Tag: Agriculture

Ugandan Farmers Are Net Buyers of Food

Norah OwaragaLeave a comment

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 Ugandan smallholder farmers as peasants and or as subsistence farmers. It is long over due that we detoxify our discourse of culturally imperialistic descriptions that denigrate us.

There are No Subsistence Farmers in Uganda

Norah Owaraga2 Comments

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 produce for sale in as much as and or even more than they produce for own consumption. And for many that is likely their major source of livelihood.

Ugandan Farmers Are Not Peasants

Norah Owaraga4 Comments

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” are required to transform into landless labourers and service providers and to be like the majority of the British, who are landless labourers.

Food System of Iteso Degraded – Part II: ‘Urban-slumitisation’ of villages

Norah Owaraga1 Comment

The commercialisation of millet – growing it to sell to ajon commercial brewers - has caused a reduction in the availability of millet for food... And re-allocation of land from production of sorghum for food to production of Epuripur is a form of covert land grabbing which devastates food security in Teso.