As producers of food, farmers have a right to question the rationale behind Uganda’s fast growing population. The Population Secretariat put our population figure at 30.66 million by mid 2009 and gave the population growth rate as 3.2 per cent.
However, the Development Strategy and Investment Plan (DSIP) prepared about the same time by experts within the Ministry of Agriculture Animal Industry and Fisheries gave our population growth rate as 3.4 per cent and went on to indicate that it is the third highest in the world. The Washington-based Population Reference Bureau gave the same figure as far back as 2007. We have an unmet need for contraception of 41 per cent and it is estimated that if we proceed at the present rate, our population will be 130 million in 2050. DSIP further indicates that despite the rapid population growth, our agricultural production has suffered a decline since 2000/01 when it was at 7.9 per cent to 2007/8 when it is 0.7 per cent.
The Millennium Development Goal Uganda’s progress report 2007 also points at a slowdown in economic growth and says, “The challenge is exacerbated by the country’s high annual population growth rate of 3.2 per cent. The agricultural sector which employs the bulk of the labour force has grown at a slower rate than the overall economy.” Figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics indicate a production decline for a number of our main food crops over the recent years. Banana production for example dropped from 7,909,000 metric tonnes in 1995 to 4,176,000 in 2006. Sweet potato production dropped from 2,990,000 metric tonnes in 1996 to 1,695,000 in 2006. Cassava production too went down from 2,240,000 tonnes in 1999 to 1,656,000 in 2006. Chicken and sheep numbers have decreased and the fish stocks in the lakes are fast dwindling. We exported 3,400,000 bags of coffee in 2001/02 but in 2008/08, only 2,750,000 bags were exported.
An article in the Sunday Monitor of April 26, 2009 quoted a development consultant, Dr Augustus Nuwagaba, saying that since 56 per cent of our population is underage, there is a huge dependency burden that is bound to cause disaster. With the introduction of UPE and USE, 56 per cent of the population is therefore attending school or at home breastfeeding and not producing food.
We tend to blame parents who fail to provide lunch for their children who attend UPE schools, but are they really in position to produce enough food for all their offspring? Our agricultural production is still dependent on the hand hoe, which is labour-intensive. It is wrong to assume, as some do, that large populations create demand for food and that the high food prices will attract more production.
As Dr Nuwagaba rightly pointed out, a large poor population will not create demand. Rather, it will increase farm thefts and losses and worsen poverty and hunger as has already been reported in Daily Monitor’s June 16th issue, Food theft on the increase in Gulu.
Others often give the examples of India and China, densely populated nations that have substantially increased their food production and emerged as strong economies. But won’t we also go into genetically modified foods, which are behind these countries’ apparent successful stories? The United Nations and numerous NGOs supporting food production in Africa strongly advise that we sustain traditional agricultural technologies and move towards organic farming and environmental protection as the way forward.
Hon Syda Bbumba has allocated 4.4 per cent of the budget to agriculture and according to DSIP, the government is likely to expand the budget allocation to agriculture every year up to 5.2 per cent in 2012/13. But this will still be below the 10 per cent allocation to agriculture which all sub-saharan countries agreed upon in Maputo in 2006 if they are to halve poverty and hunger by 2015. We have big food production challenges such as climatic change that has come along with drought, rainstorms and floods, and has a bearing on human settlement, water resources and food security. We have the international credit crunch that is already pushing up food production costs. We have crop diseases such as the banana bacterial wilt, cassava mosaic, coffee wilt disease, trypanosomiasis, African swine fever and a whole range of others.
Can we then afford to be proud of being the world’s third fastest growing population? Isn’t it time for the government to come up with a more vigorous population control campaign similar to the one we are famous for in the fight against HIV/Aids?
