TAKE LESSONS FROM MILK INDUSTRY TO PRODUCE FOR EXPORTS

It was reported recently that milk production had reached record levels at 3.2 billion liters in 2022. Prior to the covid lockdown the Dairy Development Authority (DDA) announced the country had passed South Africa as the leading exporter of dairy products on the continent.

When history is written the exponential leap in milk production – it was 460 million liters in 1990, will have pride of place and may very well serve as template for the increased production of other commodities.

"Apart from coffee, which like milk’s success is due largely to small holder farmers, there is no other commodity, that has seen a leap in its fortunes like milk....

This was not by mistake and is all the more surprising given the decimation of the herds in eastern Uganda due to insurgency and cattle rustling in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, it was left to Western Uganda to carry the load. A long period of peace helped to boost milk production, but also an adoption of higher yielding exotic breeds, a program to dot the region with milk collection centers, at once created a market for milk that was previously poured down the village paths for lack of market and set the foundation for milk processing industry.

From a solitary processor, Dairy Corporation, which was itself privatized in 2006, there at are more than 135 processors to day with an installed daily capacity of above 2.89 million liters. Dairy Corporation had the capacity to process only 60,000 liters a day when it was a monopoly.

The formula can be used on any other commodity – Increase production, have collection sectors to lower logistical costs, set up processing units to suck up the increased production and open new markets for our processed output

As it is now barely a third of what we produce is consumed locally.

There two thirds of the produce is what is giving president Yoweri Museveni sleepless nights, criss crossing the globe in search of markets.

Maybe for the first time in a long while the president has something to hawk that has export-size production. Coffee is top of eth list but also sugar. The latter though has been canibalised by questionable policies that threaten our national sugar surpluses.

The trade ministry licensed other operators in the Busoga region who are poaching sugar cane from the Kakira and Sugar corporation of Uganda ltd (SCOUL) making previous investments in farmer subsidies, research and development increasingly unviable.

"Unlike coffee and milk whose back bones are the small holder farmer, if the math doesn’t add up for our biggest sugar producers, sugar shortages will not be far behind....

However, the dairy industry is far from ironing out all its glitches.

Dairy farmers in Kikuube district western Uganda were lamenting the slide in milk farmgate prices. They complained the fall from sh900 a liter to the current sh600 by their cooperative was making the enterprise unfeasible. They said with the cost of drugs and pesticides, margins are now paper thin or non-existent at all.  They inevitably called on government to put a floor under the falling prices.

This is a good indicator that despite the explosion in dairy processing capacity there are still demand-supply imbalances that need to be addressed. Hopefully by the private sector and not the government.

Thankfully we can not export raw milk. So unlike coffee we need to turn into long life milk or milk powder or its constituent proteins like Casein to export it. In theory it’s the one industry we can capture most of the value addition for ourselves.

People in the know say that for successful animal husbandry tow things are key feeding and genetics. The gains our dairy farmers have made may be down largely to feeding.

In more developed markets the genealogy of the animal, genetics, are value in themselves. Tracking an animals ancestry as far back as possible is good for several reasons but two jump to mind. That it can be certified that there has been no inbreeding, that would affect the health and quality of the animal and relatedly, that the animal has been bred for its best qualities.

Some of our best farmers are now importing semen from as far a field as the Netherlands to improve the quality of their herds, because they do not trust the local breeds. An investment in genetics and its management can ensure we get to the next level of the sector’s development and open all sorts of new markets for us....

While the sugar industry is mostly large plantation farming and our coffee bushes are rather hardy in surviving years of neglect, the delicate nature of dairy production may hold some useful lessons for us in how to increase production in other commodities and develop industry and export markets around them.