Our budget, farmers and climate change
During the budget reading last week Matia Kasaija urged Ugandans to plant trees and to keep away from wetlands and natural forests in order not to aggravate the effects of climate change.
He had in mind, one can guess, the fact that our country’s economy heavily depends on agriculture and that severe weather conditions arising from climate change can disrupt the targeted achievements of the document he was reading to the nation.
Trouble is that our leaders take too long to take concrete action. For us even issues that should be decided upon in a matter of days take years of debating.
The impacts of climate change such as long droughts, flooding of rivers, displacement of people, and incurable crop diseases have been with us for decades now but we still witness continuous settlements in wetlands, destruction of natural forests, and hesitation to use science and biotechnology to overcome crop diseases and the effects of drought on agriculture.
In Kenya today the use of polythene bags is totally banned and defaulters are prosecuted in law courts but here polythene bags are still a topic for debate.
In preparation for climate change and other challenges, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso and some other African countries have passed their bio-safety laws that opened the door for field trials and the commercialisation of genetically engineered crops but Uganda is still debating.
Hesitation to use biotechnology has denied us the benefit of cultivating crops engineered to resist common pests, disease, and drought.
Writing in the Daily Monitor on Friday last week, Per Lindgarde, Swedish Ambassador in Uganda quoted the UN International Panel on Climate Change which said that we have only 12 years to limit climate change to avoid catastrophe.
Lindgarde further warned that sustainable development cannot be achieved without decisive action to adapt to and mitigate climate change. “Climate Change has the capacity to reverse positive economic growth and development trends pushing more people into poverty, creating unemployment particularly for the youth and increasing income disparity,” he wrote. Shall we really see people getting out of wetlands and forest reserves?
