Streamline policies, messages to farmers

What you need to know:

  • The issue: Agriculture.
  • Our view: For the agriculture sector to positively impact on farmers, there is need for proper coordination of both policies and messages to farmers.

This paper reported that the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Vincent Ssempijja, asked Nakaseke District leaders to mobilise farmers to form and register farmers’ groups to attract funding from his ministry (See: ‘Form groups to get farming’, Daily Monitor of September 29).

Among other things, the minister urged farmers to concentrate on growing specific crops such as bananas, coffee, vegetables, etc, to ensure that what a particular group grows is in plenty to enable them benefit maximally from the fund.

The minister is spot on. The importance of agriculture in Uganda’s economy outweighs many other sectors. However, what is not clear to many farmers in the country today, is the direction farming has taken. In the past, for instance, Uganda’s key agricultural products were divided into cash crops, food crops, and horticultural produce. The most vital cash crops were coffee, tea, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, etc, whose demand and markets were readily available.

Today, farmers grow crops whose markets are not guaranteed. Consequently, many have resorted to killing two birds with one stone. They grow crops, especially food crops such as maize, bananas, potatoes, cassava, rice, groundnuts, and millet first for food, and then sell the surplus to boost income.

Today, there is a thin line between food crops and cash crops. Besides, while the minister’s appeal to farmers to form groups and grow crops in plenty is a small matter – for farmers have in the past belonged and benefited from co-operative unions – the big issue is what farmers will do with the plentiful harvest. In the early 2000s, for instance, the government convinced peasant farmers, especially in the central region, to grow vanilla. The vanilla prices were high.

Word then was that they either grew vanilla and got rich fast, or failed to plant the crop and remained in perpetual poverty. Cognisant of the potential windfall, many farmers cut down their coffee plantations and instead planted vanilla. But by harvest time, vanilla prices had drastically dropped. The promise of big profits collapsed and the vanilla story ended.

Couldn’t the minister have emphasised to the farmers the need to embrace Operation Wealth Creation programme more? This programme falls under his ministry and is meant to improve household incomes.

Farmers need guidance on how best to use the seeds and animals that OWC distributes to them if they are to better their incomes.

For the agriculture sector to positively impact on farmers, there is need for proper coordination of both policies and messages to farmers.