Looming hunger as Uganda's soils get barren

By Gerald Tenywa

Ugandans hoping to prosper through agriculture will find it hard to achieve their dream as it emerges that most soils have become depleted, according to leading experts.

Soil experts say yields per hectare of land have been declining over the years due to reduced soil fertility.

Uganda’s first soil scientist, Prof. Kitungulu Zaake, said although production has been increasing due to the expansion of land under agriculture, this is no longer possible in most parts of the country.

He said without increasing soil productivity, getting people out of poverty would remain a dream.

“Uganda’s drive to prosperity is like putting the cart before the horse,” says Zaake, a former lecturer at Makerere University and a US trained soil scientist.

“How do you work towards putting more money into the pockets of farmers without increasing soil productivity?” he asked.

He warned of a crisis in the coming years, if Ugandan farmers continue producing without replenishing the soil.

“It is a matter of time and production will stop. There are signs pointing to an unfolding disaster,” Zaake told Saturday Vision.

Coffee, banana yields dwingle

He said the quantity and quality of coffee, which is Uganda’s main cash crop, is dropping. Uganda used to produce four million bags of coffee a year, but this, according to Zaake, has dropped to three million.

For bananas, a staple food crop in central Uganda, the yields per hectare have fallen from 10 tonnes for every hectare, to only seven, according to Zaake.

He says production is being sustained by expansion into new areas, particularly western Uganda, which he said also face the same fate as areas around Lake Victoria, where bananas thrived.

In eastern Uganda, he says, striga weed, which thrives on degraded soils, is spreading widely, undermining the production of maize. This, according to Zaake, has affected the incomes of many people, who survive on maize growing.

Also, over the last two decades, farmers have been battling previously unknown crop diseases and Zaake attributes this to poor soils, which have made crops vulnerable to attack.

Low fertilizer use

Stephen Bayite Kasule, in a report titled, Utilisation of agro-inputs in Uganda: Key to Agricultural Development, points out that fertiliser use is very minimal, averaging 1.8kg per hectare a year, which is way below the average sub-Saharan Africa level, estimated at eight tonnes per hectare per year.

Six years ago, a study found that 75% of the farmland on the African continent was severely depleted, almost double the 40% that was depleted 10 years earlier.

A report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation noted that if land degradation continued at the current rate, more than half of the cultivated agricultural land could be unusable in Africa and that the continent would be able to feed only 25% of its population by 2025.

Agriculture contributes at least 40% of the GDP of most African countries and employs the bulk of the population.

In 2006, the Africa Fertiliser Summit in Abuja, Nigeria pledged to increase application of fertilisers to at least 50kg of NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium) per hectare per year by 2015. Three years to 2015, there is no movement towards this goal, says Zaake.

Farmers, politicians indifferent

Asked why the soils are no longer producing bananas, Frank Malagala,  a resident of Buso village in Wakiso district, said the soil has olunnyu (infertile). Such answers, Zaake says, point to the fact that soil has become acidic and crops no longer absorb nutrients from it.

Although the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) was put in place to help farmers shift from subsistence farming to marketoriented production, farmers mainly demand for inputs such as improved crop varieties rather than fertilisers.

About the low fertiliser use among farmers, Zaake says some people have taken it for granted that their soils are fertile, while others are discouraged by the low food prices and failure to recover the cost of inputs such as fertilisers.

He says organic fertilisers are cheap, but farmers should know their soil status before applying them.

“This is what they should be demanding from NAADS, but they are ignorant,” he observes.

Two years ago, minister James Baba, who was representing the Vice-President at an agro-input workshop at Makerere, said: “What should worry us is the diminishing returns on investment in agriculture, declining productivity and soil degradation through soil erosion and soil depletion.”

He said soil fertility management should be encouraged as has been the case in Ethiopia and Rwanda.

Recommendation

Dr. Festus Bagora, an expert with the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), says given the low soil nutrients, application of fertilisers has become inevitable.

“Getting improved yields requires fertilisers,” he says. Bagora advises that farmers need training in the benefits of using fertilisers and how to apply them so that they do not cause damage to the soil and the environment.

“Farmers should not apply too much or too little fertiliser and should not lose them to water bodies,” he says.

He sees the national policy on soils, which has remained in draft for two decades as the only way to claim Uganda’s tag, “Africa’s food basket.”