Uganda's favorable soil conditions and climate have contributed to the country's agricultural success. Most areas of Uganda have usually received plenty of rain. In some years, small areas of the southeast and southwest have averaged more than 150 millimeters per month. In the north, there is often a short dry season in December and January. Temperatures vary only a few degrees above or below 20 °C but are moderated by differences in altitude.
These conditions have allowed continuous cultivation in the south but only annual cropping in the north, and the driest northeastern corner of the country has supported only pastoralism. Although population growth has created pressure for land in a few areas, land shortages have been rare, and only about one-third of the estimated area of arable land was under cultivation by 1989.Uganda country study . Library of Congress Federal Research Division. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
Co-operatives
In the 1950s until independence in 1962, British Colonial Office policy encouraged the development of co-operatives for subsistence farmers to partially convert to selling their crops: principally coffee, cotton, tobacco, and maize. David Gordon Hines (1915–2000) (as Commissioner of Co-operatives from 1959 to independence in 1962 and then as a civil servant until 1965) developed the movement by encouraging eventually some 500,000 farmers to join co-operatives.Interview of David Hines in 1999 by W D Ogilvie; obituary of David Hines in London Daily Telegraph 8 April 2000 written by W D Ogilvie
He, as an accountant, plus a team of 20 (British) District Co-operative Officers and some 400 Ugandans established the constitution and accounting procedures of each co-operative. They ran courses at a co-operative college in Kampala; settled disputes; established a co-operative bank; and developed marketing in a population that largely had no experience of accounts and marketing. Each co-operative had 100 to 150 farmer members who elected their own committees.
In each political district, there was a co-operative "union" which built stores and, eventually, with government money, processing factories: cotton ginneries, tobacco dryers, and maize mills. The number of farmers involved rose exponentially as the co-operatives made the profits that the Asian traders had previously made. The roads, other infrastructure and security were better in this colonial period than in the late 1900s, so allowing relatively efficient transport and marketing of agricultural products.
After the Idi Amin 1971-8 era of massacres and tortures, David Hines in 1982 returned to Uganda in a World Bank delegation to find decrepit factories that had been kept going as long as possible by cannibalising other factories.
More recently, the Hope Development Initiative under Agnes Atim Apea has been re-establishing cooperatives for female farmers in several areas of Uganda.
1970s Throughout the 1970s, political insecurity, mismanagement, and a lack of adequate resources seriously eroded incomes from commercial agriculture. Production levels in general were lower in the 1980s than in the 1960s. Technological improvements had been delayed by economic stagnation, and agricultural production still used primarily unimproved methods of production on small, widely scattered farms, with low levels of capital outlay. Other problems facing farmers included the disrepair of the nation's roads, the nearly destroyed marketing system, increasing inflation, and low producer prices. These factors contributed to low volumes of export commodity production and a decline in per capita food production and consumption in the late 1980s.
The decline in agricultural production, if sustained, posed major problems in terms of maintaining export revenues and feeding Uganda's expanding population. Despite these serious problems, agriculture continued to dominate the economy. In the late 1980s, agriculture (in the monetary and non-monetary economy) contributed about two-thirds of GDP, 95% of export revenues, and 40% of government revenues.
Roughly 20% of regular wage earners worked in commercial agricultural enterprises, and an additional 60% of the work force earned some income from farming. Agricultural output was generated by about 2.2 million small-scale producers on farms with an average of 2.5 hectares of land. The 1987 RDP called for efforts both to increase production of traditional cash crops, including coffee, cotton, tea, and tobacco, and to promote the production of nontraditional agricultural exports, such as maize, beans, groundnuts (peanuts), soybeans, sesame seeds, and a variety of fruit and fruit products.
Production
Uganda produced in 2018:
3.9 million tons of sugarcane; 3.8 million tons of plantain (4th largest producer in the world, losing only to Congo, Ghana and Cameroon); 2.9 million tons of maize; 2.6 million tons of cassava; 1.5 million tons of sweet potato (7th largest producer in the world); 1.0 million tons of bean; 1.0 million tons of vegetable; 532 thousand tons of banana; 360 thousand tons of onion; 298 thousand tons of sorghum; 260 thousand tons of rice; 245 thousand tons of sunflower seed; 242 thousand tons of peanut; 211 thousand tons of coffee (10th largest producer in the world); 209 thousand tons of millet;
In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products, like cotton (87 thousand tons), tea (62 thousand tons), tobacco (35 thousand tons) and cocoa (27 thousand tons).
