Skip to main content

OIL IS COMING BUT LET US NOT FORGET OUR GOLD


The country is operating on a time table that first oil will be seen in 2020.

There is a lot of frenetic activity around building supporting infrastructure, getting investment approvals, ensuring local participation and any number of other things to ensure readiness the moment the oil starts gushing down the pipeline to the coast.

And so we should.

I was intrigued the other day to read in the Kenyan press how Kisumu County, just across Lake Victoria from us, has set upon an ambitious project to ensure egg and poultry meat self-sufficiency for the county within the next few years.

Under the plan Kisumu County will train 100 farmers every month over the 12 month pilot period. The intended aim is to be able to satisfy the county’s demand for 25,000 broilers and 75,000 eggs daily.

Whereas I would prefer that this was private sector driven deal, I like this plan for a number of reasons not least of all that it shows leadership by the county and secondly, it relies on locally sourced materials and thirdly, that the production of such volumes can very well set up Kisumu, over time,  as a hub for all that is poultry.

And for Uganda an agricultural initiative like this would suit as to a tee, as we are ideally suited for agriculture with nearly half the region’s arable land here and a fifth of the land under a water, it does not take a rocket scientist to see our competitive advantage staring us in the eye.

We can borrow a leaf from them.

What if we trained 1,200 farmers for poultry in Busoga another 500 in Masaka for goats, 500 farmers for mangoes and oranges in eastern Uganda and any number of agricultural products from around the country.

Some attempts are underway in that direction, but we need to be a bit more systematic and include the private sector more fundamentally to ensure sustainability of the project.

I propose we rethink our current model and go beyond just supplying farmers with inputs to organising, educating and facilitating them to penetrate established and new markets.

I have no doubt that our farmers are not productive for lack of application or good lands but because they do not know what to do.

We are still using the hoe to till the land and even there according to agriculture ministry statistics we do not have enough hoes in the country.  Our farmer is seeing his sweat disappear in post-harvest losses, which can be as high as half the crop. And our farmers because of the measly amounts they produce have little to no bargaining power in the market, losing more value to middlemen and the general market.

It is no wonder they continue to wallow in poverty despite the general growth in the economy over the last few decades.

It is a linear logic: Our farmers need to produce more and lose less during postharvest as a way to enhance their bargaining power in the market.

And another important outcome of increasing our farmer productivity is that it will form a good foundation for a robust agroindustry.

A cursory search on the internet for a tomato paste making plant indicate that you can get one for between $10,000 (sh36m) and $600,000 (sh2.2b). Not out of this world numbers. The catch is the capacity. The smaller one can manage a load of a ton of tomatoes an hour!

I also discovered that in 2007 Uganda produced 14,000 tons of tomatoes, most of which went to our own kitchens. But let us assume we converted all our tomatoes into tomato paste, using 50 small plants (one for every two districts) we would go through Uganda’s annual crop in under two weeks.

To keep the plants working at at least 50 percent capacity all year around, we need to produce at least 12-times as much tomato as in 2007.

It is within the realm of possibility. We have the manpower. We have the land. We even have the capital.

And that is only for tomatos. The same principles can be applied to matoke, coffee, fruits, vegetables, goats.

There are issues of markets, as markets will not just lap up all you produce, but if we can begin to ramp up production we can address the other impediments as we go along.  That’s how you do business. I should know.

(FEBRUARY 2018)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A SHIFT AWAY FROM AGRICULTURE IS CRITICAL FOR UGANDA

Anyone who has half a stake in this country would be a keen observer of the economy and the direction it is taking. In the last three decades the economy has shown strong growth, only slowing to overcome bad weather, a global financial crisis or unrest in the region. Compared to when I started out in business, it has become a more liberal economy, with individual initiative being rewarded more and more. While the economy is still dominated by the informal sector, the formal sector is growing annually. But the biggest shift in the economy has to be the reduction in agriculture’s share of the economy from more than 80 percent to about 25 percent today. This has happened despite the leap in the production of everything from bananas to coffee or from milk to maize. What has happened is that more of the economy – though not nearly enough, has been taken up by industry, construction and services. This is how it should be and in fact, more work is needed in shifting t...
Post a Comment
Read more

