Land offers to Mehta step in the right direction

Sep 23, 2011

ON Tuesday, officials of the Buganda Land Board took Sugar Corporation of Uganda Ltd (SCOUL) managers around several square miles of land the Kingdom is willing to lease the sugar company in lieu of the Mabira forest land they had requested for.

ON Tuesday, officials of the Buganda Land Board took Sugar Corporation of Uganda Ltd (SCOUL) managers around several square miles of land the Kingdom is willing to lease the sugar company in lieu of the Mabira forest land they had requested for.

In August, Sharad Patel, the owner of Sango Bay Sugar factory, offered 14,600 hectares in Rakai if the Mehta-controlled company wanted land to grow sugar cane.

For the second time in four years, SCOUL had requested a part of Mabira forest to expand the sugar plantations, a request that has been met with violent resistance in the past.

Opponents of the move say to give away Mabira, or even a part of it, would be to destroy a valuable eco-system that is critical to the country’s climatic wellbeing in addition to being the source of some invaluable species of plants.

The supporters of the giveaway argue that to plant sugar on degraded Mabira land would be to put the land to more optimal use creating more jobs, producing more sugar and increasing taxes to the treasury.

As in many contentious issues, both sides of the story are right and wrong, the trick is to reach an agreement.

What Buganda and the proprietor of Sango Bay have done is to put their money where their mouths are, which is a very constructive way forward.

We all want Mabira preserved but the urgency for employment is a very real and pressing one and one can expect that natural resource endowments like Mabira will suffer from this need.

We need to go beyond knee jerk reactions and look for win-win scenarios to solve our problems. Buganda and Sango Bay seem to have provided just that.

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