Humphrey Mutaasa, a senior technical advisor in charge of partnerships and institutional development at the Grain Council of Uganda (GCU) has noted that the absence of credible data is affecting investment decisions in Uganda’s agriculture sector,
Mutaasa who was speaking during the launch of an Integrated Grain Handling Project for rural communities in Uganda by Access2innovation told reporters that reliable data is a needed ingredient in any planning for agriculture sector.
If you don’t have information on where am I supposed to plant, how am I supposed to plant, how many people are involved in the sector, how much arable land the country has, how much grains you produce, how much do you export, and all this information, there is no way you will plan well for the sector. He said
"How do you sit in parliament and in the ministry and you don’t know how many people are in the agriculture sector? Some reports say 80% others say 70% of the population is in agriculture. Which figure should we take? He said
He noted that although subsistence farming currently dominates agriculture in Uganda, the sector has great potential to drive major economic growth and lift millions of people out of poverty.
"Reliable data in the form of traceable records would help to pull credible investments into the country". He further said
On his part, Henrik Anker-Ladefoged, the regional director for Access2innovation noted that the four-year project seeks to address a raft of challenges facing the agricultural sector in Uganda.
“There are a lot of problems which could be solved quite easily if people and stakeholders got together are focused on them. One of these big problems is good quality products free of aflatoxins". He said
According to he the project will help deal with the problem by supporting farmers in rural areas to have their own drying facilities so their produce can be dried immediately after harvest so there are no aflatoxins,” Henrik said.
He said there are many setbacks to the agriculture sector that the new project seeks to address.
The programme has been designed to address some of the challenges in the grain value chain, targeting farmer yields, post-harvest quality of the grain, and improving livelihoods with access to quality add-value markets.
Under this arrangement, the project will support organized farmers groups, processors, and off-takers and will provide support in areas of supply and installation poor harvest cleaning and drying, whole grain milling, seed cleaning equipment, farmer support training in financial literacy, access to inputs and finance
The programme will support farmer’s organizations with a need for cleaning & drying capacity from 6.5mt to 40mt per day (BM Silo).
Source: Capital FM