Agriculture in Uganda

Hi people, there's a large demand for large scale agriculture in Uganda, the challenge though remains on the way of improving the level of production, which I think is a challenge in Africa at large.so any body with the interest of Agriculture may join me and we discuss the challeges?

Last comment added: Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:03:05 PST

Comment 1 on Agriculture in Uganda

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "large scale agriculture"? I am very much am interested in increased agricultural output. But my feeling is that the many small holders in Africa really are the ones who need help to accomplish this instead of a large-scale industrial model of agriculture.

Something I did a while back was to start a wiki Ugandalinks. I'm not at all sure whether it's a useful thing or not. Christina Jordan was interested in collecting links at one point. I decided to give it a shot and made the wiki to do that. But it probably would have been better to make the list here at Ned. In any case you are most welcome to go to Ugandalinks. To see the pages there's a quickstart box on the right, click on the tab that says "sidebar" that will give a list of pages. I see that I made and agriculture page. LOL I haven't bee good about adding links I will add a few later today. You can edit the pages, make new pages, add links or text too. The password is ned4lia.

One Internet resource I like very much is African Agriculture. It's a blog that combs through news about agriculture in Africa and brings the stories together in one place.

Brosdi is an interesting model of using ICT to improve agriculture. They have a blog called Celac Collecting and Exchanging Local Agricultural Content.

In addition to improving agricultural output, I think it's very important to develop ways to add value to products; for example food processing is important. Some in LiA are looking into food drying.

There are so many challenges to face and so many complicated issues. I'm very interested to hear what you think.

Comment 2 on Agriculture in Uganda

Given the learning curve for anything new John and having been on the ground dealing with technology and learning curves in Uganda as well, I took the PBwiki Ugandalinks page and dropped it in here in a Ned workspace, hope that was okay.

Comment 3 on Agriculture in Uganda

I would like to insert that large scale agriculture may not be the short term solution to the problems. For example, it has been said that Uganda currently produces enough food to feed itself however it has energy problems (read that fuel) in transporting it from where it is grown to where it is needed. With that in mind, perhaps (certainly for the short term) a solution is much more sufficiency agriculture that requires no transport. Large scale agriculture often involves mono-cropping which in itself is economically risky for poor people. It also means that I might grown cassava but not any of the other food required to live. That then makes me dependent on a cash economy to fulfill daily requirements. If nature or politics destroys my ability to produce and distribute my mono-crop, I am in serious trouble. Most famines in the world today have nothing to do with lack of food but rather distribution.