveni was in London at the heads of state meeting to deliberate the reform of international institutions.

At the meeting, Museveni said the rising food prices globally was good for Uganda since the country has a food surplus and is, therefore, well-placed to exploit the situation.

It is true that Uganda exports more food than it imports, but it is also true that there is a perennial famine in the Karamoja region.

As a result, Uganda does not feel the world food price crisis like other countries do. The recent price increases are being fuelled by high fuel prices and the increased demand for our produce from western Kenya and southern Sudan.

But regional demand for our food has always been there, what has been lacking is a strategy to leverage this demand to our full advantage.

The liberalisation of produce marketing in the 1990s provided the initial stimulus to boost production and the figures in agricultural production have shown a marked increase since. But our producers continue to be largely subsistence farmers and in order for them to shift their outlook to exploit opportunities that show up once in a while, a few strategic and structural changes need to be engineered.

Firstly, the land tenure systems have to be folded into one or two manageable and understandable systems in order to unlock the land’s potential as a factor of production. As it stands now, with the hodge-podge of tenure systems that currently obtain, it is hard to do any meaningful investment in agriculture.

Secondly, the Government needs to commit more resources to agriculture than the token sums it continues to commit, sacrificing agriculture to sustain a huge, ineffective bureaucracy. More resources need to be channelled into research, extension services and agricultural infrastructure.

The President is right that high prices can be good for Ugandan farmers but his Government needs to invest more in agriculture to make this pipe dream a reality.