Posted on November, 8, 2016 at 10:21 am
By Michael J. Ssali
There is an important issue holding back successful farming that has apparently not received enough attention from those charged with driving national agricultural programmes.
Productive farming is more than the application of fertilisers, suppression of weeds, use of clean improved seeds, and good soil management practices.
It is not even enough to just have high yielding livestock breeds. We may stress the need to conserve the natural environment in order to create a good atmosphere for successful farming.
The government can call upon all farmers to modernise agriculture especially now that it aims at turning Uganda into a middle-income economy. But there is an obstacle to successful farming which ought to be addressed and that obstacle is lack of transparency in farming households.
Due attention must be paid to transparency with regard to family finances as a key driver in farming households. It is not just the presence of a Friesian cow in the home that will ensure regular income from the sale of milk.
The wife and the husband as well as all the grown up children should have an idea how the money obtained from the sale of milk is spent and how they benefit from it for all of them to take good care of the cow.
They should all have a sense of ownership of the cow for the household to effectively gain from its presence.
If the husband spends the money earned from the sale of milk on alcohol and buying gifts for his girlfriends the other members of the home may stop taking good care of the cow.
They may not feed it when he is away because they feel cheated. Ultimately the cow’s milk production reduces, the expected wealth creation in the home is not achieved, and poverty takes over and thrives.
Similarly, a large coffee garden may count for nothing if the wife hides some of the harvested coffee and sells it secretly. The rest of the family members will find the investment unprofitable and they may withdraw their energy. We must fight corruption right from farmers’ homes to public offices.
Source: Daily Monitor