They offer quick soft loans to desperate clients who would want to finance their personal projects. But their viciousness has left many of their clients in utter despair.

Money lending is one of the fastest growing financial industries, being operated by shrewd individuals who are on the ready to take advantage of their clients' desperation to fleece the latter of even the little they already had.

Jolly Ninshima (not real name) is now resigned to her fate. Everyday she has to cut off her hair from the head, owing to the drugs she took a few months ago to enhance her looks.

But even with this obviously cumbersome routine, Jolly considers herself lucky because she was ableto stop stray hair from growing allover her body which was the case in the few months following the pills!

Jolly is one of the growing numbers of Ugandans suffering from weird and sometimes deadly trauma arising from the urge to enhance their beauty by taking pills that stimulate hormones to enlarge their breasts, grow hair or hips?

Tropical heat will worsen as Uganda experiences extreme weather in 10 years if no immediate action is taken. The country could lose all its forest cover in less than 30 years.

The National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) attributes the declining forests to human practices like agriculture, rapid urbanization and a fast growing population.

The first ever conference on agricultural biotechnology, bio-safety and seed systems was held in Kampala a fortnight ago and brought together more than 120 leading agricultural scientists, mainly from Africa,  but some from the rest of the world.

Dubbed the "Agrisofaseed 2010", the meeting was the brainchild of a number of Ugandan and East African agricultural organizations.