Rwanda searches for healing as nation remembers genocide

 By Dr. Sam Bikangaga

The New Vision of February 16 carried several articles related to agricultural transformation, particulary one by Warren Nyamugasira Borrow China’s Agricultural Approach and another by the former Vice-President, Prof. Gilbert Bukenya. We must embrace irrigation now. Others have followed suit since then.

I totally agree with Nyamugasira’s observation that the winning formula for Uganda’s agriculture should be “state-led, market-driven and farmer-based” development, implemented consistently through deliberate interventions based on smallholder technologies for productivity improvement.

When you talk of appropriate technologies in Uganda, people think of either the biological (like new seed fertilisers) or post-harvest technologies for value addition, but little attention is given to the production technologies.

It is also on record that through the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), the agriculture ministry has developed quite a number of biological technologies, where only 5% adopt these technologies and only get 15-30% of what is obtained at research stations.

Agricultural output comes exclusively from about three to five million smallholders, 80% of whom have less than two hectares each and primarily depend on the rudimentary hand tool of a hoe and a panga.

According to Frank Ellis, state actions can retard or accelerate the rate of mechanisation, including irrigation pumps and equipment.

Only about 30% of the country’s arable land is under cultivation. Experts in the department of agricultural engineering in the agriculture ministry say for most farming systems in Uganda, labour remains the most expensive single input accounting for more than 50% of the total cost of production.

Transformation of agriculture, therefore, starts by addressing this constraint with appropriate mechanisation suitable to small-size nature of our peasant farmers.

Information available from research indicate that while an average family of three to five adults using the traditional hand tools cannot manage land greater than one to one-and-a-half hactares depending on the soil and crop type. It takes four-and-a-half hours to cultivate the same area using the walking tractor.

Farm machinery has made modern social and economic organisation possible by freeing large number of people from agriculture for other work such as manufacturing. One bulldozer does the work of 200 workers, a loader does the work of  40 workers, while one grader does the work  done by 80 workers.

The cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 that could efficiently separate cotton seed from fibre (a bottle neck in cotton production at that time) led to large-scale cotton growing in southern USA.

Today, one farmers output can feed more than 100 city dwellers. One cotton picking machine can harvest as much in a day as 100 people working by hand.

In 1997, the World Bank team, reviewing the medium-term plan for the modernisation of agriculture, noted that  “The team was struck by the absence of two-wheel tractors that were such a prominent future in Green Revolution areas of Asia.”

In 1998, the Government taskforce on farm power and post harvest technologies policy framework made the following  observations;

·         Mechanisation of agriculture should lead the establishment of agro-processing industries.

·         That the policy framework must recognise the smallholder nature of the typical Ugandan farmer  and focus on the small walking tractors with horse power of five to 15 horse power.

·         That these small tractors should be provided with a range of implements to perform all farm operations.

·         That even for the so-called large farmers four wheel tractor, emphasis should be on tractors with capacities of  50hp maximum.

Officials from the agriculture ministry said in 2002 that “there has been a tendency for Uganda to emphasise over capacity tractors of 75 to 80 hp ranges, which are expensive to run and often end up being under-utilised”.

According to Johnston and Kilby (1975), the most notable change that affected Japanese agricultural production directly was the rapid spread of power tillers/garden tractors of good design adapted to the small farmers that characterise Japanese agriculture.

On analysis of the development of the farm machinery development industry, Johnston and Kilby noted that producers of farm equipment are divided into 3 categories.

·         The village artisan working adjacent to the family dwellings and employs a capital stock in the neighbourhood of $50 (sh98,000) and using a small brick forge with hand-pulled bellows, an anvil, hammer, chisels and tongs with no formal quality control for raw materials, forging temperatures or product specification.

·         For the light engineering workshop firm size ranges from five to over a 100 employees with division labour between casting, forging, machining and assembling. Power tools such as lathes, drills presses and grinders are employed in addition to hand tools.

Like the rural artisan, the urban workshops are seldom wholly specialised. They manufacture additional light engineering products such as band saws, oil seed expellers, irrigation pumps, cotton gins, electric fans, textile looms and leathe on top of farm machinery.

·         The third segment produces the most sophisticated items of agricultural machinery that is fabricated domestically, consisting of a few large firms with capitalisation of a half million dollars or more.

According to the  former LC5 chairman Rakai district, Joseph Mulindwa, “agriculture has failed to take off due to lack of appropriate technology…farmers cannot afford to open-up more land for planting crops because they still rely on the traditional hand hoe farming.”

The African region is the least mechanised in the world, where Uganda is the least mechanised, yet according to Johnston and Kilby, most of the basic principles involved in the design of agricultural machinery of current interest and application had been worked out by the late 19^th Century. This only shows how behind Uganda is.

The time to lead by mechanisation was yesterday.

The writer is an economist working with the Ministry of Public Service