the Humanist view

Food Security

You can be food secure albeit not being in control of the production of the food that you consume. That is food security.

Take for example the irony that the survival of Ugandans who derive livelihoods from ‘rolex’ likely depends on Bidco cooking oil.

Bidco, which impoverished many in Uganda, continues to make a killing (pun intended) from profits it makes selling cooking oil.

And the livelihoods of ‘rolex’ cooks are also heavily dependent on imported wheat.

Meaning that the first beneficiaries from the consumption of ‘rolex’ in Uganda are the wheat farmers in the Diaspora, say the USA and Russia.

You do not have to be an economist to deduce how vulnerable ‘rolex’ cooks are to food insecurity.

Their sole source of income, their ‘rolex’ business, can easily be devastated by global phenomenon for which they have zero say.

CLICK HERE to read more on vulnerability to food insecurity of ‘rolex’ cooks.

Food Sovereignty

If you are not in control of the production of the food that you consume, that is to say, you have food sovereignty, you are most definitely vulnerable to easily becoming food insecure.

Uganda should learn from Cuba the  importance of advocating for food sovereignty as oppose to simply advocating for food security. There is a difference.

Cuba focuses on agriculture for food and places significant emphasis on domestic food production as the preferred source of food. Over an above food imports.

Uganda’s ‘modernization-of-agriculture-logic’ of pushing people off their land, forcing them into urban centers, and making their livelihoods dependent on products of those who pushed them off their land in the first place, is irrational.