If you had the opportunity to fly over Uganda's countryside, the most fascinating aerial phenomenon you would observe through the aircraft window is the "match-box-type" plots. It arises from parents who keep fragmenting their land for their children who in turn sub-divide it for their own children and the story goes on and on.

By 2025, it is estimated that Uganda's population will be about 54 million, with over 30 per cent living in urban areas and leaving the rest in the country-side. Considering that Uganda is heavily reliant on land resources, the future can only point to increasing pressure on land.

According to the Population and Housing Census of 2002, Uganda's population density was 123 persons per square kilometre, which was much higher than Tanzania's (39), Kenya's (54) and Sudan's (66), but lower than Rwanda's (281), and Burundi's (243) in the same year.

The population density for 2006 was projected to have increased by 13 per cent over the four years to 139 people per square kilometre. If the population continues to grow at the current rate of 3.4 per cent, the average available arable land will shrink to only 0.26 ha per person by 2030 (UNDP Human Development Report 2007).

Unless the country radically shifts to capital intensive farming technologies (which is doubtful in the medium term), this obviously calls for urgent action that involves change in attitude and culture on land utilisation. Increasing pressure on land and poor land use practices have prompted crop farmers and livestock keepers to encroach on areas gazetted for nature conservation including land considered marginal for agriculture.

Many peasant farmers cultivate in wetlands, riverbanks, shorelines and hilly areas that are fragile and susceptible to destruction. The high population growth rates around highly bio-diverse forest reserves have led to spillage of settlements into reserves. Mt. Elgon Forest Reserve was degazetted to resettle the Ndolobo tribe. Similar cases are found in forest reserves in Luweero, Masindi, and Mubende districts.

The revamped land use attitude and culture would set the stage for a well thought-out industrialisation policy that is anchored on agriculture because that is what can push idle, under-utilised rural labour force to join the wage economy, be it oil industries in Mid-west; tea, minerals, dairy industries in western Uganda; beef, cereals, fruits in the east; plantations, oil seed industries in the north.

Despite the impressive achievements made by the government in liberalising the information and communication sectors, the level of land use related information available to the public remains low partly due to low literacy levels.

The sensitisation focus group on the Land Act, if not disbanded, needs to scale up its activities to clear the air around matters of land as contained in the Land Act and the National Land Use Policy. There is a need to engage in a systematic public awareness process in order to reduce suspicion arising from reactive sensitisation.

Doing so would enable the communities where there is communal land ownership, like in northern Uganda and West Nile, to embrace partnership in land resource utilisation. It would also soften the hostility confronting investors from communities who fear loss of their communal land due to this scanty information and misunderstanding.

It is critical that the management of Uganda's land use policy integrates attitudinal and cultural aspects in order to accelerate the process of consolidating fragmented pieces of land. This would prompt rural residents to give up their fragmented pieces of land for large scale commercial activities. The global economic trends leave Uganda with no choice but to realise that there will be no room for peasant or subsistence activities in the coming decades.

Dr Odoch is a member of the Daily Monitor Panel of Experts and a specialist in rural development.