We should aim to end food aid

Residents of Karamoja receive food aid from USAID. COURTESY PHOTO

What you need to know:

The issue: Food security.

Our view: As MPs discuss the Budget for the coming financial year, it is disheartening that there is hardly any conversation on how the food can be stored for a sunny day.

The country is experiencing one of the heaviest rainfall regimes it has experienced in many years. Most crops are doing well, farmers are optimistic about getting good harvests and making money.

For this reason, food prices are low, with the cost of food having decreased by 1.6 per cent in April of 2018 over the same month in the previous year. It may decrease further as more harvests come in.

For those who are familiar with how things work in Uganda, this is hardly surprising. General inflation drops, especially driven by food inflation, at times when the rains are good, and the reverse happens when the rains are thin or don’t come at all.

When the harvests are good, a lot of food is wasted and so much of it rots away as farmers sell it at give-away prices. The reverse is when the rains are bad and the harvests are bad and food is scarce and expensive.
In elementary economics and commerce classes, young Ugandans are taught that farmers are generally poor especially because what they have to sell (food) is perishable and cannot be stored, meaning that during times of plenty they are compelled to sell off their produce at very low prices or else they lose it because they have no capacity to store it and wait for higher prices.

As Members of Parliament discuss the Budget for the coming financial year, it is disheartening that there is hardly any conversation on how the food which is currently plentiful in most parts of the country can be stored for a sunny day. The ministry of Agriculture does not have it as a funded priority for the coming financial year to build, for example, buffer stocks to store food, or enable communities to store their abundant produce for the near future. When such issues are raised, it is clearly mere tokenism.

While at it, the government of China just over a week ago provided tonnes of relief to the people of Karamoja who are currently experiencing a famine. Just over a year ago, people were dying of hunger in the western Uganda district of Isingiro just because the rains had taken months without coming.
It is surprising why as a country we cannot take lessons from such happenings and work to conclusively resolve them once and for all.

One way we could do it is to establish a fund (buffer stock) to buy produce from places of plenty and storing it for a rainy day. Once there are sufficient stockpiles of food, this endowed country will avoid the embarrassment of having to beg for food.