Many countries including Uganda, which were considered food secure only a few years ago, are still bleeding from the negative effects of recent food shortages. Despite being a net food exporter, Uganda's food prices have risen sharply in recent months forcing millions of majority poor deeper into hunger, disease and poverty.

As Uganda joins the rest of the world to mark World Food Day on October 16, leading scientific organisations like the Food and Agricultural Organisation, Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change continue to warn of dire food shortages in the years ahead unless dramatic measures are taken at individual, national and international level to reverse the trend.

The past three decades have seen a convergence of factors that have conspired to result into the current food shortage seen in Uganda and in other parts of the world. Scientific evidence shows that over the last three decades, the number of droughts, floods and similar extreme weather events have multiplied causing a reduction in food production.

According to UNDP's 2008 Climate Change Country Profiles, Uganda's average temperature has increased by 1.4?C since 1960s, higher than the East African average of 0.5?C. The increased warming has altered rainfall patterns, increased incidence of pests and diseases and rendered some crops unviable in many parts of the country.

Coming hot on the heals of nearly annual flooding episodes that have affected various parts of the country in recent years, the current heavy rains battering Eastern Uganda have washed away bridges and flooded gardens leading to rotting of crops still in gardens which are a source of livelihood for millions of people.

At the same time, the ravages of climate change have come amidst dwindling investments into the agricultural sector by national governments and donor countries. According to FAO, in the last 30 years, from 1980 to date, the share of official development assistance which OECD [industrialised] countries earmarked for agriculture dropped to 43%. In Uganda, the share of agriculture in the national budget has averaged 3.5% over the last ten years, instead of the required 10%.

Limited investments in agriculture has been compounded by loss of labour as many young people have quit rural areas and gone to urban areas in search of education and employment opportunities. According to ministry of Agriculture officials, the effects of the mass exodus of able-bodied young men have been most felt in the central region where many young men have taken to boda boda business, rendering much of Buganda's urban areas dependent on food from other areas like Western and Eastern Uganda.

And yet none of this is totally new. In fact, several government-led initiatives like the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture, NAADS, all indicate there is a good level of awareness about the problem.

But the continued failure of these programmes, suggests the lack of political will to make them effective in delivering the much-needed solutions and to bring about meaningful difference in the lives of majority Ugandans.

Many times, Ugandans have been treated to depressing stories of how monies meant to provide seeds are stolen by NAADS coordinators who prefer to distribute rotten or poor quality seeds, and no punitive action is imposed against culprits. At national, district and sub-county level, money that would have been injected into boosting farm out put or establish stores, has often been spent in workshops.

As the Director General of FAO Dr Jacques Diouf pointed out recently, the seeds of the current food crisis were sown in the last century, when policy makers failed to react to warnings. Over the past few years, policy makers, civil society have engaged in endless debates on climate change, on the need to give farmers what is due to them and on the need to manage or reverse rural-urban migration.

The apparent lack of political will to respond to the crisis facing agriculture and adapt it to the changing climatic conditions is not to be blamed solely on governments. Donor countries and organisations too appear to be making similar mistakes by spending money on unproductive ventures.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Uganda recently held one such workshops at which they invited over 100 personnel to a workshop in Munyonyo. The workshop was meant to train people into "Champions for Change" or people who would work with rural families to grow enough food to feed their families while they generate income.

But according to someone who attended the workshop, most of the participants were urban based and rarely interact with rural farmers. So for over Ushs 1.5m that was spent on each participant in the air-conditioned rooms of a five-star hotel, there is really little that can be expected from the training.

Globally and nationally, the current food crisis has demonstrated that the effects of food shortages go beyond individual households. Over the past few months, the Ugandan economy has suffered serious negative effects arising from inflation whose causes have largely been linked to poor agricultural output.

Although the central bank has tried to stem runaway inflation, the governor Tumusiime Mutebile bluntly said that unless the government makes deliberate efforts to boost agricultural production and productivity, high food prices will continue to destabilise the economy.

The central bank has during its recent conference on agriculture and finance and during several occasions reaffirmed the need for government to boost output, invest in technologies that cushion farmers to the vagaries of weather and climate change, improve storage of produce and devise more effective means of improving access to credit by farmers.

The apparent delay to take action now to respond to urgent problems of climate change, declining soil fertility, population explosion, will more likely breed more intractable problems like conflict, but whose causes, few will care to trace back to the current inaction by government. blog comments powered by Disqus

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