Agriculture in Uganda
[1] These conditions have allowed continuous cultivation in the south but only annual cropping in the north, and the driest northeastern corner of the country has supported only pastoralism.
[1] In the 1950s until independence in 1962, British Colonial Office policy encouraged the development of co-operatives for subsistence farmers to partially convert to selling their crops: principally coffee, cotton, tobacco, and maize.
[2] In each political district, there was a co-operative "union" which built stores and, eventually, with government money, processing factories: cotton ginneries, tobacco dryers, and maize mills.
The roads, other infrastructure and security were better in this colonial period than in the late 1900s, so allowing relatively efficient transport and marketing of agricultural products.
[2] More recently, the Hope Development Initiative under Agnes Atim Apea has been re-establishing cooperatives for female farmers in several areas of Uganda.
Other problems facing farmers included the disrepair of the nation's roads, the nearly destroyed marketing system, increasing inflation, and low producer prices.
[1] The decline in agricultural production, if sustained, posed major problems in terms of maintaining export revenues and feeding Uganda's expanding population.
[4] Uganda's main food crops have been plantains, bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, millet, sorghum, corn, beans, and groundnuts.
Co-operatives had been very successful during the British Colonial period (see below) but later many farmers complained that cooperatives did not pay for produce until long after it had been sold.
In the 1950s, cotton was the second most important traditional cash crop in Uganda, contributing 25 percent of total agricultural exports.
Farmers had turned to other crops in part because of the labor-intensive nature of cotton cultivation, inadequate crop-finance programs, and a generally poor marketing system.
Successive governments after Idi Amin encouraged owners of tea estates to intensify their cultivation of existing hectarage.
Mitchell Cotts (British) returned to Uganda in the early 1980s and formed the Toro and Mityana Tea Company (Tamteco) in a joint venture with the government.
In 1990 many of these estates were being sold to private individuals by the departed Asians' Property Custodian Board as part of an effort to rehabilitate the industry and improve local management practices.
[1] For several years after independence, tobacco was one of Uganda's major foreign exchange earners, ranking fourth after coffee, cotton, and tea.
By 1989 Uganda imported large amounts of sugar, despite local industrial capacity that could easily satisfy domestic demand.
Rehabilitation of the Kakira estate, delayed by ownership problems, was completed in 1990 at a cost of about US$70 million, giving Uganda a refining capacity of at least 140,000 tons per year.
[11] A joint verification team by Kenyan and Ugandan officials established that in the two calendar years 2014 and 2015, total production averaged 398,408 metric tonnes annually.
[12][13] The country's natural environment provided good grazing for cattle, sheep, and goats, with indigenous breeds dominating most livestock in Uganda.
Smallholder farmers owned about 95 percent of all cattle, although several hundred modern commercial ranches were established during the 1960s and early 1970s in areas that had been cleared of tsetse-fly infestation.
Nevertheless, by the late 1980s, the livestock sector continued to incur heavy animal losses as a result of disease, especially in the northern and northeastern regions.
Low producer prices for milk, high costs for animal medicines, and transportation problems were especially severe obstacles to dairy development.
Imported powdered milk and butter were expensive and required transportation and marketing, often in areas where local dairy development was possible.
By the late 1980s, the poultry industry was growing rapidly, relying in part on imported baby chicks from Britain and Zambia.
The major constraint to expanding poultry production was the lack of quality feeds, and the government hoped that competition among privately owned feedmills would eventually overcome this problem.
In 1987 the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the IDRB and the Government of Uganda, funded a poultry rehabilitation and development project worth US$17.2 million to establish hatchery units and feed mills and to import parent stock and baby chicks.
