When good intentions put farmers in a dilemma

Sophie Acen, a farmer in Otuke, weeds her rice garden. Photo by William Odinga Balikuddembe.

What you need to know:

Despite being semi-arid, Otuke District can produce food though it is prone to dry spells. Dams built to solve the problem cannot benefit the farmers because of a lack of coordination between different ministries and other agencies.

If you visited Otuke District in northern Uganda this October you would describe it as fecund or simply green and beautiful. Do not be decided though. It will be dry and brown soon, and the people, again, will have shea pulp or mangoes for lunch.

Otuke’s is a case of scarcity in plenty. When they come, the rains wash away bridges and flood the gardens, when they do not, the crops dry up.

Carved out of Lira District in 2009, Otuke looks like a large kraal without cattle. Homesteads of grass-thatched houses are kilometres apart, squatting among shrubs. Standing tallest are shea trees, the source of shea butter, a precious element in the Langi cuisine.

Damage
Here, in the small village of Tecwao, Sophie Acen, 49, toils for a living as a farmer, assisted by members of her family.

“We grow rice, groundnuts, millet, pigeon peas, simsim, sorghum, tomatoes and beans,” she says. “The rice we sell to get school fees for the children. I have a son in boarding school in Kampala, another is in Lira and others studying nearby.”

Acen returned to Tecwao in 2008 after six years in Ngetta Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camp in the neighbouring Lira district.

She had fled the wrath of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group headed by Joseph Kony, which kidnapped, raped and murdered people in northern Uganda for 21 years.

On a July evening this year, Acen watched in agony as the sun scorched the rice growing in her garden. She, however, kept removing the little weeds using a tiny hoe. As dust rose, forming a cloud that hovered over her face and head, she kept hoping that the rains would come soon. They started in September after much damage had been done to the crop.

The puzzle
In Anepkide parish, about 50km from Acen’s home, the dry spell hit Lilly Awor’s pigeon peas during flowering stage. This meant there would be no harvest. “These millet fingers I am harvesting should have been bigger but there was little rain. When I look at my peas and beans, I feel like crying,” she said then.

Acen and Awor are among the 80,000 inhabitants of the district, who annually face starvation due to climate variability. Otuke sits in a semi-arid zone. It sometimes gets too dry that the crops just have to die and when it rains, it is in form of flash floods. Many families confess to surviving on wild plants or one meal a day for at least three months in a year.

“From April to June, we did not have food. We had to reduce the number of meals a day as well as the quantity consumed per person to cope,” Acen says.

In 2011, the Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE) completed works at Akwera dam, just near Otuke town, to provide water for production, including irrigation during dry spells.

Up to Shs8bn was spent on the 1.4 billion litre dam but for two years, residents have had to watch its water as their crops struggle in their gardens. How they can channel the water into their gardens is the puzzle.

Coordination
“When I look at this dam I feel very unhappy. It was dug and left there. We don’t even need more dams because why should we have them when we cannot use them?,” asks Helen Beatrice Anyait, the Vice Chairperson, Otuke District.

Six dams of the same size have been dug in different water-stressed areas in Uganda. Another three, which are much larger, with capacity of 2.3 billion litres each, have been dug in Karamoja region and Rakai District.

Critics point to lack of proper coordination among government ministries and agencies, leading to creation of white elephants. While the MWE may set up the dams, it is the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries to see to it that the water gets to the farms. The cohesion is often, if not always, missing.

Eng Richard Cong, the acting director of the Directorate of Water Development (DWD), says that by December, government is to put drip irrigation systems at Akwera and the other dams, to cover two acres at each, for demonstration purposes. “We are going demonstrate how drip irrigation works. When they have known how it works, we expect farmers to mobilise resources and install these systems at their farms,” Cong explains.

Limited impact
This strategy will, according to Benson Ogwang, chairman, Otuke District, have very limited impact. “How many farmers are around the dam? Can they make an impact? If they had used that money to de-silt other dams it would have served better. We have 18 dams built in the 1940s and 1960s which only need de-silting,” Ogwang says.

Following the end of the LRA insurgency, the National Agricultural Advisory Services and some international NGOs and foreign state agencies, including Care International and the US Department of Agriculture, are in Otuke supporting small scale farmers to improve their productivity.

With climate variability, their impact will be predictably very limited, unless there is significant budgetary intervention on the part of the government.

The solution is simple: tap the water during the rainy season and store it for use in the dry season, but the means is not easy. It calls for mechanisation. This involves huge amounts of money, and it is only a responsive government that can make that investment in agriculture.

The writer is Chairman, Uganda Science Journalists Association
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