Kampala — DURING his recent tour of Masaka, Vice-President Gilbert Bukenya asked rich land-owners to engage in agriculture and stop leaving it to the poor. This message was also recently echoed by President Yoweri Museveni and Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi.
According to the 2007 Human Development Report, 73.3% of the Ugandan population survive on agricultural production. The majority of these are living below the poverty line. This means there is stagnated investment in the sector, with most farmers too poor to raise funds for larger investments like acquiring more land and mechanisation. Most rich people engage in agriculture only as a pastime.
In the US, for instance, two to four percent of the population is engaged in agriculture. However, they produce enough food to feed their own country and export tonnes of surplus to Africa.
In Uganda, most farmers own, on average, one acre of agricultural land and barely produce enough to sustain themselves.
Uganda's industrial sector is growing at around 10% per annum while the services sector is growing at around 12%, according to the 2008/2009 budget. The growth of these sectors is one of the reasons agriculture growth fell to around 0.5%.
In the developed world, as poor farmers moved to the cities their land was taken over by wealthy farmers who increased their acreage and production. As the acreage for a single farmer increased, one farmer was able to feed thousands of people.
In South Africa, only five percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, yet the country ranks among the top producers in the world.
The country is among the leading producers of tobacco. There are only 1,000 tobacco growers, using 24,000 hectares of land, about 24 acres per farmer. In Uganda, the average acreage is only two acres per tobacco farmer!
Even for coffee, which is supposed to be Uganda's leading cash crop, it is difficult to find a coffee farmer with over 10 acres.
According to the World Development Report, although women comprise 70% of the farmers, only 7% of them own land. The implication is that the women cannot expand their activities without permission from their partners or other land-owners.
Since production is so scattered, it is difficult to get a viable market for the produce. International business demands that a permanent source of food is identified and this can only be done if there are large scale producers to bank on.
"I got a deal to supply organic pineapples to Germany and the UK. However, when the importer found out about the acreage of pineapples per person, they pulled out," says Samuel Lutwama, an exporter. The supermarkets wanted 10 farmers with at least 20 acres of pineapples each, but he failed to identify any.
High acreage increases production. And the acreage can only be increased if the numbers holding onto small farmlands are reduced. Land in Uganda is so fragmented that it is near impossible to produce commercially. The solution lies in giving those who are already well-off incentives to join the sector.
The fight should not be about encouraging more people to join agriculture, but about encouraging farmers who are already producing commercially, to increase their land and helping the rest find jobs in the industrial and services sectors.
If the rich become more involved, they will acquire most of the land being 'wasted' by the poor and then introduce the much-touted mechanised agriculture and produce on a larger scale. This is what policy makers must focus on.
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When it comes to transforming the society everybody likes to talk about examples around the world even if they have zero knowledge about how those places or countries came to be what they are. First and foremost the discussion should be focused on Uganda. The missing link in all this is the lack of meaningful government programs; run by sound uncorrupt governments. Public officials, be they presidents, or kabakas or kings should stop passing the buck. It is their responsiblity to provide leadership to transform their societies. This ridiculous and nonsensical attempts at trying to blame the rural people for their poverty is as irresponsible as the air brain programs advanced by corrupt politicians as leadership. American farming community is where it is not by accident neither did a few farmers just decide to choose to mechanise, while the majority of the rest of people chose to leave farming. The American farmer is so subsidized he or she doesn't have to grow anything and still get paid. It is a height of ignorance to even dein to compare the heavily government subsidized agrobusiness of American farmer to poor African farmers who are always on their own even when, God forbid, a flood or an earthquake befalls them. Ugandans and Africans need to wake up. A French farmer is paid more money by the French government to keep his cow per day than it takes a Ugandan to live per day. The Japanese rice farmer is paid more to produce a kilogram of rice than he or she is paid to sell it to Uganda. In short these are heavily protected farmers. Have you ever heard of World Trading Organization formerly known as GATT: it is manned by the best brained economists the rich countries can afford just so that they can publish 27,000 pages or rules and regulations on how the rich countries can protect their trade interests. What about poor third world countries ? They are supposed to compete with subsidised farmers and tariffed markets. The only markets open to the third world are markets for manufacured industrial goods which they do not produce, while the markets for agricultural products which they produce cheaper than anybody on earth are tariffed. Africans can also produce industrial goods, but this takes infrastructure and sound educational institutions among other factors, to be competitive. The thin middle class does not provide enough capacity to transform poor economies like Uganda's. The only way out is to have non-corrupt transformative governments that can use, on wider national scale, the limited reasources generated both internally and externally to build a large enough middle class. Just having a few governement connected thieves leeching on and fleecing the taxpayers will never do it, however much primitive accumulation of capital they indulge in. The best they always endup doing is making trips abroad to rich countries to stash their ill gotten wealth away; just as Mobutu did. Karl Marx the economist once wrote: capital is dead labor. It is sound, credible, and uncorrupt leadership that is missing.