East Africa parliament member calls for significant investment in agriculture

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Rwanda’s East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) member Caroline Kayonga Rwivanga has urged the Council of Ministers to see to it that funding for the agriculture sector is increased, noting that allocations across the eight member states remain below the agreed threshold.

She echoed this on December 3, 2025, during a debate on a motion for resolution of the assembly, urging the ministers' council to enhance food security and access to affordable food, moved by Jeremiah Woda Odok.

“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 10 per cent, but look at all the budgets of the partner states, we have failed to achieve the target,” she said.

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

“We all have strategic food reserves but 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-19. Then, when the Ukraine war happened, the skyrocketing prices have not gone down. So, the issue is not lack of policies, knowledge or whatever, it is implementation,” she added.

Chipping in, Kenya’s Zipporah Kurga Kering said, “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.”

Fast forward, she said the motion was timely considering that food prices had risen between twenty and sixty per cent across partner states. This, she argued, had undermined welfare, education, productivity and stability.

A gap, Kering contends, should be solved through leveraging the East African Community (EAC) common market protocol. The agreement signed in 2009 allows free movement of workers, goods, services and labour among the eight member states.

“You realise that in Kenya, around 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, while they are at it, Sadia James Sebit from South Sudan, cautioned member states on 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.