A bright milestone for Uganda's agriculture, food security

 By Bernard Barasa

In Uganda, food security discrepancies are influenced by socio-demographic, economic and spatial factors.

These include farmer's age, education level of the household head, household assets, access to non-agricultural income sources, changing climate and size of land owned. As a result, the country has witnessed farmers suffering from hunger, adoption of environmentally harmful strategies, reduced the quality of life and a sizeable number of farmers in need of humanitarian aid. Despite these challenges, new opportunities exist to exploit in the agricultural sector.

Today, many farmers with surplus yield can sufficiently feed their households and improve income levels. This is arrived at by widely embracing existing and planned agricultural facilities, policies, programme and strategies to support their landholding activities. One of the opportunities exploited is the use of newly constructed central regional markets that are capacitated with modern storage and handling facilities to sell farm products, obtain market information and establish market contacts with the sellers.

This linkage has facilitated the faster sale of perishable farm products and obstinance of cash. There is also a high adoption of sustainable and improved large-small farming systems such as modern-intercropping which have led to the lucrative harnessing of both income and food for home consumption. It a good choice for smallholder farmers with limited access to land and labour.

Uganda's infrastructural developments are also a big plus to the agricultural sector. For example, the expansion and development of international airports, landing sites, construction of post-harvesting storage facilities, the establishment of irrigation systems and upgrading of feeder roads are facilitating the movement and post-harvest handling of agricultural produce to the major markets. The subsidized electricity bills are encouraging more small-scale medium enterprises to venture into value addition of yields.

In addition, the dense network of information and communication technology ranging from radios, internet and mobiles are facilitating the attaining of information on farm management, markets and reporting, farmer's negotiation of better farm prices, accessibility of extension services and knowledge of market value chain have improved. Farmers are realizing better household incomes and access to food.

A lodestone of sectoral policies, strategies and programmes that have been formulated enhance agricultural production. For example, the government's policy on the liberalization of the economy is an opportunity in the livestock and crop marketing system in most parts of the country. Uganda National Agricultural Policy 2011 and Uganda Vision 2040 aim to achieve food and nutrition security and improve household incomes through coordinated interventions that focus on enhancing sustainable agricultural productivity and value addition.

Pellucid programmes like Operation Wealth Creation are facilitating effective National Socio-economic transformation with a focus of raising household incomes in poverty eradication. In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industries and Fisheries has re-structured its operational activities to eradicate poverty and malnutrition, and increase awareness campaigns that have increased productivity.

Umpteen improved seed varieties and seedlings are available in the Ugandan market. These have improved farm outputs, sustained production and increased environmental protection. Farmers can now easily access the varieties to improve their harvests at a low cost. A good number of agro-processing facilities have been established to process drought and disease resistant varieties. As such, this has increased the share of the market for coffee due to the availability of drought and disease resistant seedlings in Uganda.

There are also a number of vibrant stakeholders engaged in the agricultural sector. The government of Uganda and its development partners (like UNDP, FAO, WFP etc) have played a big role in promoting value addition, market and credit access. In turn, the farmers have increased their purchasing of farm inputs and equipment. The civil society's role of advocacy in reminding the government to allocate more funds to the agricultural sector according to the signed declarations, treaties and agreements such as the AU 2003 Maputo Declaration has improved the smallholder farmer's access to credit and inputs.

Notwithstanding the achievements attained so far in the agricultural sector, there are still hitches that need to be timely addressed by concerned parties to strengthen these gains. To start with, there is a need to reduce crop and livestock diseases, provide farmer training and support effective weed management. The government should support farmers to form cooperatives to increase their bargaining power and access to market information. Also, it's important to reduce duplication of responsibilities betwixt the ministry for agriculture and local governments by merging some agencies/ministries to reduce expenses. Lastly, improvements in the post-harvesting handling and value addition are minimal. There is a need to comprehensively train farmers on value addition and facilitate them in procuring small processing equipment.

To sum up, I strongly argue that the achieved milestones and planned strategies in offing should be strengthened and swiftly implemented to transform the agricultural sector.

The writer is a lecturer from Kyambogo University