EALA pushes partner states to raise agriculture funding

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East African Legislative Assembly members have urged the Council of Ministers to increase agriculture funding across the region, with Rwanda’s representative Caroline Kayonga Rwivanga warning that the eight member states continue to fall short of agreed investment targets.

Rwivanga made the remarks on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, during a debate on a motion moved by Jeremiah Woda Odok, urging the Council to enhance food security and improve access to affordable food.

“We have all these water bodies; we should invest in climate-smart agriculture. But the issue is, where is the funding coming from? The Malabo declaration has called for ten percent, but look at all the budgets of the partner states, we have failed to achieve the target,” she said.

According to Rwivanga, greater investment is essential in addressing hunger, which, according to the July 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, affected 673 million people on the African continent last year, largely due to unpredictable weather patterns.

“We all have strategic food reserves, yet we have problems of food security. We still import a lot of our food in spite of the huge expanses of arable land that Honourable Sankok has said,” she observed.

“Today, food prices are going up and up. We first said it was Covid. Then, when the Ukraine war happened, skyrocketing prices and they are not going down. So, the issue is not lack of policies, knowledge or whatever, it is implementation,” she added.

Kenya’s Zipporah Kurga Kering noted that “Food security is a shared regional burden. More than 50 million East Africans face food insecurity due to climate vulnerability, post-harvest losses, market disruptions and socio-economic vulnerabilities.”

She said the motion was timely, pointing out that food prices had risen between twenty and sixty percent across partner states, undermining welfare, education, productivity and stability.

Kering argued that the gap could be addressed by leveraging the East African Community (EAC) Common Market Protocol, which allows free movement of workers, goods, services and labour among the eight member states.

“You realise that in Kenya, around the months of June and July, that is when we don’t have grains in Kenya. Because that is the time, our maize is green. But that is the time, Uganda is harvesting, so we get the inflows and don’t get a gap of actually missing any food and of course from Uganda,” she explained.

However, South Sudan’s Sadia James Sebit cautioned partner states against the use of synthetic fertilisers.

“We have to ensure a sense of ownership in what we eat. As Africans, we have to ensure that we don’t need synthetic fertiliser, so we can grow our food naturally with organic fertilisers,” she implored.