COFFEE AND POVERTY IN UGANDA

Growing up in my village in Iganga, we may have had about 6 acres of coffee and during the seasons possibly over 10 acres of cotton. What I remember in the villages then especially during the cotton which used to be in December holidays was that there was activity in every home. People picked coffee, hand processed it and took to the ginnery. During those times, many families that didn’t have people into paid jobs and they celebrated the receipt of incomes by purchasing radios, bicycles, iron sheets and all. The coffee and cotton plantations were well tendered. As I speak now, the coffee in our home is largely gone. We have built up some of the areas, some of the coffee is in the bush and I am told that one of the maids in the home plucks the coffee and sells it for her benefit. Last weekend I was in Butambala district and I paid special attention to the state of coffee which was the gold to the African family. What I saw what is not very different in my own home compound and in the shambas of many other Ugandans. Coffee is in the bush unattended to. The Daily monitor of June 20th on the Business page reported that for the month of May there was a 13.5% drop in volume and 17.5 drop in value of coffee exported compared to the same time in the previous year. One MP from Busoga had told me that coffee production had declined 70% in the Busoga region. Remember the population has since doubled. It doesn’t take rocket science to explain a fact that people are poorer than they were before. The dominator, the population has more than doubled and the numerator, the coffee production has declined. I can’t say by how much in aggregate figures. In addressing poverty we must address production as a first item, we must have something to produce and then we must address poverty which is the competitiveness of what we produce. If production has gone down, what do we need to do to improve it? This will give incomes to the ordinarily people on a hard tested product that has demand. The Monitor report said Uganda will miss out on the proceeds from the coffee boom. I do not support government interference in markets other than regulation however I would now support a subsidy to the coffee industry. Crazy isn’t it? But it’s crazy enough to put incomes on the tables of the ordinarily people. We should boost production of poor people and productivity through education, implements and these SACCOs that people are slowly getting into. See a story in the New Vision of August 7, 2012 by one Bonny Kayondo on how to empower subsistence farmers.