Two international conferences took place in South Africa last month and at both conferences the small farmer was the main subject of debate. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan attended one of them, the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEF), which ended on June 12, 2009.

Annan who is now the chairperson of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) said, "The average African small holding farmer swims alone. She has no insurance against erratic weather patterns, gets no subsidies, and has no access to credit. I say 'she' because the majority of small scale farmers in Africa are women." AGRA is an NGO that aims at reducing poverty among Africa's small scale farming communities.

According to the South African-based news agency IPS, the general consensus that emerged out of the conference was that any attempts to alleviate poverty and hunger and boost African economies are futile if the needs and potential of small scale farmers in the region are ignored.

Another participant at WEF, Florence Wambugu of Africa Harvest Bio-tech Foundation based in Kenya, said, "We have approximately 80 million small scale farmers in Africa who produce very little not because they do not want to be more productive, but because they are unable to. Raising these farmers' productivity is possible and it is key to Africa's food security and overall economic growth."

Nick Moon of Kick Start International, a non-profit organisation that develops low cost technologies for cash-poor farmers stressed that poor irrigation infrastructure plays an important role in the farmers' hardship and the food insecurity in the region. "Only four to five per cent of agricultural land in Africa is irrigated.

The rest is rain fed. Few small holding farmers in sub-Saharan Africa live in close proximity to a water source, whether it is ground or surface water. Therefore when addressing the needs of small scale farming, more attention should go to water and irrigation infrastructure."

Addressing a team of visiting local journalists on June 24 at Nakasongola District headquarters, the District Production Officer, Ms Sarah Nakamya, decried the enormous havoc that the prolonged drought had played on all the agricultural activities of the district. She wished the government could come up with a programme to provide more water for production to the farming communities in the district. Whole fields of maize, groundnuts, potatoes, beans, coffee, and other crops had withered and were drying up due to failed rains.

Yet those engaged in animal husbandry were planning to relocate 20 or so miles to be near a water source for their animals. Thousands of small scale farmers elsewhere in Uganda are currently experiencing similar difficulties and we could face a food crisis in the near future.

Participants at WEF on Africa argued that African governments should keep the 2003 promise they made in Maputo of spending 10 per cent of their budgets on agriculture by 2008. Uganda only managed to allocate 4.4 per cent of its budget to agriculture this financial year! Rwanda is one of the countries that kept the promise and President Paul Kagame said at the conference, "If you enable farmers to increase their productivity, you increase your gross national product and lift people out of poverty. Investing in agriculture is easier than having millions of people starving."

The other conference was the Agri-Business Forum 2009 which took place in Somerset West, seventy miles out of Cape Town between June 14 and 17. Uganda's Minister of Agriculture, Henry Bagire was among the 400 participants and praised the Naads programme in which small farmers are being merged into cooperative groups to create economies of scale.

"This latest budget," he said, "focused on leading farmers into commercial production. Even those farming small pieces of land must farm them intensively." He also told the conference about the government's effort to provide technical input and subsidies to some selected 30,000 farmers and appealed to investors to 'create value adding processing plants for coffee.'

However a large section of Naads support beneficiaries such as George Muloki and Ssenku Ssalongo of Wabinyonyi Sub-county Nakasongola District and thousands of others across the country are in tears due to insufficient rains.

The residents of Wabinyonyi depend on a single dam for water for domestic use and for their animals and it is drying up. Muloki plans to drive his cattle towards a river 20 miles away for a few weeks as he waits for rain but is worried about leaving behind his 30 beehives that Naads provided to him. The bees too need water. Ssenku has lost over 15 acres of his maize crop due to failed rains and he has a lot of issues with the way Naads support is given out to the local farmers.