Why MPs want government to stop free seeds distribution

Bukomansimbi farmers line up to get free seeds from their district woman MP Veronica Nanyondo. Photo by ALI MAMBULE.

On June 9, 2014, as the country marked Heroes Day with, President Museveni making a major directive, replacing National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) coordinators with soldiers, who he said would breathe new energy into the agriculture sector.
The Cabinet approved the policy directive just a month later, and 300 senior army officers were henceforth drafted into induction training at Makerere University to embark on what was packaged as a game-changing intervention in the poverty eradication drive.
During the campaigns for the 2016 elections, President Museveni talked up the role that Operation Wealth Creation (OWC) would play in improving Uganda’s agriculture. The President promised to commit an astronomical Shs1 trillion to OWC in the 2016/17 budget, although only Shs350 b, by no means a small amount, was availed for the purpose.
By the time Mr Museveni promised a massive increase in the allocations to OWC, complaints were already commonplace that the programme, under the charge of President Museveni’s younger brother Gen Salim Saleh, was failing.
At Luuka District grounds during the Independence Day celebration last year, Mr Museveni broke the silence on his flagship poverty eradication programme, but he focused the blame on the farmers.
Mr Museveni said: “Unfortunately, I am told that around 40 per cent of the coffee seedlings have dried up because of the beneficiaries not watering them. This is terrible carelessness.”
Shortly after making this remark, Mr Museveni was photographed in Luweero demonstrating drip irrigation, which he urged farmers to adopt in the fight against drought.

Enter Parliament
But the problems OWC is facing are bigger than just drought. The Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, in light of this, recently conducted an inquest into the working of the programme and has released a damning report.
The MPs, who toured 12 districts to assess OWC operations, concluded that the programme is plagued by several challenges and queried its legality.
“The Committee observed that OWC took up most of the roles that were being played by NAADS, which is a body established by an Act of Parliament. However, OWC is operating without a proper legal frame work and is only guided by Standing Orders of Procedure,” the report says.
Other challenges the committee identified include inadequate number of suppliers, supply of poor quality seed and animals stocks, late distribution of inputs, mismatch of priorities, supply of inadequate quantities of seed and animal stocks and failure to provide extension services and inputs like pesticides and herbicides.
In some cases, the report released on May 16, says, would-be beneficiaries have ended up with seed stocks that they do not need.
Cases in point are Moroto and the wider Karamoja sub-region, where OWC operatives, the report says citrus and mango tree seedlings distributed by OWC officials were rejected.
In Tooro sub region, the report says, OWC seemed to concentrate on provision of tea seedlings, hardly providing any seeds for food crops.
In Kabarole District in particular, it was found out, the heifers that had been distributed were not in calf as per requirements and that while apples were found to have been performing very well, not enough seedlings of the same had been distributed there.
In other cases, the report says, would-be beneficiaries find it difficult to access the sub county headquarters where the distribution takes place. The few who access such stocks never use them for the right purpose.
“These seeds are picked by a few people who eat them instead of planting them. This leads to wastage of time and resources,” the report says.
The report also alludes to lack of equity in the distribution of animal stocks.
It says that people in central region, for instance, would have also loved to have a share of the cattle and heifers on offer, but are only provided with seeds and seedlings.
In Mubende District it was found that no heifers had been delivered despite the farmers having been earlier advised to prepare for their arrival.
The sum total of those challenges, the report says, is that huge sums of seed stocks delivered to sub county headquarters have ended up rotting as would-be beneficiaries never pick them on account of delayed supply.

Blame game
Maj James Nkojjo, the public relations officer of OWC, has however defended his team, saying that the blame for the delays in deliveries and botched procurements are misplaced.
“It isn’t within the mandate of OWC to procure. The procurement is done by NAADs. OWC’s mandate is to distribute,” Maj Nkojjo said.

