Famine Here To Stay

By waiswa Submitted on 3 August, 2009 - 11:04
Famine in farms in Uganda_m.jpg

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Famine here to stay! People are dying of hunger in some parts of the country and this has raised a lot of concern to the general public as well as the Government. Every body that cares from government officials, to both local leaders, and local natives is coming up with a lot of reasons as to why this is happening.

Some of the reasons Government ministers are putting up for this entire prevailing situation is that people are lazy and drunkards. This is partly true but to a large extent not because of what I am just about to let you know.

In the past, people in the farming communities in all parts of Uganda had what was called food crops and cash crops. The food crops were basically grown and used for home consumption(subsistence farming ) these included crops like Matooke (Bananas), sweet potatoes, beans, peas, cassava etc and then the cash crops which were used for income earning to the families included; cotton, coffee, sugarcane, tobacco, tea,  etc.

Now days the trend has charged in that what ever is grown in most cases is sold by the head of the family so as to raise money for the family up keep.

All this has been attributed to the high cost of living which most people can’t cope up with. Now days, for a person living in a local community to have his child or children go to school especial to higher levels of learning like institutions or universities, a parent is tasked to sell off all the farm produce so as to raise the required amount of money to enable him/her meet the ever increasing costs of living such as high tuition dues and fees.

If a parent is to educate, cloth, and provide health care for his family without any other source of income then we should expect famine as a full time member of our families, for example if a parent is to educate a child in the university it would require that parent to at least raise 1.200.000/= (one million two hundred thousand shillings) par semester and this is just tuition which is quite a lot of money to a peasant farmer.

low yields from the ever decreasing farmland( due to land fragmentation)  does not help the situation but rather makes it worse as produce harvested per season can barely cater for the family basic needs.

How is our Government to blame, first it has failed to provide the required water for production which is too insufficient due to changes in weather patterns It’s abused that a country like Egypt that is almost 90% percent desert has more sufficient water for production through modern farming techniques such as irrigations and hence have food security to meet their basic necessities.

Secondly Government has failed to come up with better agricultural techniques like, crop handling, pest control and storage not forgetting the bad practices by government officials in mismanaging funds meant for the improvement of the agricultural sector through trainings and sensitization.    

The ever escalating inflation rates that have led to constantly increasing cost of living that Government has failed to address has really put the peasant population in a tight corner as even with all the effort they invest in agriculture, they can not ripe anything to even favorably meet any of the costs of living. First prices for produces have constantly remained low as opposed to the ever increasing costs of finished products and services.   

To sum up all this, “famine is here to stay” for as long as Government does not play its part in addressing and playing its role where due since most of the solutions to this problem basically require government intervention.

I would say as much as many people in Uganda are trying to work hard, the cost of living will always leave them with dry pockets as they try to make ends meet and this is why famine is becoming a problem since most people who are in the agriculture sector can no longer store food for their families.