The Monitor (Kampala)
Kakaire A. Kirunda
1 July 2009
analysis
To improve the situation faced by impoverished family farmers, agricultural research should be focused towards helping the impoverished farmers, not just large companies or farms that are producing cash crops.
And likewise, extension services should be changed to better spread new technologies when they are developed.
Those are the major conclusions of a research paper by Nate Ryan titled "The Improvement of Food and Nutritional Security in Uganda through Agricultural Research and the Education of Family Farmers."
Ryan recommended either using NGOs to research and develop technologies that are directed towards impoverished farmers or that farmers are in some way empowered to control the direction of agricultural research.
"NGO's are far more likely to be committed to pay more attention to subsistence agriculture and in general improving the poor's situation, because the existing governmental networks (e.g., the National Agricultural Research Organisation) are unsuited to do so," the author writes.
Ryan further writes that once new relevant technologies are developed, they need to be distributed to the impoverished farmers who need them most. But to do so the extension services need to realise a couple of things one of the major ones being that women are a vital part in farming.
"Once the extension services realise that women are vital to agriculture, then information on techniques and technologies can be passed on to those women and impoverished family farmers will be better able to grow their crops," the research paper concludes.
Ryan's paper observes that while Uganda's crop yields should be enough to feed its population, hunger is still very common due to poor distribution, storage, and processing facilities. And while some areas produce high yields, most is perishable, and famine still occurs in these areas. Most farmers lack self-sustenance after they sell their crops, which leads to malnutrition, it is further observed.
While the author notes that even though Uganda consciously decided to step up its investment in subsistence crop development, little research has been devoted to subsistence crops: "An example of the lack of research on subsistence crops and how it affects impoverished farmers is well demonstrated in plantains. The lack of bio-technology research on plantains contributes partially to the lack of enough food and the lack of sufficient income, used to purchase food or dietary supplements, by not preventing loss of yields in the plantain crop."
The author sums it up saying that if national governments and other stakeholders realise that they need to focus on helping women and they also realise that the agricultural research direction needs to be focused on the impoverished farmers, then it would help with solving food and nutritional insecurity and ensuring that natural resources are used in a sustainable way.
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