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Uganda Modernizing Uganda’s agriculture |
DEVELOPMENT
Although agriculture is the main source of livelihood for 95% of Uganda’s population (70% of whom are small farmers), it is still based on subsistence production. Farming methods and technology are still traditional and rudimentary. This curtails the sector’s capacity to achieve meaningful sustainable product, and it means a lot remains to be done to exploit its potential
President Yoweri Museveni has made modernising Uganda’s agricultural sector his pet theme. He’s taken every opportunity to appeal to Ugandans to abandon subsistence farming methods. He says his message has not yet permeated the rural areas, and that is why poverty is still prevalent. He recently said he has sent university graduates in agriculture, forestry and veterinary medicine to the sub-counties across the country, so that peasant farmers can profit from their expertise.
The need for Uganda’s agriculture industry to be modernised cannot be over-emphasised. As a result of low production levels, the country is now earning less from exports than previously, as well as suffering from a lack of food for the population’s own consumption. Almost 44% of the population are living below the poverty line.
How to modernise agriculture
The drive to modernise agriculture needs a multi-pronged approach if it is to take shape and pay dividends in the long term. This will involve more permanent restructuring of social service provision and programmes to favour the poor, and long-term measures directed to productive sectors such as credit programmes, extension services and selective infrastructure development.
Firstly, the peasant farmers will need to gain access to agricultural extension services as a way of translating the modernisation rhetoric into real action. Secondly, the drive to modernise agriculture will come to naught if the farmers do not have access to credit facilities that will enable them to drop subsistence farming in favour of commercial agriculture. The Government seems to be ready to address this crucial aspect to the modernisation drive. Gerald Sendaula, Uganda’s Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, has said that a key element of both the Government’s Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) and the Plan for the Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA) is by providing sustainable financial services to the poor. The provision of such services to the peasants is best conducted through non-traditional banks (Micro Finance Institutions).
Sendaula has also announced a number of interventions for the next financial year, including the allocation of US $1.4 million for the production of cotton through the Cotton Development Organisation (CDO) and US $850,000 for coffee seedlings through the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA). «These will be interim measures pending the transfer of a number of aspects concerning agriculture to the private sector», said the Minister.
The PMA will make poverty eradication the overriding objective of agriculture development and will ensure efficient delivery of agricultural produce. It will remove direct government involvement in the commercial aspects of agriculture and promote the role of the private sector. It will support the development, dissemination and adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies. Within this framework, the challenge for the Government will be to create an enabling environment that allows the peasant farmers to graduate into thriving modern commercial farmers, thus improving the productivity of agriculture and other rural generating incomes.
Crucial aspects
Another crucial aspect of the modernisation of agriculture is the need to diversify the export base, by putting more emphasis on non-traditional cash crops. There is need to focus efforts on high-value agricultural products like vanilla, okra, fish, fruit and flowers. Over-dependence on only a few traditional cash crops like coffee, cotton and tea have proved to be unhealthy and sometimes disastrous for the economy.
There is also need for credit schemes that aid export diversification. For example, as far back as September 1991, the Bank of Uganda established an Export Refinance Scheme (ERS) to broaden the country’s export base, especially by promoting non-traditional agricultural exports, and thereby diversify the country’s foreign exchange earnings capacity. The object of the Bank’s export sector support scheme was to ensure availability of sufficient institutional credit resources to meet genuine credit needs of exporters of non-traditional exports. The main export commodities funded include fruit and vegetables, maize, groundnuts, hides and skins, vanilla, flowers, minerals, among others.
Food security
Another aspect that is crucial for the agricultural modernization drive is in the area of food security. It is ironical that a fertile country like Uganda should suffer on-going hunger and famine whenever a drought situation arises. There is need to develop technologies that will enable the country to increase and harness its food production, so as to address the serious threat of food insecurity. This can be done, among other ways, by: Focusing attention on the problems of small-scale farmers; identifying the major obstacles and constraints to production and utilisation; developing crops (such as early maturing or drought resistant crops) that can be grown in specific conditions; advising farmers on the most effective methods for growing the crops that will help to avert starvation in different parts of the country.
What the country needs are multi-disciplinary teams that include agronomists, entomologists, plant pathologists, plant breeders, food scientists, production-oriented social scientists and veterinary scientists, all undertaking collaborative research ventures aimed at modernizing agriculture and resolving Uganda’s food security problems. In other words, agricultural research has to be linked with the fight against hunger and famine.
It is clear that any measures to fight poverty will depend for effective implementation on broad understanding and commitment within the Ugandan government itself. This will involve pragmatic shifting of resources, directly or indirectly away from other interests, and require extensive institutional changes.
The fight against poverty may be on, but Ugandans await to see how far it can go, since frequently promoting and protecting the interests of the poor, are way down the priority lists of leaders and governments.
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