GIVE OUR TRAFFIC POLICE A CHANCE

Last week during an investor interaction   Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) officials called on police to stop overriding traffic lights while directing traffic. KCCA argues that the traffic lights are large investment and it makes no sense for police to countermand them. In a classic case of “The importance of the river was not known till it dried up” on Friday the traffic police desisted from directing cars at the traffic lights leading to the worst traffic snarl-up in the city’s history. People were stuck in traffic jams around the city for hours and long into the night. Maybe it was the unhappy coincidence of the traditional Friday traffic and pre-Christmas excitement but without the traffic police directing traffic it was a mess. They made their point. It of course points to the bigger issue of a revamping of Kampala’s road network, which has remained   largely the same since independence but with an exponential increase in cars in the last three...
Post a Comment
Read more

WE NEED A BETTER SOLUTION FOR KAMPALA TRAFFIC

I am sure I am not the only one feeling it. Kampala’s traffic is becoming increasingly unbearable. Even the removal of roundabouts around the city seem to have an opposite effect to the intended purpose of easing traffic flow in the city. Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) has an ambitious plan of flyovers, underground tunnels and railway transport, which should help the cause, I hope. The snarl ups that we are coming fast accustomed to, are not only an issue of teeth grinding inconvenience but have a real cost on our economy by hampering and increasing the cost of doing business. A recent World Bank report suggests that as an economy, we are losing about sh3trillion annually due to traffic jams. The losses come in form of delayed deliveries, higher fuel consumption and the health consequences of seating in a smoke filled environment. To put this in perspective this is the combined budget of the health, agriculture and ICT ministries in this year’s budget. Or ...
Post a Comment
Read more

COME HELP BEAT BACK HIV/AIDS

Uganda has made tremendous strides in containing the AIDS pandemic. For some of us who were around in the 1980s and saw the worst effects of the AIDS pandemic, the way the country has contained the disease is not what we had envisaged back then. Ignorance, stigma and lack of drugs surrounding the disease saw thousands die horrible deaths – wasting away, tortured by opportunistic diseases and being shirked by family and a society out fear.  The doomsayers were projecting a major fall in our population, a collapse of the economy and a total breakdown of social cohesion. That the country is still around and fighting back the disease successfully, could not have been envisaged in those scary days of the 1980s when the disease came into the public conscious. Thankfully rather than sweep the problem under the carpet like many of the neighbouring countries, President Yoweri Museveni led a fight back against AIDS that had at its core widespread dissemination of infor...
Post a Comment
Read more

WELL DONE UGANDA REVENUE AUTHORITY BUT …

Over the weekend President Yoweri Museveni commissioned the new head office of the Uganda Revenue Authority, an imposing structure that is set to dominate the Nakawa skyline for some time to come. Congratulations are in order to URA for the construction of such an aesthetically appealing building, which I hope wills set the pace for other developments not only in the area but in Kampala and even Uganda as a whole. I know the pride that comes with having completed such a massive build for the initiators and implementors. The new 22-story structure has allowed the tax man to fold back all his offices from around the city back to the head office, a move they estimate will save them sh7b annually. Using simple math the sh140b will pay for itself in 20 years. The move is seen as precursor to a government move to build a ministerial compound in Bwebajja, where all ministries will be relocated sometime in the future. I have seen comments that such actions are evidence that...
Post a Comment
Read more

NOT ONLY THE HARDWARE BUT THE SOFTWARE TOO

In the middle of September the United Nations released its annual Human Development Indicator (HDI). This index serves as an indicator of the quality of life of a country’s people by measuring the health, education, inequality, poverty and security standards. Aside from the statistical measures of development like GDP growth, this is obviously a better measure of how people are actually doing. In this year’s HDI report Uganda was ranked 162 out of 189 countries with a HDI score of 0.516. The index goes from zero to one, the nearer you are to one the better. Our score puts us in the low human development category. But as bad as that sounds we have been worse. In 1990, the earliest year that these figures were compiled our score was 0.311 even the UN recognises that we have improved 66 percent in the last three decades. According to the UN figures life expectancy has risen to 60.2 years   from 45.5 in 1990; expected years of schooling has doubled to 11.6 fr...
Post a Comment
Read more