THE HARVEST MONEY EXPO AS AN EYE OPENER

Last weekend the Vision Group and its sponsors hosted the third Harvest Money Expo at Namboole, an event that brings together exhibitors and farmers – current and potential, in an increasingly popular event that is fast becoming the premier event on the agricultural calendar.

This year’s theme was “Farming as a business” and given the stated ambition to shift the sector away from subsistence to commercial production, there is no reason why that is not a constant theme going forward.

At the expo where exhibitors were set up all around the exterior of the stadium, the thousands of visitors who walked through the gates were exposed to everything from tractors to seed varieties to agricultural processing plants and machinery to agricultural financing products.

It was a revelation to see what is available to farmers on the market on one hand and on the other the magnitude of interest in the subject by people from all walks of life, gender and age.

As seven in ten Ugandans derive their livelihood from the soil, what happens or not to agriculture has an effect on Uganda’s fortunes.

"The anaemic growth in output of agriculture when seen against the progress in construction, industry and services, means that the economic fortunes for the majority of Ugandans have been barely touched by the country’s 33 years of unbroken growth....

This should concern everybody because the growing income and wealth inequalities cannot go on for ever before they trigger insecurity and instability.

There is a lot to be done with the land tenure system, improving farming practices, promoting farmer cooperation and facilitating access to markets.

One of the major challenges of dealing with farmers in sustainable and scalable ways is that they remain largely informal. Being such an agricultural country it should be that agricultural enterprises are comprise the largest number. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

So farms are often unregistered sole proprietorships or partnerships that are operated to meet this or that families’ subsistence needs, which even they don’t do well.

In Mityana around Africa’s largest coffee plantation Kaweri Coffee, coffee farmers have been organised into groups to improve their farming practices, bulk their crop giving them better bargaining power when the middlemen show up.

The Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) estimates that the average yield on our farms is 0.5 tons. The Kaweri farm does 2.5 tons per hectare and the local farmers do about half that. The trick has been in improved planting, husbanding and processing and organising of the farmers into groups not only for marketing of their produce and improved bargaining power with suppliers  but also as a forum for shared learning.

The last I heard the groups were planning to incorporate. A change in their status may very well signal an improvement in their fortunes as suppliers, traders and even financial institutions would find it easier and more convenient to deal with them.

"Like with business people the sector complain that there is no access to tailored agriculture finance.  While that is true, being incorporated with proper books would give financiers a better appreciation of the business and improved sense of the risk they would be underwriting....

Finance is scarce everywhere often because financiers cannot appraise the enterprise with any degree of certainty.

The issue of the agriculture in this country is one of failure to unlock the full potential of the bounty around us. We can’t do that because the sector --- starting from the ministry, is not geared for the job.

The proof is the foreign concerns who have entered the agricultural space and showing world class productivity and quality  – the aforementioned Kaweri coffee farm for one; Exclusive Cuts a company operating out of Kiwenda, Wakiso export up to five million flower seedlings a month to the flower auctions of Europe.

As the Harvest Money Expo showed – to me at least, the sector has to get organised to get access to inputs and capital that will help the country live to its full potential as the food basket of the continent. Further afield the demand for what we can produce is boundless, it’s a scandal that we continue to be a poor country.