The survival of Uganda and her people over the years has been based on agriculture and this is not about to change anytime soon even when the world is faced with the growing feat of industrialization and a technology takeover. Humans and other living organisms will always need food to eat to survive.
What is predicated that will change regarding consumption of food as a means of survival, and is now being experienced in many parts of the developed world, is how people consume this food. A case of how it is harvest, stored, traded, delivered in homes and how it is cooked.
While in developing countries like Uganda people are still consuming farm produce freshly and sometimes raw food, the world has moved on to adding value to these farm harvests as a means of preservation and adding market value – after all, agriculture is a business.
Value addition has been described by experts in the agricultural sector as the process that transforms the raw agricultural product into something new through packaging, processing, cooling, drying, extracting, and other processes that change a product from its original raw form.
With 80 percent of Uganda’s land being arable, it means that farming can thrive on it for many years to come and the country can mint trillions of shillings from the God-given resource.
And according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), 70 percent of Uganda’s working population is employed in agriculture. In 2017/2018 about 20 percent of the country’s GDP was earned from agriculture and the sector contributed 43 percent to the country’s export earnings – leading the pack.
As a farming country, Uganda’s main food crops have been plantains, cassava, sweet potatoes, millet, sorghum, corn, beans, and groundnuts. This is supplemented by cash crops like coffee, cotton, tea, and tobacco. Farmers sell off the excesses of food crops to earn extra money that their families might need.
According to the FAO, Uganda’s fertile agricultural land has the potential to feed 200 million people and this presents numerous and significant investment opportunities in Uganda’s agriculture sector, including in production, value addition processing, standards compliance and export, and post-harvest handling.
Well aware of this potential, the government under the National Development Plan 2, and later in Vision 2040, put an emphasis on the importance of agro-processing and value addition of Uganda’s traditional cash crops mainly in cotton ginning, tea processing, coffee hauling, tobacco handling.
However, a 2018 World Bank Uganda report titled ‘closing the Potential-Performance Divide in Ugandan Agriculture’ said that there is need to close potential performance divide through commercialization, value-addition and trade by strengthening institutions to remove distortions can facilitate trade, and enhance resilience through climate-smart agriculture and low-cost irrigation systems and adopt the use of agricultural technology and ICT.
On the positive side of things, the report noted that the rising population and growth of incomes have increased the demand for food and agro-processed products. Challenges notwithstanding, Ugandan agriculture has enormous potential to transform the economy and make farming much more productive and profitable for Ugandan smallholder farmers, the report said.
In a message at the 2nd Joint National Agricultural Research Organization and Makerere University (NARO-MAK) Scientific Conference which sat at Makerere University in 2018, Prime Minister Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda emphasized the need to promote post-harvest handling and value addition to boost Uganda’s agri-business and nutritional sector.
The Prime Minister said that the agro-business products where value has been added not only enjoy a higher profit margin than basic commodities but also tend to exhibit long-term real-price stability on the market. “Our sustained promotion of commercial agriculture will be a let-down to the farming community unless it goes hand in hand with the promotion of post-harvest handling and value addition.’ Dr. Rugunda said.
And with this backing from government officials, and the leading stakeholders in the agriculture business, members of the private sector in Uganda are heeding to the call to spearhead a revolution that will see a spark in the agriculture sector value addition agenda light up a fire that will positively transform the agriculture sector in the country.
One such member of the business community who is going all out to champion the value addition gospel in Uganda is Hamis Kiggundu of Ham Enterprises who is massively investing in a multimillion-dollar agro-processing business he has called Ham Agro-Processing Industries.
Ham Agro-Processing Industries recently entered into a contract with Roko Construction to start the construction of phase one of an integrated agro-processing plant in the outskirts of Kampala, the capital of Uganda that will add value to Uganda’s agro produce henceforth increasing their demand on the domestic, regional and international market.
Ham Agro-Processing Industries’ business plan from the onset is to promote import substitution by being able to add value to locally produced foods instead of importation of agro-processed products. This economically means that Ugandan money will not exit the country to benefit agro-processing factories abroad.
Also, increased regional and international exports of Ugandan made agro products will increase farmers’ incomes which will not only improve their lives but equally empower them with the ability to pay taxes thus widening the country’s national tax base. Jobs will also be created internally.
To actualize his dream of seeing Ugandan farmers earn more money from their sweat and that the country earns more revenue from its God-given fertile soils, Kiggundu traveled to China and attended the China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) where he bought factory machinery for the agro-processing plant. This now means that Kiggundu has the right technology to add value to Uganda’s farm produce.
The Vice-Chancellor of Makerere University Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe speaking at the 2nd NARO-MAK said that Africa’s potential to feed the world is enormous and is poised to drive the global agricultural revolution. And with people like Kiggundu taking action, Uganda and Africa at large is positioning well and the farmers will smile all the way to the bank.
