This week the World Food Program (WFP) announced it will
start buying food grown by small farmers of the Acholi region.
This was a momentous event because barely two years ago the
region was dependent on food assistance from the UN agency.
For almost 20 years between 1986 and 2004 northern Uganda
ravaged by the LRA insurgency, as a result more than two million people were
displaced from their homes and housed in the Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP)
camps.
For the duration of the war the fields have remained fallow,
reducing the once productive region to a food aid recipient.
But with rebel leader Joseph Kony far from home in the
Central African Republic, people have been moving back home and have set about
returning their lands to productivity.
Even twenty years of the decimation of their cultures and
traditions have not taken away a work ethic that existed before and an initial
154 tonnes delivered to the WFP is proof of that.
The Acholi farmers has a few things working not least of all
is that the land left fallow for all these years has been regenerated with most of its fertility
restored, so we can expect that farm productivity will be higher than two
decades ago.
WFP are obviously see this coming, they have set up a 6000
ton produce warehouse just outside Gulu town.
When the war ended a suggestion was floated that the people
should not return to their villages but instead the camps be developed -- with better housing, proper infrastructure and
services into urban areas.
The major benefits were that it would be easier to provide
services to those large concentrations of people. Pabbo camp’s 140,000
inhabitants would be the fourth largest city in Uganda.
But also the large tracts of uninhabited land could launch a
commercial agriculture revolution.
The idea never caught any traction, probably because of the
magnitude of the endevour, coming out of a war, emotions still raw the project
would understandably be a hard sell.
But if the truth be told northern Uganda with a lot of its
land communally held, will face a huge
challenge raising farm productivity beyond the fertile soils and reenergised
labour force can manage.
Communal land ownership means there is collective ownership
of land by a group of people – tribe, clan or family with all decisions about
land use done by consensus. The disadvantage of this is that land is often
underutilized, hard to trade and therefore difficult to unlock its full value.
An opportunity has presented itself. The larger part of the
population in the Acholi region is starting life anew. The time to make
transformative changes is fast slipping away.
This is not a northern Uganda problem, but the area’s
leadership have the keys to make a significant change.
Land reform is always a politically expensive process and
understandably leaders with a five year horizon will be reluctant to tackle the
issue. The inertia of doing things the way we have always known them to be done
is an immovable object. The question is can the local leadership create the
irresitble force to dislodge it?
Northern Uganda will have no problem feeding itself, but the
land tenure system will put a ceiling on production and the surpluses which can
lead to the transformative change the region so urgently needs.
In the meantime we can still improve productivity further in
the area through the use of fertilizer,
improved crop husbandry, efficient post-harvest handling and by reviving and
exploiting the economies of scale that come with cooperative societies.
