Modern agriculture requires new technologies
We seem confined to small scale agriculture for many years to come unless new land settlement reforms are made to allocate massive parcels of land to a few large scale farmers and drive smallholder farmers from rural areas to alternative settlements.
In the current circumstances agriculture is faced with a lot of challenges that will require appropriate technologies to overcome and open up the potential of smallholder farmers.
One of the challenges is producing sufficient food to feed a rapidly growing population when most of our food crops are steadily reducing due to pests and diseases that cannot be fought by conventional means.
For example, according to scientists, there is no chemical cure for the destructive Banana Bacterial Disease, the Cassava Brown Streak Disease, and Cassava Mosaic. Other crops such as maize, sweet potato, and Irish potato, are under attack by different pests that impede their production. Uganda’s cotton production is greatly undermined by the African boll worm. The Coffee Wilt Disease and the Coffee Twig Borer among others are undermining coffee production. These are cash crops and their massive production should be the main approach to poverty reduction and better quality lives. The weather patterns are by far less predictable than they were years ago due to climate change. Farmers are no longer certain when to plant crops.
Another challenge is to do with nutrition. Apart from having the requisite nutrients the food crops should not be unduly exposed to pesticides that can endanger the lives of the consumers. Mitigation of such challenges can be mechanical, biological, chemical, biotechnological, process-based or any other activities but policy makers and the farmers must be ready to embrace the appropriate technologies and innovations that are available to them. By embracing biotechnology our neighbour Kenya has overcome the African boll worm and has now joined cotton producing giants such as India, USA, China, Pakistan, and Brazil.
Our researchers under National Agricultural Research Organisation (Naro) have found biotechnological solutions for many of the crop diseases that are undermining agriculture in Uganda but we cannot benefit from the technologies since we don’t yet have the Biotechnology and Bio-safety law in place.
