Norah Owaraga

Ugandan Farmers Are Net Buyers of Food

It is, in fact, policy of the President Yoweri Kagutta Museveni led National Resistance Movement party, which is the current Administration of the Republic of Uganda, to promote commercialisation of food crops. Promoting the growing of food crops as cash crops. It is thus simply Machiavellian for official government documents and discourse to refer to…

No Subsistence Farmers in Uganda

The only way in which agriculture is a significant contributor to Uganda’s GDP, is if the produce of its smallholder farmers is sold by them and is bought by others who didn’t produce it. Economic exchange must take places and money changes hands, so to speak. This means, de facto, that Ugandan smallholder farmers likely…

Ugandan Farmers Are Not Peasants

The implications of an industrialised economy with a developed service sector, as it is espoused in that vision, implies that smallholder farmers and semi-nomadic pastoralists who live in rural areas of Uganda, necessarily have to cede ownership of their land to others better positioned to use it in “optimal” ways. Those currently mal-described as “peasants”…

Detoxify our Discourse of Cultural Imperialism

It is a good start, but the voice needs to get stronger for detoxification of discourse in key fora and documents of formerly colonized nations. For example, the discourse in such documents as Uganda’s national planning instruments – narrative plans and budgets. It does us no good to rename physical assets, while we accept descriptions…