Unfriendly budget
Michael J. Ssali
What you need to know:
- The agriculture sector needs more money for research and to purchase irrigation infrastructure which drives water from rivers and lakes to distant districts apart from paved roads.
- We cannot commercialize agriculture by reducing investment in it and seeking more effective channels of taxing farmers.
Who cares about farmers in Uganda? Unlike teachers and health workers, farmers cannot express their dissatisfaction by organizing strikes for not getting their fair share of support from the government.
So they won’t make any noise following the allocation of a mere 3.6 per cent of the national budget to agriculture despite the fact that 70 per cent of Ugandans depend on the sector.
Officially the farmers belong to the private sector and they are expected to struggle for their own growth.
But who has forgotten that in 2003 at the African Union Summit in Maputo, under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) all African governments including Uganda committed to boost agricultural production by allocating at least 10 per cent of their national budgets to the sector?
Coffee which used to be the leading foreign exchange earner is now ranked third after tourism and Diaspora remittances. For about twenty years Robusta coffee has been under attack by the Coffee Wilt Disease.
(CWD) which has reduced national production by 56% according to Uganda Coffee Development Authority. However due to budgetary constraints the government cannot distribute CWD-resistant seedlings to farmers to grow.
The coffee seedlings currently being donated to farmers are prone to the incurable CWD and they are not so high yielding according to experience.
Yet we are aiming at increasing coffee production from the present average annual 3.5 million bags to 20 million bags by 2025.
Our agriculture is actually sick given that most of our crops, including coffee; banana, cassava, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, and maize are under attack by devastating pests and diseases most of which have no known cure. We are also host to Black Coffee Twig Borer, Leaf Rust, and Coffee Berry Disease which require money to fight.
We have the onset of climate change and its effects of extreme weather conditions all of which impact on agricultural production.
The agriculture sector needs more money for research and to purchase irrigation infrastructure which drives water from rivers and lakes to distant districts apart from paved roads.
We cannot commercialize agriculture by reducing investment in it and seeking more effective channels of taxing farmers.
