Uganda's bad seeds: East Africans go hungry because they can't trust their markets.

AuthorToro, Francisco

THE NATIONAL SEED Testing Laboratory is about eight miles north of the Ugandan capital of Kampala, where the sprawl of the city starts to give way to fields of cassava, corn, and bananas. Inside, a strong, yeasty smell pervades the air. It's a Wednesday morning, but no one seems to be here: I pass one empty office after another on my way to meet the director, Divine Nakkede.

Nakkede is proud to describe the work her Ministry of Agriculture lab does testing the quality of the seeds used by Uganda's farmers. But as she sings her institution's praises, I keep wondering: Who exactly is doing all this crucial work? When I ask how many people the lab employs, she talks about budget challenges and hiring plans. When I press her, she casts her eyes down.

"We have only one technician," she says. Today that technician is not in.

With every last bit of fertile land spoken for, Uganda's only path out of mass hunger is intensification--getting more food out of the same amount of ground. Back in the 1960s and '70s, high-yield varieties of wheat and rice revolutionized agriculture in Asia and Latin America, freeing up to a billion people from chronic hunger. But the Green Revolution skipped Africa. I had come to Uganda to try to figure out why.

Nakkede's laboratory gives me my first clue. Ensuring that farmers have access to good seed should be at the forefront of Uganda's fight against hunger, and a sample of each lot of agricultural seed produced in the country is supposed to be tested here. But the lab barely functions at all.

Is insufficient funding the problem? Not quite. Expensive-looking machinery is all around us. Yet none of it, I slowly realize, is plugged into the wall.

"Oh, yeah," an aid official tells me days later. "All the equipment at the Kawanda lab is fried."

Between 2003 and 2008, a $1.9 million project by the Danish International Development Agency fully equipped this lab and trained staff to work here. But blackouts are frequent in Uganda. When the power comes back it often returns with a surge, and the Danes apparently forgot to put surge protectors in the budget. As a result, Danish taxpayers have paid top dollar for a collection of finely engineered paperweights.

The Danes were just one of a string of donors to come in, commission an assessment of Uganda's food security problems, zero in on seed quality, and spend a lot of money on "technical assistance," only to see virtually no bang for the development buck. Writing for the World Bank, the agricultural economist James Joughin reviewed 20 substantive studies of the Ugandan seed industry conducted between 2003 and 2013. Everybody who is anybody in African development has done one: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the African Development Bank, the European Union, the United Nations, and various NGOS and academics.

"The reports invariably recommend howto repair these problems," Joughin concludes. "Rarely do they ask why earlier recommendations have not been acted upon."

A MARKET FLOODED WITH BAD SEED

THE VILLAGE OF Buwenge is a couple of hours' drive from Kampala. The road is paved, and roadside stands sell cold drinks and mobile phone airtime; goats munch on whatever's around.

At the Buwenge Modern Farmers' Sacca (a Ugandized rendering of circle), a group of small farmers tell me how trouble obtaining decent seed has blighted their community.

Dandel Byansi is a big, soft-spoken 19-year-old. His family sacrificed for years to afford secondary-school tuition--a major hardship for small farmers here--and he'd done well in his classes, eventually earning a place at a nearby agricultural training institute. He was hoping to become just the kind of well-educated, technically astute "modern farmer" constantly invoked in the aid agency reports. But then things went terribly wrong at home.

In early 2015, Dandel's father spent a good portion of the family's meager savings on a batch of high-yield soybean...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT