NRM secretariat champions food security

FOOD|SECURITY|AGRICULTURE

KAMPALA - The ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) secretariat has encouraged all Ugandans to embrace agriculture to ensure sustainable food security. 

Celebrating World Food Day at its secretariat in Kololo on Friday (October 16, 2020), NRM's director for mobilization, Mathias Kasamba, noted that all Ugandans have a role to play in ensuring food security in the country.  

The Day was celebrated World Wide under the theme, "Grow. Nutrition. Sustain. Together. Our Actions are our Future." 

"Under the current circumstances of political campaigns, all leaders who are aspiring for all positions should effectively communicate to their communities the importance of food security for everyone because we all have a role to play in ensuring food security in the country," Kasamba said. 

Kasamba noted that preserving access to safe and nutritious food is an essential part of the response to the deadly global COVID-19 pandemic particularly for poor and vulnerable communities, who he said are hit hardest by the pandemic. 

"As we face disruptions to our food supply and people's livelihoods, it is also important to rethink how our food system functions so that even during a crisis, we can still strive for positive outcomes by enabling access to nutritious diets and healthy lives for more people in the coming decade and beyond," Kasamba noted.

A recent survey on food security in Uganda indicates that 17% of Ugandans living in Kampala are facing acute food insecurity. 

Kasamba argued that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a turning point to rebalance and transform Uganda's food systems to make it more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient. 

"The time is right for Uganda's leadership and technocrats to take heed and ensure a transformed food system which responds to all the four dimensions of food security and nutrition," Kasamba noted. 

The four dimensions are physical availability of food, economic, and physical access to food, utilization, and stability of supply.  

"Before we mobilise for anyone to be voted, we must vote for food. Well as World Food Day is marked once in a year, all of us wake up to look for food on a daily basis and it must concern all of us," Kasamba said. 

Emmanuel Dombo, the party director of Information and publicity blamed food insecurity in the country on the colonialist's conceptual problem, which he said is anti-hand-worker. 

Dombo also asked the youth to embrace agriculture, noting that it is one of the ways of dealing with unemployment. 

"If you don't have a job, do farming and if you have a job, make agriculture your side income," Dombo said. 

NRM Secretary General Justine Kasule Lumumba urged Ugandans to take advantage of the good nature in the country such as fertile soil to improve their livelihood. 

"I was brought up by a single mother and she is actually fifteen years older than me but it is because of agriculture that I am educated," Lumumba said.

The over 100 participants who took part in the lecture were supplied with seeds and also taken through different farming techniques by exhibitors from sim-law seeds and United Innovation Development Center. 

James Iddah of sim-law seeds said there is a lot of potential in farming although it calls for passion. 

Richard Masaganzi of Uganda seed traders' association said a person who wants to be rich should embrace agriculture.