The wastage of resources is attributed to, among other things, untimely release of funds by the Ministry of Finance and failure by the Ministry of Agriculture to ensure that inputs that are procured are of a high quality.
“The Sector (Ministry of Agriculture) is not adequately inspecting the distribution of agro inputs and therefore unable to ensure that there is value for money,” the report says.
The Assistant Commissioner in Charge of Communication at the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry & Fisheries, Ms Connie Acayo, acknowledges that there have been problems, but that the Ministry has been addressing them over a period of time.
“We cannot say that there haven’t been any problems. We have had them, but we can’t change everything overnight. There has been a drastic improvement. We are moving in the right direction,” Ms Acayo said on Thursday.
The committee recommends that the Ministry sets up and supports “a robust monitoring system in order to ensure value for money in supply of seedlings and other inputs”.
On top of that, the committee adds, there should be set up new procurement procedures for seeds and seedlings saying that the existing procedure is “not appropriate”.
The inputs supplied, the legislators noted, are substandard and do not meet the needs of the recipients. They recommend that the programme should emphasize procurement of quality inputs and that those inputs should be in tandem with farmers’ needs.
The Ministry and Districts, the committee proposes, “should carry out proper needs assessments/enterprise selection so that supply of inputs is demand-driven to minimize waste of resources.”
While farmers are being supplied with planting materials, the legislators noted, the programme has not been providing extension services, leaving farmers without technical advice on how to handle their crops and animals, to which the decline in agricultural production is attributed.
The situation, the report notes, is exacerbated by the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture has not been facilitating the few agricultural extension workers on its payroll.
The MPs suggest propose that extension services be strengthened, and that each sub county should have at least three extension workers, something which Ms Acayo says the Ministry has already embarked on.
“Our target was to recruit over 4,000 extension workers. We have so far recruited about 3,000 and they are undergoing orientation training along with officials of Operation Wealth Creation. By next financial year we shall have achieved our target,” Ms Acayo says.

Wrong strategy?
The MPs also fault the approach of OWC of providing free inputs to the farmers, suggesting a different system.
“Though the OWC programme has very good intentions of fighting poverty and steering the country to a middle income status, giving free inputs to farmers is not sustainable and it will in the long run breed a dependency syndrome,” the legislators argue.
“Besides, some of the people do not attach value to the inputs which are given freely,” the report adds.

The legislators recommend that the system be replaced with another that we see farmers pay for them albeit subsidized prices.
“Instead of giving people free inputs, they should instead be subsidized under the e-voucher subsidy programme and offered to farmers at a low price so that farmers can value them and take good care of them,” the report reads in parts.
The Deputy Director of the Media Center, Col Shaban Bantariza, has however said that the recommendation was not based on research.
“There are Ugandans who cannot afford them at all whether they are subsidized or not. 68 percent of Ugandans are not captured in the cash economy. They will be left out if you insist on making them pay something,” he said.
Col Bantariza also warned that scrapping of free distribution will cause a reversal in what has so far been achieved since supply of free seed and animal stocks began.
In January this year, the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) announced that coffee exports had risen to 404,673 60-kilo bags worth $48.98 million, a 20.9 percent rise in volume and 52.5 percent increase in value.
Mr Bantariza attributes that development to a decision by government to distribute at least 68.3million coffee seedlings in the period between 2013 and late 2016.
In their report, the legislators also say that farming communities often sell of their entire produce and leave nothing for either future consumption or seeds for planting in the next season because of lack of storage facilities.
A way around this, they say, is for government to revitalize cooperatives and set up silos in different parts of the country to allow for storage of food to not only insure against possible famine, but also help stabilize prices.
The Ministry, they say, should also launch an aggressive campaign to educate communities on the importance of storing food.

They also recommend that communities be educated in post-harvest management.
Ms Acayo says that the Ministry already has a number of storage facilities in some sub counties especially in Northern Uganda, but they are underutilized on account of the fact that most farmers basically operate at subsistence level.
Ms Acayo, however, says that the Ministry will with effect from next financial year be operationalizing the Agriculture Cluster Development Project, through which farmers will be provided with inputs to assist them scale up to production.
Under the project, funding will be provided in three phases beginning with the Ministry providing up to 67 percent of a farmer’s needs in the first season, before scaling down to 50 percent in the second season and 15 percent in the third. The other percentages, 33 percent in the first season, 50 in the second and 85 in the third will be met by the farmers
What the Ministry will be providing will be based on what farmers will be submitting as what they need in order to scale up production.

More issues
Noting that farmers are provided with planting materials and animal stocks, but not pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and irrigation equipment, the committee recommends that they should be provided with the same to enable them increase production.
Transportation of inputs from one area to another, the report says, leads to the transfer of pests and diseases from one area to another. It also amounts to waste of time and resources and creates difficulties in the verification of quality of inputs.
The programme, the report says, has only 20 suppliers nationwide. This is inadequate and causes unnecessary delays in the supply and delivery of inputs.
To beat that, the report says, locals must be encouraged to set up nurseries in all districts to allow for fast and safe distribution. It also recommends localization of the procurement of seed stocks and that OWC should enter into Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) with local persons to produce and supply inputs.
Some suppliers, the report says, supply poor quality inputs which never germinate when planted. It recommends that such errant suppliers be blacklisted in line with Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets (PPDA) guidelines.
Maj Nkojjo has, however, said that local leaders are being encouraged to reject bad seeds stocks. He says that while planting materials undergo certification by the Ministry of Agriculture, some fraudulent supplier later adulterate the stocks, a situation which they hope will be mitigated by the creation of the Agriculture Police unit.