Uganda: Vicious Circle of Poverty and Food Insecurity

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni

A poor household is usually malnourished, and vulnerable to disease and other evils. Uganda is known to be well endowed with fertile soil and bi-annual rainfall. Yet we have thousands of households that are too poor to produce enough food for their nutritional requirements or to produce anything to generate income.

Successful agriculture requires money, physical energy, and sufficient arable land for crops and livestock production. A farmer should have access to high yielding and clean seed which often requires money to purchase. He or she should apply fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and other inputs which have to be bought; otherwise it will be impossible to produce enough crops for the family's food and income needs. Poverty leads to food insecurity and malnutrition which invite disease, yet sick people are not helpful in crop fields.

Thousands of our farmers work on small plots of land whose soil is exhausted after decades of cultivation without rest or nourishment.

The plots continually get fragmented when parents die as they have to be divided up for distribution to the children.

Such is the traditional inheritance system in most of our communities. The smaller the plots the less productive they are and our agriculture will continue to depend on the hand hoe. A farmer who operates on half an acre cannot afford a tractor and, anyway, has no use for it. Such a farmer cannot easily keep a large animal like a cow.

A poor household is more disadvantaged when it comes to fighting crop and livestock diseases. The poor cannot afford insecticides and cannot easily pay the vet doctor's fees when diseases and pests strike.

Poor households are less likely to engage in such practices as irrigation in the event of natural disasters like extended droughts.

Our education system is very late in stressing the need for smaller families and the average Ugandan woman continues to give birth to five to six children despite our declining natural resource base. Such are the challenges agricultural policy makers and planners will probably think about soon.