Three events last week have interesting linkages with far reaching consequences for us.
The damage being meted out on Lake Victoria, President
Yoweri Museveni’s shakeup in how his government is handling land issues and
China’s insatiable demand for more and more resources made one seat up and take
notice.
The Vision Group’s “Save Lake Victoria” project continues to
highlight our wanton disregard for the lake, the source of water for the
country’s largest urban centers, provides a livelihood for thousands of people
on its shores and is a major factor in stabilizing the region’s climate.
Museveni, earlier this month he disbanded State house’s land
unit and constituted another one in the Land’s ministry to put a stop to
illegal evictions. The President then had a media event where he explained his
thinking on resolving the land issues of the country.
It is to state the obvious, but how we utilize our land and
water resources is not only going to make the difference whether we will become
the middle income economy we envision in the next 20 years or not, but even
more basically whether we will continue to feed ourselves or be racked by
famine and food related instability.
The land pressure is there for all to see but the Vision
Group’s project has shown that fishermen are having to rethink their lives as
the lake’s fish stock have been depleted to historical lows.
Fishing communities are among the poorest in the world. They
operate with a resource that is a public good, with a seemingly infinite abundance
and little capital input required to make living. This gives them little to no
incentive to plan and save for the future since when money runs out they just
push their boats out onto the water and a few hours later are cash rich again.
The disruption to their generation long way of life will come with fatal
consequences.
For anyone who has been on the lake show to witness the
untreated effluent we continue to dump into the lake from our factories and
poor sanitation, you have to marvel that we even brush our teeth with tap
water. It is so bad that National Water & Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) needs
sh700b to build a new plant but more importantly to extend the pipe that draws
water from the lake further out to tap cleaner water. A water remain affordable
but it would be even more affordable were it not for the millions NWSC has to
shell out in treatment costs.
Our land is another previously “infinite” resource that is
coming under pressure from our fast growing population and inefficient use of
it.
The knee jerk reaction by most is to lament our growing
population and propose that we work towards slowing it down. At 3.2% growth a
year we are among the fastest growing populations in the world.
The truth of the matter is that our population is growing at
such a fast rate because we are poor. With poverty comes early marriages, lack
of alternative recreation opportunities, low access to contraception and proper
reproductive health care. Sort out the poverty and the population rate will
slow on its own. This is how population growth has been slowed all over the
world.
To spread out the affluence we need to more efficiently use
land. And more efficiency land utilization will come with a permanent
resolution to our convoluted land tenure system, which allow us to extract
maximum value from the land by increasing our food production and creating more
employment in related industry.
Which brings me around to China.
“China is going to eat your lunch. They’re going to make
your food more costly to produce. They’re going to make water more scarce,”
Michael Silverstein, a senior partner at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in
Chicago sounded this warning to Americans in a recent edition of Forbes
magazine. He might as well have been talking about Uganda.
The new food tastes and demands of the Chinese middle class
will lead to hyper-competition fora commodities, and not just corn and
soybeans, but I’m talking the stuff that farmers need to produce corn and
soybeans: fertilizer and water,”
Silverstein said.
Silverstein said.
To illustrate. According to Forbes, in 2010 99% of China’s
maize production was used as animal feed and this figure accounted for one in
every five kilograms of world maize production. Maize importation to china is
expected to more than double to 15 million tons in 2020.
China’s shift to a meat diet has led to a tenfold demand in
water there. The linear logic suggests that as China’s middle class demand’s
rise they will import more and more food and Uganda is a natural source of this
new food.
Not be a doomsayer but our mismanagement of only these two
resources – our water and land, means we are setting ourselves up for failure and
greater instability as the rich become richer and the poor waste away.