Crops
Uganda's main food crops have been plantains, bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, millet, sorghum, corn, beans, and groundnuts. Major cash crops have been coffee, cotton, tea, cocoa, vanilla and tobacco, although in the 1980s many farmers sold food crops to meet short-term expenses. The production of cotton, tea, and tobacco virtually collapsed during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the late 1980s, the government attempted to encourage diversification in commercial agriculture that would lead to a variety of nontraditional exports. The Uganda Development Bank and several other institutions supplied credit to local farmers, although small farmers also received credit directly from the government through agricultural cooperatives. For most small farmers, the main source of short-term credit was the policy of allowing farmers to delay payments for seeds and other agricultural inputs provided by cooperatives.
Cooperatives also handled most marketing activity, although marketing boards and private companies sometimes dealt directly with producers. Co-operatives had been very successful during the British Colonial period (see below) but later many farmers complained that cooperatives did not pay for produce until long after it had been sold. The generally low producer prices set by the government and the problem of delayed payments for produce prompted many farmers to sell produce at higher prices on illegal markets in neighboring countries. During most of the 1980s, the government steadily raised producer prices for export crops in order to maintain some incentive for farmers to deal with government purchasing agents, but these incentives failed to prevent widespread smuggling.
Coffee
Coffee has been Uganda's most important cash crop since the 1980s. In 2013, coffee exports totalled US$425.4 million.
Majority of Ugandan people rely on farming as their source of income in some cities woman own farms in order to provide for their families. A lot of farmers in Uganda face challenges like being able to access the market. The cost of transport is high which makes it difficult for farmers especially during wet weather conditions.
The Uganda Coffee Development Authority Uganda Coffee Development Authority overseas the country's coffee industry.
Cotton
In the 1950s, cotton was the second most important traditional cash crop in Uganda, contributing 25 percent of total agricultural exports. By the late 1970s, this figure had dropped to 3 percent, and government officials were pessimistic about reviving this industry in the near future. Farmers had turned to other crops in part because of the labor-intensive nature of cotton cultivation, inadequate crop-finance programs, and a generally poor marketing system. The industry began to recover in the 1980s. The government rehabilitated ginneries and increased producer prices. In 1985, 199,000 hectares were planted in cotton, and production had risen from 4,000 tons to 16,300 tons in five years.
Cotton exports earned US$31.7 million in 2013, compared to US$86.0 million in 2012.
Cotton provided the raw materials for several local industries, such as textile mills, cotton oil and soap factories, and animal feed factories. And in the late 1980s, it provided another means of diversifying the economy. The government accordingly initiated an emergency cotton production program, which provided extension services, tractors, and other inputs for cotton farmers. At the same time, the government raised cotton prices from USh to for a kilogram of grade A cotton and from to for Grade B cotton in 1989. However, prospects for the cotton industry in the 1990s were still uncertain.
The Uganda Cotton Development Authority or CDO was created in 1994 by Act of Parliament; the CDO is a semi-autonomous body of the Uganda Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries.
Tea
Favorable climate and soil conditions enabled Uganda to develop some of the world's best quality tea. Production almost ceased in the 1970s, when the government expelled many owners of tea estates, mostly Indians in Uganda. Many tea farmers also reduced production as a result of warfare and economic upheaval. Successive governments after Idi Amin encouraged owners of tea estates to intensify their cultivation of existing hectarage. Mitchell Cotts (British) returned to Uganda in the early 1980s and formed the Toro and Mityana Tea Company (Tamteco) in a joint venture with the government. Tea production subsequently increased from 1,700 tons of tea produced in 1981 to 5,600 tons in 1985. These yields did not approach the high of 22,000 tons that had been produced in the peak year of 1974, however, and they declined slightly after 1985.
In 1988, the government doubled producer prices, to per kilogram, to expand tea production and reduce the nation's traditional dependence on coffee exports, but tea production remained well under capacity. In 1989, only about one-tenth of the 21,000 hectares under tea cultivation were fully productive, producing about 4,600 tons of tea. Uganda exported about 90 percent of tea produced nationwide. In 1988 and 1989, the government used slightly more than 10 percent of the total to meet Uganda's commitments in barter exchanges with other countries. In 1990 the tea harvest rose to 6,900 tons, of which 4,700 were exported for earnings of US$3.6 million. The government hoped to produce 10,000 tons in 1991 to meet rising market demand.
Two companies, Tamteco and the Uganda Tea Corporation, a joint venture between the government and the Mehta Group, managed most tea production. In 1989 Tamteco owned three large plantations, with a total of 2,300 hectares of land, but only about one-half of Tamteco's land was fully productive. IN 1989 the Uganda Tea Corporation had about 900 hectares in production and was expanding its landholdings.