A few weeks ago President Yoweri Museveni set off the
chattering masses with his announcement that he was going to see that
government distributes 18 million hoes to villages across the country.
The response from the urban elite was unbridled derision, we
the chattering masses were rolling in the aisles our sides threatening to crack
with the absurdity of the campaign pledge.
Aren’t we supposed to be modernising agriculture? Shouldn’t
we be distributing tractors? Credit to the chattering masses they dusted up
their primary arithmetic skills and did a quick calculation.
That if a hoe is sh25,000 (that should have warned us to how
out of touch the calculator was, a hoe goes for sh7,000 in Arua. But never mind him) government would spend
sh450b. The calculator then divided this by sh120m – his proposed cost of a
tractor, and came up with 3750 tractors
he then divided this by 110 districts (actually there are 112) and came up with
about 34 tractors per district.
Even I was amazed at the possibility.
But then when one thought of it, one wondered whether a lack
of tractors more than hoes was the key issue in the agricultural sector?
For the chattering masses modernisation of agriculture is
synonymous with mechanisation, which is not entirely wrong.
"A cursory look around Uganda’s agricultural sector shows that yes hoes are still very much in use, but also that they are in short supply...
Ever since the Chillington tool company based in JInja folded
up its plant and left the country in the early part of the last decade we have
not been making hoes locally. They folded because they couldn’t compete with
the cheaper imports.
In 2011 then finance minister Maria Kiwanuka scrapped the 10
percent import duty on hoes as a way to lower their costs and eventually raise
productivity. That intervention was missed by the chattering masses but signals
a recognition that there are issues with our farmers getting this much needed
implement.
The majority of farmers – 96 percent of the 3.95 million
farming households, in Uganda are small holders with farms of less than three
acres according to official statistics. A tractor is not their immediate
need.
Interestingly of all the farming households 3.4 million of
them have hoes according to a 2011 statistical abstract from the agriculture
ministry. So one wonders about the half a million households without a hoe,
what do they use to cultivate their crops? And is one hoe per household enough?
The numbers also show that only about 30,000 households
employ tractors.
But to see mechanisation as the only evidence of modernised
agriculture is to keep a narrow view of the issue. Essentially mechanisation
suggests increased productivity, defined as out per unit input be it land,
labour or capital, but increased productivity can be managed in our context
without mechanisation as we the chattering masses think.
In the areas around Mubende the Neumann foundation is
working with coffee farmers to improve the productivity of their holdings.
According to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) the average yield
of a coffee farm in Uganda is half a ton a hectare, but the farmers in the
project double even triple, this out put on their own, with not a tractor in
sight.
The key to their improved yields is the extension services
made available to them by the Neumann Group, which means they benefit from
information about better coffee farming and handling practices, setting up and
running farm organisations, improved bargaining power and access to inputs on
credit.
To make the argument that giving farmers hoes is backward
thinking is fallacious.
"As the numbers show hoes are urgently needed. However beyond hoes it is clear that our farmers are getting little to no guidance, and therefore unable to improve productivity and therefore remaining in poverty...
The same Agriculture ministry figures showed that of the
nearly four million farming households 0.68 million or about a sixth of all
farmers benefit from extension services.
In an ideal world we should be clamouring for tractors
instead of hoes, but in the current circumstances that will be like me pining
for a private jet to go to work when I need a car or better public transport.
In my mind the joke is really on us the chattering masses.
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