'Help farmers with modern technologies to promote commercial farming'

Apr 27, 2016

"We know that farmers can achieve large increases in their crop yields even with relatively low input technologies."

The deputy governor Bank of Uganda, Louis Kasekende, has said that modernizing smallholder agriculture in Uganda will require helping farmers to improve their farm practices.

Using more modern farm inputs and producing more for the market, he added.

This, Kasekende said, has been evidenced by an increase in farm yields by farmers being supported by development agencies through demonstration gardens and plots using modern farming practices.

"We know, from the work done on demonstration plots supported by development agencies, that farmers can, in principle, achieve large increases in their crop yields even with relatively low input technologies combined with the adoption of good agricultural practices."

 

The deputy chief of the Central Bank mentioned this recently at a high-level meeting on developing approaches for financing smallholder households in Uganda in Kampala.

The meeting was organized by the Uganda Agribusiness Alliance that was established in 2014 as a nonprofit multi-stakeholder partnership and members-based organization to catalyze sustainable investment and growth in the Ugandan agricultural sector.

Kasekende said Ugandan smallholder farming has the potential for transformation but the constraints to the transformation are both large and multifaceted.

According to him, a lack of access to finance by smallholders is one of these constraints, although not necessarily the most binding constraint for the majority of smallholder farmers at this early stage of agricultural development.

 

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